Yes, CRTs are very dangerous. VERY high voltages inside.
I would not dink around in there without at least having someone experienced present to help you.
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On older screens those adjustments were sometimes available through holes in the back BUT you need a plastic screwdriver made for this to be safe.
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PCBONEZ wrote:

Yes, CRTs are very dangerous. VERY high voltages inside. I would not dink around in there without at least having someone experi […]
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Yes, CRTs are very dangerous. VERY high voltages inside.
I would not dink around in there without at least having someone experienced present to help you.
.
On older screens those adjustments were sometimes available through holes in the back BUT you need a plastic screwdriver made for this to be safe.
.

Yes, like I said, I'm definitely not going to do that myself. I'm just wondering if that's a sure way to solve the issue of CRT longevity.

Not really.
The light from a CRT comes from the electron beam shooting electrons at a phosphorous coating.
Over time, the phosphorous coating will wear out somewhat, reducing brightness. You can hit it with more electrons, but at some point you've reached the end of the line.

A funny thing happened with my first widescreen TV, which was still a CRT.
You could choose whether to watch 4:3 broadcasts stretched to 16:9, or just centered, with black bars left and right.
I chose the latter, because I didn't like the stretched images, they distorted everything.
But, during the lifetime of that TV, most broadcasts were still 4:3.
Eventually, when you did get 16:9 broadcasts, you saw a notable difference in brightness between the center 4:3 parts, and the bars on the left and right which were usually black.

I wouldn't worry too much about the brightness issue, just turn down the lights in the room 😀
Increasing the anode voltage to compensate for phosphor ageing will affect the other picture adjustments, which may or may not be easily fixed. It'll also put further strain on a vintage PSU.

Vintage CRTs that you find working now will likely not be those that have high tube hours anyway.
Your Samsung example seems good but I wouldn't worry too much about an exact model.
The games you have listed need nothing more than a bog-standard 14" VGA, max 640x480, large dot pitch.

bjt wrote:

The games you have listed need nothing more than a bog-standard 14" VGA, max 640x480, large dot pitch.

Yes, most VGA games run in 320x200 or 320x240, so dot pitch really is no issue whatsoever.

I bought an IBM 8513 12" VGA (640x480) Monitor which has a very sharp and colorful Picture for Dosgaming.
I don't think you will get a better Monitor for Lowres Dosgaming. It has nearly the same picture quality
as the Atari SC1224 which is excellent.

You're talking about 256 colour games. There's lots of games which run at 640x400 or 640x480, 16 colour mode. Later DOS games (Crusader series, DN3D, Mech2) could run at high res, 256 colour.

If you want to get a monitor that can handle a certain resolution, use a calculator like this one I found through Google.

Put in the resolution and desired refresh rate (typically 60Hz unless you're in Windows and using a video card that supports refresh rate changes) and see what it spits out in the horizontal refresh rate.

For 1024x768 at 60Hz, the horizontal refresh required is at least 49.1kHz. These two figures - 60Hz vertical refresh, 49.1kHz horizontal refresh, are what you then look for in the specs for the monitor model you want to buy. If you get a screen with a horizontal refresh of LESS than 49.1kHz, then you won't be able to do 1024x768 at 60Hz (although you might be able to reach it at 56Hz, but you'll get a headache from all the flicker!) The higher the horizontal refresh figure, the better the monitor is.

Looking at page 14 of the Samsung SyncMaster 3 you posted, it looks like it only supports a couple of fixed frequencies, and they are all below 49.1kHz, so you won't be able to do 1024x768 on that screen. It looks like you can do it in interlaced mode, but I have never been able to get that to work reliably, plus you likely need special drivers to do it, and it tends to look horrible (the lines can be a bit wavy and you get a headache from the flicker) so personally I consider interlaced modes not an option.

By way of an example, the last CRT monitor I was using was a Hyundai 19" with a horizontal refresh of 108kHz, which was enough to do 1600x1200 at just over 85Hz. I used to run it at 1760x1320 at 80Hz, which ran it *just* out of spec but allowed me to get an even higher resolution without going below 80Hz, which was the point where the flicker started to bother me.

The reason I mention this is that with CRT monitors the resolution isn't really where the limit is, because you can always increase or decrease the resolution, as long as you stay within the vertical and horizontal refresh ranges supported by a given monitor.

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For me right now, it's more a matter of actually finding anything at all. If I could be choosy, I would go for a 15". I just don't have the room for anything larger (deeper). CRTs are rare in my neck of the woods.

Try to buy local -- check craigslist and LetGo - it seems rare that CRT monitors are shipped well.

For my Pentium 3 build, I've rescued a very old 14" SVGA monitor, a Crystal CM1402E from 1992 (although the monitor is a 1989 design). Despite being quite old and one of the very first "8514/A compatible" monitors ever available on the market, the picture quality is good and colours are very deep and vibrant.

The dot pitch is .28 and makes it fine both for Windows and DOS games. However, like the Samsung, being a fixed frequency monitor, it only supports 1024x768 in 8514/A mode, which means 43.5Hz interlaced, a video mode that isn't easy to configure anymore with modern operating systems, unless you use the 8514/A driver in Windows 3.1.

Neverthless, I keep everything at VGA standard, 640x480, and I'm fine with it, because if I increase the resolution, text starts to look a bit fuzzy much like every other 14" monitor of the period.

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ElectroMan wrote:

Your Coppermine is a lovely setup, though I can't imagine myself running PIII on just 14". I understand it is your main old skool PC, so you probably had to compromise to get the best of all worlds. Me, I plan to get 486, Pentium and Pentium III - as you can see, much more space to maneuver 😀

Heh thank you! Now the little beast is a 1.4 Tualatin, pin modded from South Korea. And yep, you guessed right. Also, the reason of the small'un monitor is due to lack of space. I keep it under a library so I can't fit anything bigger than 14" in that spot, but using Windows XP at 640x480 is pretty manageable.

More updates and pictures will come soon, along with a name change. 😉

Small CRT's are good for low-res gaming up to 640x480, if win9x comes into place you need 800x600 and more because of the fonts and general layout, win3x is fine with 640x480 though.
In my opinion a small crt is best for a real-dos-gaming-machine, but not if it comes to win9x. Bigger CRT's for win9x need much more space and so I went for a small 15" tft.

I tested some of my CRT's a short while ago, first I was impressed, but after a short while i put the TFT back in place... beside CGA/EGA/MDA CRT's are not my flavor any more.

I may be the odd one out here, but I actually prefer big, sharp aperture grille CRTs (like my Sun GDM-5410, Dell P1110, or my sadly departed Sony GDM-FW900) even for older games that ran at 320x200 or 640x480 with glaringly obvious, razor-sharp pixels. Shadow masks just don't do it for me half the time, and there's something to be said for having a big 21" monitor that would've been ungodly expensive back then.

That said, there is one unusually small CRT that I keep around right now: a 13" AppleColor RGB monitor that matches up with a Macintosh IIcx, with a nice Trinitron tube. No burn-in, still kinda bright, holds up after all these years.

I'd even try using it on my PCs just for the heck of it, but even with the same pin adapter I use for the 6500, it's a fixed-sync monitor that runs on 67 Hz of all oddball refresh rates - not a clean 60 Hz or 70 Hz. I don't know what's up with that, but it sure doesn't match up with any standard VGA resolution.

aperture grille CRT's defiantly have their pros over a shadow mask monitor. one things is the lack of support wires that can show up in the display. But you don't want a shadow mask crt with out them

After whining yesterday in this very thread several posts up, I spotted a 14" or 15" TTX? CRT in my buddies junk pile at his office. It's buried far behind a bunch of crap, but he said he would dig it out for me as there was way to much stuff to move at that time. He said he might even have an old tower in there, and if it's period matching with the CRT, maybe it's a 486 or Pentium.

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