TandySensation wrote:

Bottom line: The smaller 4:3 monitor is closer to period correct hardware and looks better all around but a good quality cable doesn't hurt and may help. There is a difference between cards, some are better than others but even my worst one looked better with the heavy cable with the large monitor.

Might be easiest to just get a DVI video card and be done with it but it's fun to use the original cards and I've had limited success getting a card with DVI working on my Socket7 VIA boards, they are difficult to make stable.

That 17" is 5:4. Still better than 16:9. Does it keep the aspect ratio, ie. are there black bars at the bottom and top for 4:3 resolutions? For 4:3 you would need a 15".
Agree with the suggestion from tgod regarding a calibration picture. This is what I always do when I have to use a TFT with VGA, I also show this to all colleagues who still use a VGA connection. Still, I did notice some progress with TFTs, the newer ones (my experience is with Dell monitors) do a better job locking on the image, even without a calibration picture.

Regarding a DVI video card: What cards did you try? I had no problems using a GF2MX card in a SS7 ALi board.

With modern LCD monitors, proper 4:3 options are a bit limited.

I have two 18.5" 1366 x 768 monitors. Both support 4:3 aspect ratio, and at 1024 x 768 you get a perfect, 1:1 pixel mapped 4:3 1024 x 768 resolution. I'd guess that the resulting image size matches a 15".

New 17" and 19" are all 5:4 and I haven't come across one that letterboxes on top and bottom.

At the high end you can get a 1920 x 1600 screen, giving you perfect, 1:1 pixel mapped 4:3 1600 x 1200 resolution. The image is nice and big. I've got a Samsung screen and it's not the best when it comes to the "auto" image adjust button. Certain games, colours, patterns work best, so it's not hard to set it up once for 320 x 200 resolution.

1600 x 1200 does look very very nice though many games have tiny user interface elements and often period correct hardware struggles at that resolution.

Many games support 1280 x 1024 natively though, but not all do it VERT+, and just stretch it vertically. Either way, it's full of compromises and I often change monitors depending on what I do. Unreal on a Voodoo 3 for example looks mint on one of the 18.5" LCD monitors at 1024 x 768. Splinter Cell looks best at 1600 x 1200 on the 24" screen. But this game is new enough > DVI.

Also interesting, the 18.5" screens support 75 Hz, gives you bit of extra smoothness with V-sync enabled.

Tried a GF4MX, GF2GTS, Radeon 7500 and FX 5200. Each worked fine with 2D but 3D would lock up or crash to desktop. I was using a DFI board with a MVP3 chipset at the time and still have it. I've since gotten a FIC-2013 but haven't tested it. I'm not sure if it's a good idea to install or not install the via drivers or to use rivatuner to turn off features. Didn't seem to matter what I did, it would lock up within a few seconds.

I've been looking for a GF2MX, hoping they draw a little less power. I've read the AGP port on these boards don't provide enough current for newer cards. I've also seen the occasional TNT2 with DVI but since I've already have a TNT2(nondvi) in my parts bin I'm not too excited about getting another.

I'm not sure if a PCI card with DVI would work, there are different versions of PCI.

The 17 inch monitor does lock the image in place, it had auto adjust and auto contrast which do a good job plus manual control.

My Trio64 displays mint 800x600 image on my 24" LCD... And another system with a Geforce MX440 is also very good at full HD on the same monitor using a cheap/not very thick VGA cable, but I did use it for long, as I exchanged the MX for a GT 6600 and have been using DVI for that system ever since. So I guess the better the video card and monitor, the less important the quality of the cable is.

Yes with older ISA cards, on a 386 for example, I would just try out a few cards until you find a decent combination between your card / cable and monitor. For Socket 7 machines, Matrox and Voodoo 3 AGP cards output a very strong signal. After that it's all DVI, which makes life easier.

One of the reasons I like playing 386 games on my Pentium with caches off, great image quality.

philscomputerlab wrote:

Yes with older ISA cards, on a 386 for example, I would just try out a few cards until you find a decent combination between your card / cable and monitor. For Socket 7 machines, Matrox and Voodoo 3 AGP cards output a very strong signal. After that it's all DVI, which makes life easier.

One of the reasons I like playing 386 games on my Pentium with caches off, great image quality.

I actually found the ATI Rage cards to be very nice 2D cards for socket 7 machines. While the signal quality isn't quite as nice as the Matrox cards , its still far better and more consistent than the S3 cards at the time , the performance is good and the it has a few less compatibility issues than the Matrox cards too (Keen4-6 still have issues, but Jazz Jackrabbit for instance works fine). Also the ATI version of Tomb Raider is very nice (the Matrox version looks alot like a PS1 running in 640X480)

have to admit the video quality on the Matrox Millennium II/Mystique is fantastic , and would be an excellent companion to say , a Voodoo2 setup circa 1998.