keenerb wrote:

I have built my retro PC around that exact target, 8088/CGA.

There's a TON of old games from that time period, CRPGs, graphic adventures, platformers, and the like.

Then I would say you have singular tastes. The appeal of cyan and magenta graphics and PC speaker bleeps is rather limited, especially when so many of the games worth playing at the time were available on other platforms like the C64, where they tended to look and sound much better.

It's all about nostalgia and which time period is "your" classic/most loved.

To me there's absolutely nothing interesting about putting together a 486 system to play Doom on, because Dosbox does it better and the 486 era wasn't particularly magical for me.

Yeah. Really the nostalgia age for me was the early 3D game days like Quake, Tomb Raider, Turok, Final Fantasy 7 and up, etc. The time when 3dfx was king. That's why I resurrected my PS2 computer with a Voodoo2 SLI setup (for Glide and OpenGL and a TNT2 card for DirectX).

An 8088/V20 Turbo system + a Socket 7 machine with a K6+ CPU covers all the DOS era pretty well. The Socket 7 system can be even used for 3D acceleration windows games.

Rhuwyn wrote:

The one market I do see is reproduction or retro compatible components such as the dreamblaster S1/X1 and that Gravis project that someone is working on. I don't think full systems will sell much unfortunately.

I agree with this.

Emulation is good enough for the vast majority who want something that's close enough to what they originally experienced.

But for those that want it to be as close as possible, or who like to get their hands dirty and build a system, they'll be building a real system that fits exactly what they want\remember. Along with this, there will certainly be a market for new components that perfectly replace the old ones that are more expensive to find (and could have problems due to age).

Personally, I think there's a pretty nice market for a proper modern CRT monitor that can handle VGA, EGA\CGA, Composite and S-Video inputs for retro gaming and computing. Using any kind of modern display technology, along with its image persistence blurring, input lag, resolution scaling, ghosting, poor color quality, poor low resolution support etc.... people are losing more than they realize. If you don't have space, that's one thing, but people with several towers for retro computing and no CRT should make it a point to get one. If you haven't look at one in years (or, for you youngsters, never seen one), you might actually shed a tear when you see one working... anything from the DOS era (and even Windows 98 honestly) looks so so sooo much better and so much more at home on a CRT.

Well, maybe you guys are right. The people who would buy this are already scouring the usual suspects for everything retro and building their own machines with real vintage parts.

But maybe there will be a market sometime, when the supply of retro hardware starts to dry up.

Ozzuneoj wrote:

Personally, I think there's a pretty nice market for a proper modern CRT monitor that can handle VGA, EGA\CGA, Composite and S-Video inputs for retro gaming and computing. Using any kind of modern display technology, along with its image persistence blurring, input lag, resolution scaling, ghosting, poor low resolution support etc.... people are losing more than they realize. If you don't have space, that's one thing, but people with several towers for retro computing and no CRT should make it a point to get one. If you haven't look at one in years (or, for you youngsters, never seen one), you might actually shed a tear when you see one working... anything from the DOS era (and even Windows 98 honestly) looks so so sooo much better and so much more at home on a CRT.

I'm a "youngster" (18 years old) but I certainly grew up with CRT's since that and my dad's old Katmai machine was all he would let me play with, back in the late 2000's. Recently he threw away all the old CRT's his business used to have, which annoyed me somewhat 😐 But it was a long time coming; they'd been doing nothing but take up space, and I simply don't have room for one 🙁 And they were some really nice monitors too. Oh well.

But I do agree, a new CRT would be cool. Especially one with EGA/CGA support.

Putting aside 8bit computers, there really is two way of approaching it:

- the hardware authenticity way: bringing back ISA, IDE, Floppy and PS/2 ports on modern motherboards. With a scalable CPU, people could use their legacy hardware and software or have new manufacturers of retro hardware to replace the expensive old junk, like the X1 addon, that MPU card, or the GUS enthusiast project on this forum, etc. It's my preferred way of doing it.

- the hardware emulation way. It's what the industry did, although they really did a half hassed job. Modern BIOSes can have emulation of legacy hardware, passing USB mouse and keyboard input into a virtual PS/2 port, simulating IDE on a SATA drive, allowing to boot on a USB floppy drive. Support is really spotty and could be much better, but there isn't any technical roadblock, only a lack of will to do better than good enough. Sound is still a problem this way, but I remember reading how simulating an ISA slot via a PCI-e card could be feasible. It would allow sound card manufacturers to bring back legacy support as well. We are almost there with modern graphics cards and their support for glide wrappers, we just lack legacy drivers for legacy OSes.

I firmly believe it is possible to have a modern PC fully compatible with legacy hardware and software. Now whether a company will make such a PC is highly doubtful, but our modern PC have still the potential for being a compatible IBM-PC, if the effort and money is put in.

The real problem, and this is true for everything retro, is the display. I'm a CRT purist and believe everything look better on it and retro stuff look right only on one. But they are old and dying and no one cares about them 🙁

keenmaster486 wrote:

I'm a "youngster" (18 years old)

Ah, that explains a bit! 😀

jarreboum wrote:

The real problem, and this is true for everything retro, is the display. I'm a CRT purist and believe everything look better on it and retro stuff look right only on one. But they are old and dying and no one cares about them 🙁

Since we're on this subject, I had looked up new CRTs earlier and found that places like AliExpress have hundreds of hits for new CRT monitors, able to be ordered in bulk from China. This seems unusual to me, as Chinese import electronics have always seemed to lean toward the light and easy to ship items.

I don't have the funds or the means to take part in something like this, but a bulk buy of some of these simply to see what they're like would be interesting. New old stock CRTs would be highly interesting to lots of retro computing fans so they'd probably be easy to resell for a profit. Especially a few years from now after the remaining freebies have finally dried up. Once everyone's grandma has a tablet, the CRTs will be all but gone from the yard sales and classifieds. They're already getting to be a lot harder to find. I just got a nice old Sony Trinitron but the screen clicks and dims every so often... And I don't know how to fix CRTs. I'm hesitant to toss it because it looks great otherwise.

I for one have no interest whatsoever in VGA CRT monitors (CGA/EGA is another story), regardless of features. Size aside, they give me headaches and severe eye strain and have been doing so since 1995. The introduction of LCD monitors was a blessing for me 😀. Quality wise, a CRT has nothing on a professional MVA led backlit low response time LCD - great colors, good resolution scaling, great blacks, good viewing angles, no headaches from the image bouncing around and no eye strain - but each of us has their different tastes in the matter which is cool.

If we're dreaming, I'd expect the optimal solution would be something like the old compatibility cards used in the Macintosh and Amiga and suchlike – something that integrates with a modern motherboard and allows the use of the rest of the peripherals, but with its own CPU socket. But if it was at all economical or practical to develop such a thing, we'd have seen it by now.

jarreboum wrote:

Putting aside 8bit computers, there really is two way of approaching it:

- the hardware authenticity way: bringing back ISA, IDE, Floppy and PS/2 ports on modern motherboards. With a scalable CPU, people could use their legacy hardware and software or have new manufacturers of retro hardware to replace the expensive old junk, like the X1 addon, that MPU card, or the GUS enthusiast project on this forum, etc. It's my preferred way of doing it.

A "scalable" CPU? If you mean one where the speed could be adjusted with a knob rather than having to abuse the F11 and F12 keys like in DOSBox, a scalable CPU would be great.

The real problem, and this is true for everything retro, is the display. I'm a CRT purist and believe everything look better on it and retro stuff look right only on one. But they are old and dying and no one cares about them

I'd like to be able to get a nice new CRT with a variety of input ports. Not just VGA, CGA, EGA, but connections that could take both PAL and NTSC Amigas, C64, Atari ST, and other old computers.

Serge himself will tell you that the Dreamblaster S1 and X1 are not something he makes any money on. He might not even break even. He simply does it because he enjoys retro stuff.

If you want to pursue a retro computing project, there's certainly lots of things that you could do. I would personally be happy to see more cool stuff being done as would most people in this forum, I think. The key, though, is that you pursue it for the right reasons, or it might result in a very sour experience for you.

Jorpho wrote:

keenerb wrote:

I have built my retro PC around that exact target, 8088/CGA.

There's a TON of old games from that time period, CRPGs, graphic adventures, platformers, and the like.

Then I would say you have singular tastes. The appeal of cyan and magenta graphics and PC speaker bleeps is rather limited, especially when so many of the games worth playing at the time were available on other platforms like the C64, where they tended to look and sound much better.

I Agree. I have tried several early 90's flight sims that I played for weeks as a kid and the appeal is not there anymore. The graphics are mostly awful and so are the controls. I personally would struggle to play CGA/beeper games for more than a few minutes at a time. Most people who talk about retro games tend to think of the 1990-95 Sierra, Lucas, Origin games which had high production values and are still (mostly) playable. I can play C64 games as the gfx/audio is kinda good, but anything from other computer makers of the same era just looks (Spectrum) or sounds (Amstrad/Spectrum) awful. Besided C64/Amiga, I don't know anyone who would be willing to play any 80's games on other systems these days. I remember thinking back in -91 when I got the first 386/VGA PC that "damn, these CGA games really look and sound shitty".

kanecvr wrote:

I for one have no interest whatsoever in VGA CRT monitors (CGA/EGA is another story), regardless of features. Size aside, they give me headaches and severe eye strain and have been doing so since 1995. The introduction of LCD monitors was a blessing for me 😀. Quality wise, a CRT has nothing on a professional MVA led backlit low response time LCD - great colors, good resolution scaling, great blacks, good viewing angles, no headaches from the image bouncing around and no eye strain - but each of us has their different tastes in the matter which is cool.

Even though I had a CRT monitor as a kid, I spent most of the new millennium on LCD monitors. I was fine with them but I really disliked how terrible they looked at anything but the native resolution. I picked up a pro monitor, one that can do 1600x1200@85Hz, because I had the opportunity and I wanted to use it occasionally for non-native stuff. I plugged my computer in it to toy with it a little bit and realised that I was fine with it and it replaced my ageing LCD. I used it at 60Hz at first because I didn't know better, but once I realised I could switch it to 85Hz I saw the light. Funny how I didn't feel it when I was at 60Hz, but now looking at a still and going from 85Hz to 60Hz I see the screen strobe so hard at me I can't even look at it. The effect goes away after a while and isn't even noticeable in a game where everything is moving in many colours.

The picture is super stable, doesn't give any sort of eye strain, the brightness setting is actually useful, scrolling doesn't ghost, and of course it gives a perfect picture at every resolution.

skitters wrote:

A "scalable" CPU? If you mean one where the speed could be adjusted with a knob rather than having to abuse the F11 and F12 keys like in DOSBox, a scalable CPU would be great.

I'd be interested to have the opinion of someone with a more technical background. CPUs are locked at a certain speed by the manufacturer, and some people find ways to overclock them, at a cost of stability. I do wonder if there are stability problems with reducing the clock speed to extreme lows (like 386 low) and if it can be alleviated somehow, maybe in hardware itself. I heard programs like slomo give stuttering at very low speed as they don't really slow down the CPU but instead force it to pause every "tick" to simulate a slower overall speed.

skitters wrote:

I'd like to be able to get a nice new CRT with a variety of input ports. Not just VGA, CGA, EGA, but connections that could take both PAL and NTSC Amigas, C64, Atari ST, and other old computers.

Scart RGB is your friend 😉 All European TVs have no problem displaying 50Hz and 60Hz in RGB. Some are missing an NTSC decoding chip, resulting in black and white images over Composite or S-Video, but even they were a relative minority. As such they are able to take a VGA signal if output in real 200/240p and with a proper composite sync. Same goes for CGA and EGA, except the cable is slightly more complicated to cater for that brightness pin. I haven't tested it as I lack CGA/EGA hardware yet. 480p is out of reach on a traditional TV though.

jarreboum wrote:

kanecvr wrote:

I for one have no interest whatsoever in VGA CRT monitors (CGA/EGA is another story), regardless of features. Size aside, they give me headaches and severe eye strain and have been doing so since 1995. The introduction of LCD monitors was a blessing for me 😀. Quality wise, a CRT has nothing on a professional MVA led backlit low response time LCD - great colors, good resolution scaling, great blacks, good viewing angles, no headaches from the image bouncing around and no eye strain - but each of us has their different tastes in the matter which is cool.

Even though I had a CRT monitor as a kid, I spent most of the new millennium on LCD monitors. I was fine with them but I really disliked how terrible they looked at anything but the native resolution. I picked up a pro monitor, one that can do 1600x1200@85Hz, because I had the opportunity and I wanted to use it occasionally for non-native stuff. I plugged my computer in it to toy with it a little bit and realised that I was fine with it and it replaced my ageing LCD. I used it at 60Hz at first because I didn't know better, but once I realised I could switch it to 85Hz I saw the light. Funny how I didn't feel it when I was at 60Hz, but now looking at a still and going from 85Hz to 60Hz I see the screen strobe so hard at me I can't even look at it. The effect goes away after a while and isn't even noticeable in a game where everything is moving in many colours.

The picture is super stable, doesn't give any sort of eye strain, the brightness setting is actually useful, scrolling doesn't ghost, and of course it gives a perfect picture at every resolution.

60hz - 85hz - even 100hz - I still get got headaches and eye strain. In fact I partly blame my astigmatism on CRT monitors (I spent A LOT of time glued to a 14" monitor as a kid). Not to mention some monitors make a barely audible high pitch noise at 100hz