Dithering? CRT monitors don't process the image at all, and therefore won't have a 'sharpness' control (generally they'll have colour temp, brightness, saturation and contrast, horizontal/vertical convergence, phase alignment etc) - the image is controlled purely by the rgb signal directly affecting the electron guns - it's an analogue display (assuming you're using vga).

Whether something looks sharp or fuzzy is related to the resolution of the image you're feeding it and the dot pitch (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot_pitch) of the individual phosphor dots. I'd bet your old monitor had a really crap dot pitch, something above 0.30mm, whereas your new monitor has a pretty decent 0.25mm. The smaller the dot pitch, the finer and less 'smoothed' the image will look. The average back in the days of Dos was around 0.28mm, but better monitors generally had finer screens.

You need a Trinitron or an OEM monitor that was a Trinitron in disguise. They have a really sharp picture at any resolution.

It's true that old (and even most newer) CRT monitors don't do digital image processing/scaling/etc as LCD displays do, but they certainly can have "sharpness" control via analog means. (usually control of beam focus, making the whole screen more blurred or sharp)
This is very common on SDTVs, but not super common on VGA monitors. (in some cases with older monitors, there's also internal tuning controls that aren't normally accessible to the user)

Also, high dot pitch won't help if the beam itself is poorly focused (and thus blurry). Granted, it's uncommon for a high-quality screen to be poorly calibrated (or use a cheaper electron gun) as-such. For monitors that do support sharpness/focus control, the finer dot pitch also won't hinder intentional attempts at blurring the display. (so a high quality monitor with fine dot pitch and a wide focus/sharpness range would be ideal)

I'm not sure what you're thinking with your "do dithering" comment . . . dithering is almost always done on the computer end (aside from some low-quality LCD monitors with poor color precision), though having sharpness control can help filter/blend dithering in software/video acclerators that do use it. (that will only go so far though, and always at the expense of blurring everything)

I dunno, but if I remember correctly games such as Cool Spot that had "transparency" no longer do... the transparency was a dithering trick that mixed white verticle lines with black ones, and dithered to make a "glass" type effect in certain areas. However, on this new monitor you can flat out see the white and black verticle lines that normally are transparent.

This effect [although it was a scanline trick] is also in the Genesis port of Cool Spot.

Also, I don't remember seeing such sharp pixles in game sprites etc on some of my CRT monitors. However, this is probably the dot pitch, as megatron-uk stated, but if that's the case that kinda sucks, heh. I'd like the games to look how the programmers intended. 😜

I dunno maybe i'm just being forgetful, or just spoiled by my retro consoles and CRT TV's being able to do scanline tricks to do transparencies and other awesome dithering effects.

sliderider wrote:

You need a Trinitron or an OEM monitor that was a Trinitron in disguise. They have a really sharp picture at any resolution.

'in-line electron gun' usually refers to a Trinitron-style phosphor layout, also called aperture-grille. In-line guns could be used with round dots but that is very uncommon and would blur the image in horizontal direction.
Aperture-grille screens are very sharp but that's not what you want at resolutions below 640x480.

megatron-uk wrote:

Dithering? CRT monitors don't process the image at all, and therefore won't have a 'sharpness' control [...]

Most monitors have a focus adjustment knob on the flyback transformer (that's the black box with the thick wire going to the picture tube). I haven't seen any monitors so far that didn't have this knob. You'd want to set it to the sharpest possible picture however, deliberately blurring the screen does not really improve anything IMO.

Anyway there was a thread here about a similar problem not long ago:
CRT questions

PhaytalError wrote:

I dunno, but if I remember correctly games such as Cool Spot that had "transparency" no longer do... the transparency was a dithering trick that mixed white verticle lines with black ones, and dithered to make a "glass" type effect in certain areas. However, on this new monitor you can flat out see the white and black verticle lines that normally are transparent.

This effect [although it was a scanline trick] is also in the Genesis port of Cool Spot.

That's Genesis's infamously blurry cables taken advantage of to produce transparency out of dither. That has nothing to do with PC monitor features, and some pc ports of genesis games (i.e. Earthworm Jim, Comix Zone) don't even consider that effect and leave it as a dither as-is, instead of turning it into a proper translucent look-up powered thing

If you want to play those particular genesis games how they were intended on a PC as best as you can, you could use KEGA Fusion and turn on the MD NTSC filter for both simulated analog distortion and the cable blur effect.

Thank you all for your input, yeah I compared different monitors, and it's the same thing. Come to find out my old monitor is also .25mm, however my new one has a flat screen and the older one was the typical "curve" style to the screen.

Well, with that said i'll be using my new Gateway VX750 17" CRT monitor permanately on that PC, it has amazing image quality, flat glass, and as I said it matches that PC's color scheme. I'm gonna save my old 17" monitor as a backup. 😀

leileilol wrote:

PhaytalError wrote:

I dunno, but if I remember correctly games such as Cool Spot that had "transparency" no longer do... the transparency was a dithering trick that mixed white verticle lines with black ones, and dithered to make a "glass" type effect in certain areas. However, on this new monitor you can flat out see the white and black verticle lines that normally are transparent.

This effect [although it was a scanline trick] is also in the Genesis port of Cool Spot.

That's Genesis's infamously blurry cables taken advantage of to produce transparency out of dither. That has nothing to do with PC monitor features, and some pc ports of genesis games (i.e. Earthworm Jim, Comix Zone) don't even consider that effect and leave it as a dither as-is, instead of turning it into a proper translucent look-up powered thing

If you want to play those particular genesis games how they were intended on a PC as best as you can, you could use KEGA Fusion and turn on the MD NTSC filter for both simulated analog distortion and the cable blur effect.

If you were a European Megadrive user with SCART, the dither would be ruined too (nice shcarp RGB vs blurred/artifacted composite) . . . or if you were among the few North American users with RGB monitors (I know a few people who actually used Amiga monitors for that). Or modern retro gamers with s-video mods and/or RGB monitors and/or RGB to YUV converters.
Also note that a lot of games on many platforms resorted to dithering, regardless of blending/blur, as there was no other option to achieve the added color/shading. (be it RF/composite video on very low res systems -C64, Atari, etc- or later platforms usually used with RGB monitors -Atari ST, Amiga, PC, etc)

One major problem with this is that composite video also has chroma artifacts that can get very bad on dithered surfaces ("rainbow" moire artifacts), worse at certain resolutions.

If you want similar blur on a PC monitor, get a video card with composite video output. 😉

Thanks kool kitty89,

It's honestly been YEARS [since around 1999] since i've played a DOS game on a real DOS machine, I don't recall seeing the pixels, etc as sharp and vivid as they are on "modern" CRT's, or on DOSBox, but then again it was probably so normal back then that my eyes were used to it. 😀

As for the Sega Genesis [Megadrive] yeah, people that have modded theirs to S-Video here in the USA people tend to be amazed at the high image quality but sorrely disappointed that it alters the graphics [no dithering, pixels are not smoothed over, etc].

Compared to the console and home computer machines, PC Monitors always had razor sharp pixels.

I have to Giggle when retro console gamers just now discover Scart RGB, scalers and whatnot to get a good image. We had all of this at 70Hz flicker free and with no interlacing. Under Windows 85Hz+ for super smooth FPS action.

In Short:

Old consoles and home computers: Monitors were TVs more or less
PCs: We had proper Monitors

Man these 50Hz Amigas flickered so badly...

Compared to the console and home computer machines, PC Monitors always had razor sharp pixels.

I have to Giggle when retro console gamers just now discover Scart RGB, scalers and whatnot to get a good image. We had all of this at 70Hz flicker free and with no interlacing. Under Windows 85Hz+ for super smooth FPS action.

In Short:

Old consoles and home computers: Monitors were TVs more or less
PCs: We had proper Monitors

Man these 50Hz Amigas flickered so badly...

I don't remember DOS looking all blurry then either. For regular use I use the Yhkwong Dosbox SVN build with the crt.d3d.bright.fx shader with scale2x with the curvature tweaked a bit. It produces a similar image to the monitor i've had in '94 and slightly blurs things. It should end up with something like this or this or this.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

I have to Giggle when retro console gamers just now discover Scart RGB, scalers and whatnot to get a good image.

To be fair, there has always been a dearth of TVs that support SCART RGB outside Europe. Even today.

I've always wanted to use RGB, but the idea only came to me recently to use an RGB->YUV converter box to get RGB quality on my newish CRT telly.

Yea RGB to Component is to way to go for TVs in Australia for example. Europe was quite blessed but we got punished with PAL 50Hz which gaves us games that ran slower and vertically stunted.

leileilol wrote:

I don't remember DOS looking all blurry then either. For regular use I use the Yhkwong Dosbox SVN build with the crt.d3d.bright.fx shader with scale2x with the curvature tweaked a bit. It produces a similar image to the monitor i've had in '94 and slightly blurs things. It should end up with something like this or this or this.

Looks like a blurry LCD with faint scanlines to me.
This is what a 2000W electric heater... errr I mean a 14" CRT monitor looks like:
http://img404.imageshack.us/img404/1325/img1183xz.jpg
and
http://img849.imageshack.us/img849/5317/img0485z.jpg

But then my opinion might be a bit biased as I've been staring at this tube almost full-tme for at least 15 years.

SquallStrife wrote:

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

I have to Giggle when retro console gamers just now discover Scart RGB, scalers and whatnot to get a good image.

To be fair, there has always been a dearth of TVs that support SCART RGB outside Europe. Even today.

I've always wanted to use RGB, but the idea only came to me recently to use an RGB->YUV converter box to get RGB quality on my newish CRT telly.

When the monitor for my Amstrad CPC died (only minutes after I bought it) I was delighted to find out, some years later, that the monitor uses the same standard RGB Scart signals as my old TV 😀

Now if only I had a use for it...

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Yea RGB to Component is to way to go for TVs in Australia for example. Europe was quite blessed but we got punished with PAL 50Hz which gaves us games that ran slower and vertically stunted.

Except on the Megadrive, Amiga (or ST), and a few others where many games had 50 Hz optimization (or lacking 60 Hz optimization in some Amiga games), and commonly used resolutions that used close to square pixels on 60 Hz TVs, but were much too "tall" on 60 Hz sets (ST was worst, actually still tall in 50 Hz, Amiga was near pearfect in 50 Hz, and MD was almost 1/2 way between 60 and 50 Hz -hence Sonic is egg-shaped in both NTSC and PAL, just tall vs wide). Granted, that's only for the large number of games that didn't compensate for pixel aspect ratio. (a much bigger problem on systems like the NES, Master System, SNES and low-res MD games, where pixels were too-wide in 60 Hz and MUCH too wide in 50 Hz 😉)

This was also a problem for 320x200 DOS games as standard calibration for monitors at 70 Hz left this stretched to 4:3, meaing pixels were much too tall. (same games compensated, others didn't, and some did so inconsistently . . . for consistent games you could just manually adjust the screen though . . . or use a driver forcing 60 Hz)

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Compared to the console and home computer machines, PC Monitors always had razor sharp pixels.

I have to Giggle when retro console gamers just now discover Scart RGB, scalers and whatnot to get a good image. We had all of this at 70Hz flicker free and with no interlacing. Under Windows 85Hz+ for super smooth FPS action.

Though by those same merits, you didn't see console gamers complaining nearly as much about resolutions or dithering artifacts . . . they were simply less noticeable on TVs (especially thrhough composite). Seriously, how many people actively complained about the Playstation or N64's dithering at 320x240?
And, of course, the whole "HD" console revolution just moved onto resolutions in the range that had been common de-facto standards years earlier on PC.

Old consoles and home computers: Monitors were TVs more or less
PCs: We had proper Monitors

The higher-end Amiga and ST monitors should have had relatively similar sharpness to contemporary CGA/EGA and early VGA monitors in the same range. Granted, there were (are) many cheaper, often blurrier monitors as well.

THat's also not including the ST's 31 kHz 640x400 70 Hz monochrome mode.

jwt27 wrote:

Looks like a blurry LCD with faint scanlines to me.

JPEG ate my aperture

I guess I didn't mean "blur" I meant smoothed over pixles, but then again as I stated I was spoiled by CRT consoles, and also had not gamed on a PC [for DOS] since around 1999. I took a magnafier and viewed my "new" CRT and you can see the RGB pixles simular to jwt27 screenshots. 🤣! 😜

If I had my way i'd have a CRT hooked up to my main PC as well instead of an LCD. CRT's in my opinion simply create a more vivid picture than even todays LCD monitors. Although my monitor on my main PC is a HP w2007 LCD screen, and it is crystal clear, it still don't compare to good ole CRT's sharp, vivid and crisp image quality.

I don't miss them to be honest. On the PSX (I used a RGB Scart cable into an Amiga monitor) I had to adjust the geometry for almost every game. My 21" back-breaking heavy Compaq CRT took ~ 30 minutes to warm up and the image shift a little to the left. Only after that was it properly ready to go...

A huge benefit with CRTs (on the PC) were the high refresh rates. I mean we had 70Hz in DOS and under Windows 85, 100 or even 120 Hz without any issues.

But just wait until OLED becomes mainstream... I can't wait!