Shponglefan wrote on 2023-08-02, 17:24:

Ensign Nemo wrote on 2023-08-02, 17:19:

Some modern(ish) LCDs have a 4:3 mode. Asus seems to have offered that on a lot of their monitors (e.g., https://www.asus.com/ca-en/commercial-monitors/vs229hp). Have you ever tried one out yourself for a more modern option without extra adapters?

The challenge is that certain modes (e.g. 320x200) won't necessary display in 4:3 on an LCD monitor.

I have an Asus ProArt display and it won't recognize these modes as 4:3. Which unfortunately makes it not useful for DOS.

I didn't know that. That's good to know.

Ensign Nemo wrote on 2023-08-02, 17:28:

IMO, having a CRT is the one thing that you can't fake on modern hardware. You can emulate a wide range of vintage computers and consoles, but you can't simulate the original monitors very well on an LCD, even with CRT shaders.

IDK some recent attempts are starting to look pretty bad. ... That joke because of course accentuating the flaws of the tech is what is done to make it more "real"

I do appreciate the "costless filter" on CRT though. Get some stuff that looks like shot to film, high budget, stop motion animation on CRT then put it on LCD and it's very not.

Ensign Nemo wrote on 2023-08-02, 17:30:

Shponglefan wrote on 2023-08-02, 17:24:

I have an Asus ProArt display and it won't recognize these modes as 4:3. Which unfortunately makes it not useful for DOS.

I didn't know that. That's good to know.

I also have the Asus ProArt display (PA248QV), and have researched their 4:3 mode, and resolution and aspect ratio handling in more detail.

The way that Asus ProArt goes about HDMI input is:
- if HDMI width <= height in pixels, then Asus ProArt will not sync to the image at all, but will show a black screen. I.e. the display requires that width > height.
- iirc Asus ProArt will not sync to a 320x200 HDMI resolution at all. (it certainly does not sync to 320x400)
- Otherwise it does nicely sync to any arbitrary pixel size resolution, e.g. a random 643x324 pixels from a HDMI signal generator.
- if refresh rate < 50 hz or > 75 hz, it does not sync.
- the 4:3 aspect ratio mode is actually what could be called a "smart 4:3 aspect ratio" mode. If input resolution has aspect ratio < 16:10, then it is shown in 4:3 mode. However, if the input aspect ratio is >= 16:10, then it is hardcoded to show in 16:10 mode.

So for example DOS 320x200, 640x400 and 720x400 modes will all show as 16:10 even when the display is set to 4:3 mode.

I am not 100% sure how much of the above info translates to the VGA input side. I suppose it will genlock to figure out a horizontal pixel resolution from the VGA signal, and then behave the same way as the HDMI side would. Hence DOS 720x400 text mode will show up as 16:10 aspect ratio even when in 4:3 mode.

This "smart 4:3 aspect ratio" mode is actually not totally bad, it can be utilized to some benefit. Though I do wish that Asus would add other aspect ratio modes, like a forced 4:3 mode, as well as a 1:1 mode, a 16:9 mode, and also would sync to pixel resolutions where input width <= height.

Interesting. I was thinking about a monitor with 4::3 mode that has a VGA port. I have one, but never tried it because I have a couple of 4:3 monitors. I'll have to test it sometime to see if it handles it differently than HDMI.

CRTs are quintessential for a retro build IMHO, not as in "CRT or bust", but rather on a "I'd rather use a CRT if I can".

CRTs were superior to all but the latest best in market LCDs.
Try it with an orange windows desktop wallpaper background without any image displayed. It should be a constant colour top to bottom. Not many can manage it though!

All my retro machines have CRTs. The only place I don't have one is the test bench

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2023-08-03, 01:21:

CRTs were superior to all but the latest best in market LCDs.
Try it with an orange windows desktop wallpaper background without any image displayed. It should be a constant colour top to bottom. Not many can manage it though!

Any IPS panel worth its salt should be able to pull this off, no? I'm looking at this on a 2018 Surface Pro, and it's absolutely fine. Sadly, my less-than-a-year-old Samsung Odyssey Neo G7 and its VA panel doesn't pass this test.

I also just noticed that the Odyssey can't display Vogons in its purply-blue glory consistently from top to bottom. The little IPS panel in the Surface again passes with flying, uh, colour. 😜

Yeah an IPS will be able to do that. But it doesn't have the black levels of a CRT.

The only flat panel technology that matches the black level of a CRT is OLED.

I used a Sony Trinitron 21“ for a while but it just was too bulky, colors faded and pretty dim.
Now have a Panasonic PanaSync Pro PL70i (anyone familiar with it?) that‘s not so bulky a looks way better! 17“ is perfect I‘d say and the colors are just great.
My TFT screens from ViewSonic, HP and Eizo all show weird moving lines when connected to a Voodoo 1 - only the Eizo not so much but still annoying because they were there even on a DOS screen.
Those are all gone with a CRT.

Kouwes wrote on 2023-08-03, 05:41:

I used a Sony Trinitron 21“ for a while but it just was too bulky, colors faded and pretty dim. Now have a Panasonic (anyone f […]
Show full quote

I used a Sony Trinitron 21“ for a while but it just was too bulky, colors faded and pretty dim.
Now have a Panasonic (anyone familiar with it?) that‘s not so bulky a looks way better! 17“ is perfect I‘d say and the colors are just great.
My TFT screens from ViewSonic, HP and Eizo all show weird moving lines when connected to a Voodoo 1 - only the Eizo not so much but still annoying because they were there even on a DOS screen.
Those are all gone with a CRT.

I have a 13 inch and a 20 inch CRT tv for gaming. I actually use the 13 inch more than the bigger one. It's way more convenient for me and fits on my desk. It's also worth keeping in mind that most DOS era games were designed with smaller screens in mind. I remember seeing ads for 17 inch monitors as a kid and thinking those were huge. Maybe I needed more rich friends as a kid, but 15 inches seemed typical in the 90s.

Standard Def Steve wrote on 2023-08-03, 02:28:

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2023-08-03, 01:21:

CRTs were superior to all but the latest best in market LCDs.
Try it with an orange windows desktop wallpaper background without any image displayed. It should be a constant colour top to bottom. Not many can manage it though!

Any IPS panel worth its salt should be able to pull this off, no? I'm looking at this on a 2018 Surface Pro, and it's absolutely fine. Sadly, my less-than-a-year-old Samsung Odyssey Neo G7 and its VA panel doesn't pass this test.

I also just noticed that the Odyssey can't display Vogons in its purply-blue glory consistently from top to bottom. The little IPS panel in the Surface again passes with flying, uh, colour. 😜

You would be surprised how many fail.
Certainly in the early days of LCD TFTs. Now not so much of course, but then the LCD has come of age now and I would expect an LCD of that class to pass the test.
Its always a good test in any PC retail store 😉 heheh

Another good trick is an LCD that can rotate to portrait with the orange test.

keenmaster486 wrote on 2023-08-03, 02:44:

Yeah an IPS will be able to do that. But it doesn't have the black levels of a CRT.

The only flat panel technology that matches the black level of a CRT is OLED.

No, not all of them can.
You give it a try.

Blacks is another matter.

Ensign Nemo wrote on 2023-08-03, 06:14:

Kouwes wrote on 2023-08-03, 05:41:

I used a Sony Trinitron 21“ for a while but it just was too bulky, colors faded and pretty dim. Now have a Panasonic (anyone f […]
Show full quote

I used a Sony Trinitron 21“ for a while but it just was too bulky, colors faded and pretty dim.
Now have a Panasonic (anyone familiar with it?) that‘s not so bulky a looks way better! 17“ is perfect I‘d say and the colors are just great.
My TFT screens from ViewSonic, HP and Eizo all show weird moving lines when connected to a Voodoo 1 - only the Eizo not so much but still annoying because they were there even on a DOS screen.
Those are all gone with a CRT.

I have a 13 inch and a 20 inch CRT tv for gaming. I actually use the 13 inch more than the bigger one. It's way more convenient for me and fits on my desk. It's also worth keeping in mind that most DOS era games were designed with smaller screens in mind. I remember seeing ads for 17 inch monitors as a kid and thinking those were huge. Maybe I needed more rich friends as a kid, but 15 inches seemed typical in the 90s.

Im tending towards the smaller monitors too these days. my desk and bench have 15" on them for retro and tinkering with systems and rigs

I love using a CRT. I got this 21 incher a few years ago from an older gentleman who was giving it away. I was lucky to be the first to respond and then drive over and grab it.

Not having used one in 20+ years, I recently found a CRT TV on the street and picked it up to see if it would work. The experience of turning it on was something amazing. I didn't remember that CRTs have that kind of glow and "magnetism". They feel more "human" than LCDs.

Remember that feeling of being in a dark room with a CRT? The 60hz refresh rate, the 20.000 volts... something makes that kind of technology interface with men at a biological level.

If space wasn't a constraint I'd definitely get one.

It's like you are perceptually aware of the depth of a CRT, you are looking at the projections of magic from deep within. Something mystical behind the surface of the screen. LCD, nothing there, hand behind it, very flat, like a print or physical photo. It's not all about physical depth either, somehow a mirror gives you a feeling of depth too, where mirror mode on your smartphone doesn't.

Somehow the CRT feels more like a pipe to the soul of the machine, like how a horn on a wind up gramophone connects you directly to the vibrations on the needle, versus playing a CD where it feels more synthesized and artificial.

To my eyes the response curves of most CRTs are different than modern displays that are all tuned to give benchmark perfect results. Also the primary colors on CRTs look different then modern calibrated displays. Not always for the better, but a good CRT with (still) good phosphors has a particular, different look then most TFT screens have. And then finally a CRT of period correct size (for consumers anyway) gives just the right smoothing and blending of pixels to provide the right experience that the pixel artists probably were after. They were certainly not after some kind of mosaic, diamond painting abstract kind of art, the pixels were a necessary evil and they did their best to create the illusion of what was in their head and that works best when viewed from a distance or with the slight blur of contemporary 14” and 15” displays (or even smaller when you go further in the past).

A good CRT looks really nice with old stuff (like what this forum is concerned with). I really like them. Unfortunately, my experience was that most CRT monitors around in the late 1990s and early 2000s were total crap. At best, they looked like the focus control on the flyback was off, but I never tried to adjust one. At worst, there was the Compaq V55 (probably the most common model of monitor in businesses and schools in the late 1990s), where the model of graphics card determined whether the picture was unusable or just poor. ATI Rage cards were the only ones I remember that didn't produce a picture that was so blurry that it was unusable (Matrox cards did, along with Intel 810 integrated graphics in the Deskpro ENs). They had severe ghosting instead with the ATI cards, but you could at least see what you were doing. Interestingly, I've seen a few pictures and videos of those monitors today, and they don't look as bad as I remember.

I only have one little 15" Trinitron, and it's getting really dim. Even when it was bright, the gamma curve was so far off that the brightness had to be cranked up until black turned into gray before you could see dark colors. At least it's staying sharp. Maybe "60W replacement" LEDs are getting brighter instead of the monitor getting dimmer, or there's some fault limiting the maximum brightness somehow. I haven't found a complete service manual online, so I don't know what exact circuit it's using.

I checked my local buy and sell for CRTs after reading this thread. There's a guy trying to sell a CRT for $5500! It is described as a Sony FW900, which was a premium model, but that better be the best monitor money can buy for that price. Lol.

lti wrote on 2023-08-05, 22:52:

I only have one little 15" Trinitron, and it's getting really dim. Even when it was bright, the gamma curve was so far off that the brightness had to be cranked up until black turned into gray before you could see dark colors.

Maybe that can be fixed with WinDAS?

keenmaster486 wrote on 2023-08-02, 16:44:

There is not yet a truly *good* solution for connecting VGA to a modern LCD. You will always end up with a picture that is bad i […]
Show full quote

There is not yet a truly *good* solution for connecting VGA to a modern LCD. You will always end up with a picture that is bad in some way, fails to switch resolutions without a 5 second wait, jitters, etc.

VGA was designed to be connected to a CRT, and a good, well designed CRT will always look very good with it.

The problem is that a CRT is an analog device, and VGA is designed around the analog nature of the CRT. The signals reflect the pattern that the electron beam traces on the screen. That signal was created by a DAC on the VGA card, so when you connect an LCD you have to convert that signal *back* to digital despite it having been digital in the first place. The results with any of the currently existing VGA->HDMI/DVI converters are tepid at best. The built-in VGA to digital converters in some monitors are okay in terms of stability, but still suffer from atrociously bad scaling (fuzzy pixels for no reason despite screen having plenty of resolution for example). A good CRT will get you nice sharp pixels in 320x200 that put an LCD to shame.

There are some projects that can get you fair results. OSSC for example. But it requires a lot of fiddling and doesn't work well with resolutions higher than 320x200. I use it for capture, but really want something better.

I expect a truly good VGA->HDMI converter will eventually be designed and released by somebody. The RGBtoHDMI gets admirably close to ideal for MDA/CGA/EGA signals, but still has some rough edges. We need that for VGA. Until then, CRTs are going to be the way to go if you want the best image.

This sums it up for me. Until the VGA era is covered by a good scaler, I'd rather be using a bad CRT than even the best flat panel.

The CRT Terminator looks very promising, but realistically it will still only cover the early VGA era.