In my head I thought one could make relatively cheap high capacity in 2.5" SATA form factor by having more NAND chips of lower capacity. You give up speed and PCB space but that’s fine since bandwidth and IOPS are limited by SATA anyway and there’s plenty of space compared to M.2.

Turns out to not shake out that way, controller ICs that support SATA aren’t coming out any more, and NAND ICs are internally stacked to use up channels while not taking up PCB space.

There are some enterprise options, but they’re mad expensive.

I have 4x 6TB HDDs in my NAS. Around 5 years ago I decided to simply replace any dead drives with 6TB ones instead of my previous strategy of slowly upgrading their size. I figured I could swap to 8TB 2.5" SATA SSDs that had just started to exist and would surely only get cheaper in the future…

I could be wrong but I think that photo shows the workflow I was describing, the PC compiles and loads the game onto the console that runs it. You can run it and see how it looks, and while no doubt streamlined, makes the act of drawing and viewing the final output a bit disconnected.

That said I seem to be totally proved wrong by another part of the video showing hardware I’d never heard of, the Sega Digitizer System. It looks like a tool to draw with a reference screen that’s updated in real time. It seems really helpful for drawing sprites in situ and surely enabled artists to fine tune pixels to look good on the monitor.

Great video, though I think it’s overstated how on-purpose these things were. I was only playing games in the 90s, but my understanding is the art was mostly authored on deluxe paint / on various PC systems/monitors. While also CRT, they would have much higher fidelity. I don’t know how much artists were drawing, compiling for the console and viewing on a TV to make pixel by pixel adjustments. Not to mention TVs varied wildly in quality, so it’s not like artists were ‘tuning’ their pixels for a particular CRT fuzz.

There was more of a general understanding that the TV looked worse, and to not pack key details into single pixels. Stuff like dithering and drawing shadows were existing techniques in print, and still effective today on LCDs when you render at the correct resolution.

I think CRTs were just better at displaying low resolutions generally. Watching a DVD on CRT looks amazing, on a 4k LCD it looks terrible. Even modern 3D games look amazing on a CRT.