New here so forgive me hopping right in. Im in the process of building 3 high end builds (98SE, XP and 7) none will be strictly period only hardware, but still have native drivers. just end of era.

What i will do though is use the 98 machine for all the DX7/8/ early 9 games. I have a selection of GPU's to pick from but nothing whoop de doo.. XT5500 256mb, Ati 9550 128mb GDDR, I do have a faulty FX5600 ultra.. but all it does is show coloured bars and artefacts.. so toast I think. Screen wise BenQ Q9T4 4:3 and 1280x1024. I feel for 98 its definitely got to be 4:3

My XP setup will be using a HD7770 1gb ghz edition card, on a Samsung syncmaster 205BW 16:10 1680x1050, as this was what i fondly remember playing those XP era games on. and have owned the screen, gpu etc since new. recently deciding to dig it all out and dust it off.

Windows 7 wise ill either be opting for a HD7970 3gb or a GeForce GTX 970 4gb. yet to decide, but it will be on a 1920x1080p 16:9 as this is what I played most of that eras games on, I do have Acer screen, but its pretty meh! and was cheap when new. so I need to pick up something better.

I think with these setups im going to have pretty much my gaming history covered, I cant recall ever having owned a 5:4 screen. I have owned and played on various 16:10, 16:9, I have personally never been a fan of black bars on a screen, hence why I went and picked up the BenQ screen. as it would be too jarring for me. and end up irritating me to hell. Old screens are so cheap, for even decent quality ones, that having one of each isn't a big financial outlay.. space constraints might be a different matter.

I am one of those barbarians that will just fire up DOSbox on a 16:10 XP laptop fullscreen and enjoy it. Most of the 320*200 640*400 stuff looks better anyway, it's like they mostly didn't bother whether their pixels were square or not.

I still employ a lot of 4:3 monitors though, I'd rather have top and bottom bars than side bars, imagine just accepting that you have 400 lines less vertically ALL the time, not just temporarily, for a monitor with practically the same footprint, that's some powerful Stockholm syndrome crap.

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-03-01, 15:24:

Most of the 320*200 640*400 stuff looks better anyway,

The squished pixels in dos games do not bother you?

Cerberus73 wrote on 2023-03-01, 15:16:

New here so forgive me hopping right in. Im in the process of building 3 high end builds (98SE, XP and 7) none will be strictly […]
Show full quote

New here so forgive me hopping right in. Im in the process of building 3 high end builds (98SE, XP and 7) none will be strictly period only hardware, but still have native drivers. just end of era.

What i will do though is use the 98 machine for all the DX7/8/ early 9 games. I have a selection of GPU's to pick from but nothing whoop de doo.. XT5500 256mb, Ati 9550 128mb GDDR, I do have a faulty FX5600 ultra.. but all it does is show coloured bars and artefacts.. so toast I think. Screen wise BenQ Q9T4 4:3 and 1280x1024. I feel for 98 its definitely got to be 4:3

My XP setup will be using a HD7770 1gb ghz edition card, on a Samsung syncmaster 205BW 16:10 1680x1050, as this was what i fondly remember playing those XP era games on. and have owned the screen, gpu etc since new. recently deciding to dig it all out and dust it off.

Windows 7 wise ill either be opting for a HD7970 3gb or a GeForce GTX 970 4gb. yet to decide, but it will be on a 1920x1080p 16:9 as this is what I played most of that eras games on, I do have Acer screen, but its pretty meh! and was cheap when new. so I need to pick up something better.

I think with these setups im going to have pretty much my gaming history covered, I cant recall ever having owned a 5:4 screen. I have owned and played on various 16:10, 16:9, I have personally never been a fan of black bars on a screen, hence why I went and picked up the BenQ screen. as it would be too jarring for me. and end up irritating me to hell. Old screens are so cheap, for even decent quality ones, that having one of each isn't a big financial outlay.. space constraints might be a different matter.

Welcome to the forum!

Interesting to me that you desire a Windows 7 system. I have a GTX 970 that I use for an XP-10 system. It's still plenty fast enough for some new games!

ptr1ck wrote on 2023-03-01, 15:56:

Cerberus73 wrote on 2023-03-01, 15:16:

New here so forgive me hopping right in. Im in the process of building 3 high end builds (98SE, XP and 7) none will be strictly […]
Show full quote

New here so forgive me hopping right in. Im in the process of building 3 high end builds (98SE, XP and 7) none will be strictly period only hardware, but still have native drivers. just end of era.

What i will do though is use the 98 machine for all the DX7/8/ early 9 games. I have a selection of GPU's to pick from but nothing whoop de doo.. XT5500 256mb, Ati 9550 128mb GDDR, I do have a faulty FX5600 ultra.. but all it does is show coloured bars and artefacts.. so toast I think. Screen wise BenQ Q9T4 4:3 and 1280x1024. I feel for 98 its definitely got to be 4:3

My XP setup will be using a HD7770 1gb ghz edition card, on a Samsung syncmaster 205BW 16:10 1680x1050, as this was what i fondly remember playing those XP era games on. and have owned the screen, gpu etc since new. recently deciding to dig it all out and dust it off.

Windows 7 wise ill either be opting for a HD7970 3gb or a GeForce GTX 970 4gb. yet to decide, but it will be on a 1920x1080p 16:9 as this is what I played most of that eras games on, I do have Acer screen, but its pretty meh! and was cheap when new. so I need to pick up something better.

I think with these setups im going to have pretty much my gaming history covered, I cant recall ever having owned a 5:4 screen. I have owned and played on various 16:10, 16:9, I have personally never been a fan of black bars on a screen, hence why I went and picked up the BenQ screen. as it would be too jarring for me. and end up irritating me to hell. Old screens are so cheap, for even decent quality ones, that having one of each isn't a big financial outlay.. space constraints might be a different matter.

Welcome to the forum!

Interesting to me that you desire a Windows 7 system. I have a GTX 970 that I use for an XP-10 system. It's still plenty fast enough for some new games!

Ah its basically because some games just run better on specific hardware, and.. well I have the stuff laying around.. a 6600k i5, 16gb ram, pair of GTX970's but the boards only a H110 I got dirt cheap, and kept as a spare. I've plenty IDE, SATA SSD, NVMe and SATA HDD's kicking around. and other stuff, so thought id do a dedicated set of builds. so I don't screw up my main work or game machines. tweaking old games to work on modern kit... Besides its fun.

Shponglefan wrote on 2023-03-01, 13:46:

Yeah, I was hoping there might be a way to disable the monitor's native image processing. The ProArt also has a sharpness option which can make 800x600 look close to pixel-perfect, but not quite.

Nearest-neighbor interpolation rarely has been implemented to monitors, for obvious reasons, but they already scale it better than XP compatible GPUs, using more sophisticated algorithms like Bicubic. And many enthusiasts will die on "softer CRT-like picture is better" hill anyway.

Basically I'll go as high as the game supports. As my currant screens native resolution is 1600x900 that's how I play most games now.
However if a game doesn't support that I'll default back to 4:3, either 800x600 or 1024x768 which with the aspect ratio locked still look good. I've no problems with the black bars.
I was however late to widescreen only upgrading from some 5:4 screens when I started working from home in 2019 and the fact it wasn't true 4:3 never bothered me even with dos

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2023-03-01, 14:19:

Does system bottlenecking become an issue though? I would think that as one starts pushing resolutions and refresh rates, XP-era CPUs and GPUs are going to hit their limitations.

Not with decent hardware, instead of "period correct" potatoes. For example, F.E.A.R. can run 1080p with 100+ fps on Core i7 / GTX 580 easily. Early XP era games will run at blazing speed on something like 1950XTX.

FWIW, I'm using a i7-3770k and GTX 980 Ti. With FEAR running @ 1920x1200, I get between 50-100 FPS in the benchmark demo with an average of 74 FPS. For me, that puts in in the sweet spot for a 75 Hz monitor.

Earlier games, yes, I could see potentially running a lot faster assuming the games themselves don't have any FPS limitations.

1440p panel will fit 320x200 just fine, it has enough space for uneven pixel scaling in DOSBOX. 800x600 is also possible with small letterboxing, but will require some software solution or modern monitor with presets for emulating specific format and screen size, like on Gigabyte. 1600x1200 obviously will work fine with 1:1 scaling.

Yes, if we go letterboxing then in theory of a lot of pixel-perfect could be resolutions. I guess I was going for scenarios whereby the intent is to fill the monitor as best as possible.

SimCity 4 can use custom resolution, so once again, support for 1600x1200 specifically is irrelevant. Just like it was for majority of XP games.

I never knew that! Thank you, I just tried that out and now I can get widescreen in that game. Sweet! 😁

I seem to remember Taxan making those artist CRT monitors in the 1990s/2000s that could be rotated 90* so one would have that arcade game-esque resolution...

Shponglefan wrote:

With FEAR running @ 1920x1200, I get between 50-100 FPS in the benchmark demo with an average of 74 FPS

Disable soft shadows. They're garbage anyway and very buggy with multisampling. You easily can reach 120+ average on GTX285 without them.