GeorgeMan wrote:

Let me put my CRT in here too. It's a Hitachi CM772e. It does 1600x1200@85Hz.

That's brutal!

I don't know of any 19" CRT monitor that isn't, really 🤣 🤣

5u3 wrote:

There may be a difference, but the principle is the same. I once had a Samsung 959nf CRT that got magnetized so badly that some wires of the aperture grille stuck together. It was possible to set it right again with a self-built degaussing wand, so it really should be a piece of cake for a repair shop.

I read about that once in a service manual for an aperture grille screen. The solution was to either display a bright white image on the affected area and hope that the strong electron beam heats up and unsticks the grille wires... or just hit it on the side with your hand until it disappears 🤣

Darkman wrote:

its actually an aperture grille CRT so it might be different, unless this applies to both kinds?

If the aperture grille was deformed so badly I think you'd see lots of shimmering colours too at the slightest vibration. That's why I thought the purity rings may be misaligned, however the chance of that happening during transport would be very slim.

Was able to source two samtron 76e brand new in box monitors from fleabay. lets hope they come in one piece and are ok 😀

maverick85 wrote:

Had a LG Studioworks 775N back in the day. Great mojnitor, shadowmask. Now I have two aperture grille monitors which I don't like, especially when playing old games like caesar iii.

I think Caesar III is quite nice on a TFT, especially since people on the WSGF forum published patches for higher resolutions (I think on this thread.)
I tried the 1368x768 resolution on a notebook, it worked.

You and your awesome super high resolution CRT displays with aperture grille tubes and sexy refresh rates... Gentlemen, I give you the complete opposite (all pics are click to zoom):

Direct from the innards of rural Argentina, this is a Samsung CVL4955 VGA display from December 1992. A friend of mine got it from some Argentinian redneck there along with a K6-II 300 tower full o' goodies, the monitor didn't power up so he put it in storage until one day we were talking about low res VGA monitors, he remembered he had this one that didn't work and said next trip to Argentina he'll bring it over. About two weeks ago I got my hands on it. 😵

I popped the cover off and clearly it has been sitting outside for a long time. There is corrosion on the underside of the PCB so I thought this one could be too far into 'not worth fixing' territory, but I figured out I should at least try cleaning it up and simple/straightforward repairs, if it's anything more complicated than that then it's done for.

I washed the board with soap and water and let it to dry for a few days. It just happens that this monitor is designed for 120VAC while Argentina and Chile are 220V countries, so it's very likely that someone plugged it in straight to the wall and blew up something in the PSU primary (my friend read the nameplate voltage and used an appropriate transformer for testing). The PSU is based on a STR53041 regulator so it's ancient and fixed input voltage. Usually in a gross overvoltage condition like 220V mains in a 110V appliance the switching element might short, the main filter capacitor bursts and the fuse blows. Regulator and fuse were OK, but the top on the main filter cap was bulging a little bit. Bingo. Replaced the cap, resoldered some suspicious looking solder joints (like on big power resistors) and put everything together for a test run:

It powered up with a nice bright raster so I thought 'great, I fixed it!' but after a minute or two something really bizarre happened. I noticed the smell of something like rancid tuna, at first I thought it came from the outside but soon realized it came from the monitor! I quickly unplugged it thinking a capacitor was about to blow up, checked the board but nothing was amiss, the smell seemed to be coming from the PCB itself. WTF?

So I set the monitor outside and plugged it in once again, thinking that either something will fail catastrophically (like a blown cap or an arcing flyback) or the board has absorbed something from whatever critters of nature lived in it and it's now releasing the stench as it heats up (or because of the current flow? who knows). Fortunately nothing ever failed and after about two hours the stench was pretty much gone, so I cleaned the cabinet, put it back together and called it a job well done.

The picture tube is in great condition! Very bright and good geometry, but wow I didn't remember how blurry these were! The RGB triads can be clearly seen up close with the naked eye much like an old television, even 80x25 text mode shows how coarse and terrible the dot pitch is, have a look at the following pictures in full size and you'll see what I mean:


Even with the sharpest focus setting 640x480 is borderline unusable (reading file names in Windows 3.1's File Manager is an exercise in eye strain), and the weird thing is, I kinda like it. I like the sort of 'organic' look it gives to games, and I believe that if you were gaming on a budget in '92 this is probably much closer to the 'real' experience.

Is this what EGA displays looked like? I've never seen a real EGA in person since everyone jumped from MDA/CGA directly to VGA around here, and even though I've played a ton of EGA games during my childhood I always did on a VGA/SVGA system.

Great job 133MHz. You should be commended for your efforts. Great to see another nice CRT not left to rot.

Darkman wrote:

I don't know....I remember being told a number of times never to open a CRT unless one knows exactly what he is doing...

I can take apart and sort out a PC or a console quite easily, a CRT Im not so sure about.

it might be best to take it some where where it can be repaired, how ever rare such a place might be.

also you might make your own separate thread. so we might monitor your progress if it's an ongoing deal. this is a CRT thread so i'm not hating.

I once had a CRT blow up on me when I did an intern-ship. I think this traumatized me and old CRTs freak me out a bit. They make strange noises and can blow up at any time 🤣

I do not miss them at all...

133MHz, wow, that is one big coil of copper! Insane retail price guarantee 😁

I wish I would have kept an old ViewStar 17" CRT.I still remember the days I was playing on it,I was playing 4 hours day and 4 hours night,and when I finally would turn it off,my eyes would be red as if I would have taken weed 🤣

Got rid of my Diamondtron 19" recently. It was just too big, the antiglare coating was coming off and TBH I'm not a big fan of aperture grille CRTs for DOS games.

I've been using a 5:4 TFT in the mean time and hating the scaling artefacts, so when I saw this on eBay I couldn't resist. It's an apparently NOS Philips 17" shadowmask.

Manufactured Dec 2004 in the glorious PRC.

Nice bright picture although the geometry's not brilliant. Thankfully it has the full range of adjustments.

I have a few of those Philips screens in 17 and 19". They're pretty bright and sharp but I personally find them a bit too "new" for low-res gaming 😀

bjt wrote:

It's an apparently NOS Philips 17" shadowmask.

I have a NIB one of those in the shed along with a flatscreen LG and an Acer something-or-other. All 17" and NIB for when my Sony dies.

This stockpile of CRT's has to last me until modern flatscreen technology can handle scaling properly...

badmojo wrote:

This stockpile of CRT's has to last me until modern flatscreen technology can handle scaling properly...

My thoughts exactly!

I'd rather stock up on 14" SVGA tubes but they seem to be increasingly hard to find locally, especially in usable condition. I really should have started my CRT collection earlier.

badmojo wrote:

This stockpile of CRT's has to last me until modern flatscreen technology can handle scaling properly...

I'm afraid the analog inputs are going to be phased out before LCDs become good enough to replace CRTs. Then the only alternative would be an external scaler.

For me, scaling isn't the most annoying thing any more, it's the fact that one has to resort to crappy TN and VA panels to avoid jerky scrolling at 70 Hz VGA modes.
If anyone knows an IPS monitor with 1200 pixels vertical resolution which is capable of displaying 70 Hz without dropping frames, please tell. 😉

I got a couple CRTS.

The first is a 16" Dell "Trinitron" CRT. I'm guessing they licensed the Trinitron name from Sony. It does 1200x1600 @60hz

This one is my main monitor for DOS/Win9x games. I think it would be considered SVGA, only topping out at 600x800, I don't know the max refresh rate though, but I'm assuming its 60hz at that resolution.

I got this monitor for $2 😁

5u3 wrote:

I'm afraid the analog inputs are going to be phased out before LCDs become good enough to replace CRTs. Then the only alternative would be an external scaler.

Hmm that would be a problem. OK so I have to make this stockpile last until I die 😵

5u3 wrote:

For me, scaling isn't the most annoying thing any more, it's the fact that one has to resort to crappy TN and VA panels to avoid jerky scrolling at 70 Hz VGA modes.
If anyone knows an IPS monitor with 1200 pixels vertical resolution which is capable of displaying 70 Hz without dropping frames, please tell. 😉

I'll test my Dell Ultrasharp with Mario and Jazz Jack Rabbit (if they are OK?) 😀 So far it's been very cooperative in DOS (and it has a 4:3 setting)

vetz wrote:

I'll test my Dell Ultrasharp with Mario and Jazz Jack Rabbit (if they are OK?) 😀 So far it's been very cooperative in DOS (and it has a 4:3 setting)

That would be nice! 😀
Another simple test is Ziff PC Magazine's old smooth-scrolling file listing utility SMOOTH.COM (download link). When you scroll a long text file, dropped frames and blurry fringes become easily noticeable.

I found it very difficult to find out if a TFT is capable of displaying 70 Hz (unless I connect a laptop and test myself, which is not possible in any of the shops I know). This feature is never listed in the specifications and sales people and the manufacturer's technical support staff do not know what I'm talking about. So far I've never seen an IPS panel that doesn't judder at 70 Hz.