It looks absolutely godawful on an emulator since without the ghosting what remains is a high amount of flickering.
People taking the gameboy as an example of crisp pixels have either
1/ never had a real gameboy in their hands
2/ putting on nostalgia goggles, hard
The original gameboy LCDs were nothing like what people have today. They had so many limitations and quirks and they were all used in game development, or at the very least, taken into account while designing the games so that things like animations would look decent. Pixels could never look crisp when in motion on an LCD of that era. Not even the early PC monitors.
When people are comparing CRTs vs LCDs, they're thinking of today's LCDs which show a very sharp, high resolution, high contrast image. That's definitely not what a GB had.
On the GBA and GBA SP screen, pure on/off flickering every frame does not perfectly fake transparency, but it gets very close. On the AGS101 or NDS Lite screen, it looks a lot worse.
https://youtu.be/MytSySMUwv8?t=2892
It looks absolutely godawful on an emulator since without the ghosting what remains is a high amount of flickering.
People taking the gameboy as an example of crisp pixels have either
1/ never had a real gameboy in their hands
2/ putting on nostalgia goggles, hard
The original gameboy LCDs were nothing like what people have today. They had so many limitations and quirks and they were all used in game development, or at the very least, taken into account while designing the games so that things like animations would look decent. Pixels could never look crisp when in motion on an LCD of that era. Not even the early PC monitors.
When people are comparing CRTs vs LCDs, they're thinking of today's LCDs which show a very sharp, high resolution, high contrast image. That's definitely not what a GB had.