Mr_Blastman wrote on 2023-02-23, 20:40:
Those PS/1 and PS/2 monitors were sublime. They had a "sparkly" sheen to them that only IBM color monitors had. Hard to describe unless you saw one, but the sparkle was real. They had a softness to the image, particularly the prompt text, that was quite pleasing. Wing Commander and even MCGA games such as Silpheed looked great on them.
I fully agree! 😃
Essentially, these early IBM VGA monitors had the same status/value as a Commodore 1702/1902 or Atari SM124.
The picture quality was as you said, I remember that the characters of the C:\> prompt looked absolutely clean.
Same goes for Norton Commander, it looked nicely readable - soft, but not smeary by any means.
Edit: Here are some photos that give an idea.
http://trelohra.blogspot.com/2015/07/ibm-ps2-77i.html
(They're not taken by me.)
Windows 3.1 and 2.03 looked fine, too. Same goes for PC booter games, I recall.
Though they used the CGA simulation of my ATI VGA Wonder.
Commander Keen IV looked absolutely beautiful on this monitor, by the way.
Almost like a Super NES game, if I may let my younger self speak about the matter.
All in all, I really hope there will be a filter/shader some time that resembles an IBM PS/1 or PS/2 monitor.
It's not perfect by any means, but it provides an alternate view on the games we love so much.
Maybe the game designers even had these old monitors in use at some point, who knows.
Together with a Raspberry Pi, maybe in tandem with that other project over here, it would be possible to simulate such an IBM monitor on an PC flat-screen or any other monitor.
That way, physical PC systems of that era could get their VGA monitor back.
Maybe the resulting image will be even cleaner than the real thing,
because the RF noise on the VGA cable would be missing.
Akin to an idealistic version of a Composite signal versus an a real, physical version.
Anyway, making an image worse isn't difficult, so that noise could be simulated at one point.
Edit: @Mr_Blastman That being said, your work already comes quite close to the IBM monitor! And playing Wing Commander that way is in no way less fun than with the IBM monitor! 😃👍
It's just.. that the CRT mask of the IBM series was different, somehow. Lower end, maybe.
Don't know how to explain.. It's been so long. If I only had my old monitor for comparison, still. Anyway, I'm just thinking out loud, essentially. Sorry for talking/thinking so much. 😅
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