TFT/LCD. I appreciate my eyes more than I do having CRT native resolutions.

voted for CRT if you have the space... a good one will work wonders...
a tft one is not bad either but it cannot beat the crt feeling... personally on my dos-only machine I have a tft due to space restrictions - still holding a couple good digital-controls 15" crt ones in the storage though 😁

You forgot the "Both" option. 😉

I was forced to exchange my beloved, but very worn-out 21" Sony Trinitron for an old IBM L200p TFT (IPS, 1600x1200), and it's rather horrible for DOS.

Some of the problems I encountered with my TFT:

• Video mode detection takes forever, this is very annoying with programs which often switch modes
• Automatic image adjustment most of the time fails to set up the screen correctly, making the interpolation artifacts even worse
• Interlaced modes do not work, 132 col. text modes are almost unreadable
• Some tweaked and custom video modes cause problems
• Output is limited to 60Hz, thus ruining any smooth scrolling in 70Hz VGA modes

Luckily I've still got a 19" Samsung and a 14" Highscreen CRT to keep me sane 😀

damned IBM and their strict standards 😁
my old ps1 vga monitor was so tight-a$$ that I could never get 512x384 or 400x300 to work on it

keropi wrote:

damned IBM and their strict standards 😁
my old ps1 vga monitor was so tight-a$$ that I could never get 512x384 or 400x300 to work on it

No, I'm talking about a different problem, which has nothing to do with IBM and rather more with the sluggishness of the TFT panel (25ms).
You see, the IBM screen accepts 70 Hz refresh rates (after all, 70 Hz is the IBM standard for low-res VGA modes), but the output is limited to 60Hz, so the screen loses frames. In most games you wouldn't notice easily, but it becomes apparent when a game uses VGA soft scrolling techniques, like most of the scrolling pinball games for DOS.
Modern, faster TFTs don't have a problem with 70 Hz, but I suspect my IBM L200p is not the only one with this issue.

[edit:] about your PS/1 VGA monitor: 512x384 and 400x300 are likely to be tweaked 1024x768 and 800x600 modes. Many early VGA monitors couldn't display those non-interlaced.

5u3 wrote:

You forgot the "Both" option. :wink: […]
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You forgot the "Both" option. 😉

I was forced to exchange my beloved, but very worn-out 21" Sony Trinitron for an old IBM L200p TFT (IPS, 1600x1200), and it's rather horrible for DOS.

Some of the problems I encountered with my TFT:

• Video mode detection takes forever, this is very annoying with programs which often switch modes
• Automatic image adjustment most of the time fails to set up the screen correctly, making the interpolation artifacts even worse
• Interlaced modes do not work, 132 col. text modes are almost unreadable
• Some tweaked and custom video modes cause problems
• Output is limited to 60Hz, thus ruining any smooth scrolling in 70Hz VGA modes

Luckily I've still got a 19" Samsung and a 14" Highscreen CRT to keep me sane 😀

I have a Sun 21" needing repair. It has a Sony CRT. Great quality monitor!

I'm wondering if it is worth paying the repair, because I can easily get a 19" TFT for the repair cost (I'm considering a €50 cost)...

I can't make up my mind. I've used my 486 with a couple CRT's and have been meaning to try out an old 15in TFT I have gathering dust.

Depending on how old the machine you're talking about is, you may not be able to use an LCD with it at all as they don't sync low enough to pick up the signal put out by some very old video cards. You'd need some sort of converter that upgrades the signal to something that a modern LCD can use.

I've only ever used 2 monitors with my DOS computers(one CRT, one TFT), but I would personally go for a CRT. Haven't gotten very good results with a TFT monitor. Here's a little rundown of what I experienced with the monitors in question:

CRT(a 13" Macintosh monitor): Very sharp image with nice colors, though a little bit dark. CRTs are what I believe to be the best monitors to use with DOS computers.
TFT(a 24" Samsung SyncMaster 224T): Typically very blurry and with very dull colors depending on the graphics card(only the Matrox Millennium II looks good on this monitor), the screen is off-center with no way of adjusting it(too far up and too far to the left), and as this is a 16:10 monitor, the image is stretched horizontally. It doesn't look bad, but this is not how anything running under DOS was meant to look, can sometimes take a while to pick up the video signal.

Personally, I like using my DOS computers on a 27" flat-screen CRT TV with S-Video, be it either with an external VGA to S-Video converter or the S-Video output of the graphics card(preferably on an ATi graphics card; nVidia graphics cards seem blurry and sometimes have a blue tint in the video and cut off part of the output). It looks pretty good, but will never match the picture you get on an actual computer monitor.

Why no love for the Win9x crowd? But fine I won't vote.

Display technology is display technology, and aspect ratio is aspect ratio.

Personally I've had decent luck on my 16:9 Asus TFT. Every once in a while things will look a bit awkward, but for the most part it scales 640x480 quite well. 320x240 looks iffy though.

SavantStrike wrote:

Why no love for the Win9x crowd? But fine I won't vote.

Display technology is display technology, and aspect ratio is aspect ratio.

Personally I've had decent luck on my 16:9 Asus TFT. Every once in a while things will look a bit awkward, but for the most part it scales 640x480 quite well. 320x240 looks iffy though.

Nothing against Windows! The poll is about your experience running DOS with a CRT monitor, not DOS+Win9x, etc... It's about the behaviour of DOS games and apps when run on a TFT.

I never tried 320x240 on a TFT but I suppose the result is pretty bad!

rug wrote:

SavantStrike wrote:

Why no love for the Win9x crowd? But fine I won't vote.

Display technology is display technology, and aspect ratio is aspect ratio.

Personally I've had decent luck on my 16:9 Asus TFT. Every once in a while things will look a bit awkward, but for the most part it scales 640x480 quite well. 320x240 looks iffy though.

Nothing against Windows! The poll is about your experience running DOS with a CRT monitor, not DOS+Win9x, etc... It's about the behaviour of DOS games and apps when run on a TFT.

I never tried 320x240 on a TFT but I suppose the result is pretty bad!

Win9X runs Dos games 😀.

It's not as bad as one might think to run 320x240 though. Older displays won't bring up a picture at all, but a fairly new monitor will display it, just it will look very stretched.

If I wasn't space constrained, I'd have a nice 19 inch CRT handy, but I don't really feel too deprived with my 16:9 LCD these days. After 5-10 minutes you forget it's stretched.

Ideally someone should make a VGA to HDMI or DVI converter that scales video and also has an option to add black bands on the sides of the screen. Such a product probably already exists, but most likely costs as much as a monitor (or more). Scalers are like 60-80 bucks at the entry level IIRC.

EDIT: the term I was looking for was "underscan." So any VGA to HDMI scaler which supports any of the required resolutions and provides underscan functionality would be an ideal companion to a modern monitor. Then one wouldn't have to care about the monitor any more.

CRT all the way, no questions asked. The variable refresh rate is quite necessary

I've actually got Daggerfall running on a 19" Samsung Syncmaster 940b and it looks quite good.

Btw, anyone else noticing in your region also that CRT's are starting to get harder to find?
Here in The Netherlands I think the number of CRT's that people have gathering dust is about to run out.

Does it count if you have both? And use both on pure dos systems?

dosquest wrote:

Does it count if you have both? And use both on pure dos systems?

Which type of monitor do you prefer?

Lcd, it dosen't hurt my eyes as much as crt does.

dosquest wrote:

Lcd, it dosen't hurt my eyes as much as crt does.

Vote TFT, then.

The poll should be "Which one do you prefer"... 😦