Re the Toshiba T1950CT: That's an 8.4" screen, limited to 640x480 256 colors, and the earliest price I can find for it is $2799-3299 in the March 1994 PC Magazine. It's $2199-2399 by the end of 1994 though. That was a $400-$500 premium over the CS version so you really had to want it.

https://books.google.com/books?id=L2RD68Gg2sM … t1950ct&f=false

https://books.google.com/books?id=JRmzq4L7Hio … t1950ct&f=false

It's hard to generalize across the whole 1990s because things changed FAST in that decade; at the beginning very few people had DOS computers at home and if they did it was an XT class, by the end many people had Pentium II desktops and laptops. But even here there's a bit of a bias, just because the hardware existed in the 1990s doesn't mean it was available or affordable to consumers at the time.
For instance, a lot of computer equipment purchased for businesses was sold off cheaply in the aftermath of the dot-com bust. My Libretto was originally used by an oil company executive.

Also the price of SDRAM dropped hugely and many people upgraded, so there's another blind spot in the retro community where people think 512mb of RAM is typical or even limiting for a Win98 build, when the absolute high end at the end of the 90s was 128mb, and 32mb was more typical.

Here's a history of LCD production from 1997, saying that 1996 was about the earliest that even a 12" TFT LCD was commercially mass produced and that's the smallest size which was generally packaged into a desktop monitor. https://www.rrojasdatabank.info/wp109.htm

Circa 2005 the tide is turning, but Dummies Guide calls out..
LCD still more expensive than CRT,
LCD supports less screen modes than CRT
LCD may not be as bright or viewable from as many angles.
LCD may have visual defects, bad pixels.
https://www.google.ca/books/edition/Buying_a_ … tsec=frontcover

2002 Maximum PC, still seen as a compromise...
https://books.google.ca/books?id=FQIAAAAAMBAJ … epage&q&f=false
LCD vs CRT page 18 read "The Upshot" at bottom of page 19

MattRocks wrote on 2026-01-30, 13:50:

st31276a wrote on 2026-01-30, 12:17:

theelf wrote on 2026-01-29, 23:05:

No one use TFTs in desktop computers back on time

This is a fact.

Memories that contradict records are not facts. Your memories reflect a point of view in a particular place and time. And, your memories do not reflect every point of view in every place at that point in time.

Replace "no one" with "practically no one" and it is factual.

TFTs on the desktop did exist , but they were initially few of them and they were either very expensive, small or sometimes both (not to mention other limitations), which meant they almost certainly had little market share. I say "almost certainly" because I have not bothered to check, but you certainly can and, IMHO, you should be the one doing that if you want to use widespread LCD use at the time as part of your argument. Showing that desktop LCD monitors existed in the mid-1990s does not mean they had a significant market penetration in general, let alone among the game playing target audience.

As it stands, the way I see it, you have presented a hypothesis, shared some facts, pointed out some correlations and are asserting that this constitutes what you feel is compelling evidence for there being a causality .

Others have disagreed and have shared other likely explanations and, for the most part, IMHO, have either been more convincing than you have been or have not managed to be less so.

That is not to say that you are completely wrong in your assessment, just that beyond some observable correlations, I don't feel you've shared anything that convincingly proves that you are indeed right.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2026-01-30, 15:09:

This thread is another example of world class trolling MattRocks. Impressive work. *golf clap* […]
Show full quote

MattRocks wrote on 2026-01-30, 13:50:

st31276a wrote on 2026-01-30, 12:17:

This is a fact.

Memories that contradict records are not facts. Your memories reflect a point of view in a particular place and time. And, your memories do not reflect every point of view in every place at that point in time.

This thread is another example of world class trolling MattRocks. Impressive work. *golf clap*

BitWrangler wrote on 2026-01-30, 15:00:

I feel obliged to point out for readers in the 2050s that although personal quadcopters were invented 5 years ago, neither me, any of my family, friends, or as far as I know anyone in my city is flying around in one. Cars, buses, bicycles, ebikes remain the most practical method of personal transport as of this date. This is just to clarify that just because they exist and everybody is "forgetting" to mention it, that they are impractical, hugely expensive, have major compromises, and do not fulfil everyday peoples everyday needs at present. So this is for that one guy that's gonna find the news article about them and say it must mean that we were all using them right now.

Hey, speak for yourself. My great great great grandbrother's best friend's pharmacist's uncle's brother-in-law worked on this in 1923...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Bothezat_helicopter
Why would he have bothered if there wasn't a market for it? And if there was a market for it, then people were buying them, right? And if people were buying them, they had to be not only available but be THE STANDARD method of transportation, right?

Therefor, everything else that everyone else understands to be true about this topic is false and the reality that you and everyone else on earth remember is, in fact, not real.

Reality is whatever pops into my head at 3AM, end of discussion.

Take that imaginary internet person.

The facts are:

• TFT screens shipped in some laptops from 1992.
• TFT screens are manufactured on a "mother glass" that contains dead pixels - 90s had low yields because makers would cut "good squares" between the dead pixels.
• Early top-end TFT were around double the price of a top-end CRT; but all the top-end was prohibitively expensive for most consumers.
• We see Hitachi selling high-end desktop TFTs in 1996. Eizo and others would be in this class of CAD and Print money-making deployments.
• We see IBM selling desktop TFTs in 1997. IBM's marketing has moved to "consultant's counter" and I imagine a doctor in New York or London.
• We see Apple selling TFT desktop monitors in 1998. Apple has a more prosumer market.
• Brands like Apple and IBM mean sales are rising, and more sales means more waste because the dead-pixel problem remained!
• And, no-name TFTs with dead pixels appeared: These were the waste that brands like IBM/Apple/Toshiba/Hitachi were creating and that nobody wanted to be associated with.
• And that is how I could have had a no-name TFT with three dead pixels around ~1999, and obviously only suitable for use with people/software that tolerate a few dead pixels.

What you call trolling is just a genuine person having the confidence to admit they actually bought a screen that nobody else dared to. It wasn't a loved brand. It was known to have flaws (dead pixels). Nobody knew how long it would last. Not many people dared to try, and even fewer wanted to admit.

That's not trolling. That's honesty.

darry wrote on 2026-01-30, 16:33:

Replace "no one" with "practically no one" and it is factual. […]
Show full quote

MattRocks wrote on 2026-01-30, 13:50:

st31276a wrote on 2026-01-30, 12:17:

This is a fact.

Memories that contradict records are not facts. Your memories reflect a point of view in a particular place and time. And, your memories do not reflect every point of view in every place at that point in time.

Replace "no one" with "practically no one" and it is factual.

TFTs on the desktop did exist , but they were initially few of them and they were either very expensive, small or sometimes both (not to mention other limitations), which meant they almost certainly had little market share. I say "almost certainly" because I have not bothered to check, but you certainly can and, IMHO, you should be the one doing that if you want to use widespread LCD use at the time as part of your argument. Showing that desktop LCD monitors existed in the mid-1990s does not mean they had a significant market penetration in general, let alone among the game playing target audience.

As it stands, the way I see it, you have presented a hypothesis, shared some facts, pointed out some correlations and are asserting that this constitutes what you feel is compelling evidence for there being a causality .

Others have disagreed and have shared other likely explanations and, for the most part, IMHO, have either been more convincing than you have been or have not managed to be less so.

That is not to say that you are completely wrong in your assessment, just that beyond some observable correlations, I don't feel you've shared anything that convincingly proves that you are indeed right.

Thank you for being straight. I agree absolutely on every level. There is nothing I can say that will prove I'm right, and nothing you can say that proves I'm wrong.

But what I am trying to tell you (all) is that your pushback in 2026 is exactly the same pushback I received ~1999. For me, this thread is the closest to reliving the 90s as I could possibly come, and the underlying reason is known:

It's the same as where people arguing that EVs will never work. In fact, my neighbour today continues with the belief that if everyone had an EV then the grid would fail so EVs cannot become mainstream! Well, I've lived here for ~5 years and I still can't prove him wrong. Instead, I can only accept his views are different to mine.

The big difference between this 2026 thread and the ~1999 response I received was, "bring your LCD to the next LAN party". So I did. And then people said, "It's alright. I'll stick to my iiyama Pro though." And they did.. until they didn't. And, what made their LCD adoption different to my LCD adoption is that they waited until premium brands became affordable. I don't care much about brands - most people do.

But this thread started from a different perspective. I started with the view that professional games studios had better tech than consumers had, including free tech samples. The professional game studios would have had those high-end Hitachi/Eizo/Apple/IBM TFT monitors, and they would have used them where they were strongest. For example, they would be using them in what is called soft press where print materials are previewed before being printed. And, that matters because they would have known (or at least strongly suspected) that the consumer TFT desktop screen would emerge during the lifespan of the game they were writing.

And, almost every PC owner tries a game at some point - including laptop owners. Game studios knew that too.

BitWrangler wrote on 2026-01-30, 15:49:

Circa 2005 the tide is turning, but Dummies Guide calls out.. LCD still more expensive than CRT, LCD supports less screen modes […]
Show full quote

Circa 2005 the tide is turning, but Dummies Guide calls out..
LCD still more expensive than CRT,
LCD supports less screen modes than CRT
LCD may not be as bright or viewable from as many angles.
LCD may have visual defects, bad pixels.
https://www.google.ca/books/edition/Buying_a_ … tsec=frontcover

2002 Maximum PC, still seen as a compromise...
https://books.google.ca/books?id=FQIAAAAAMBAJ … epage&q&f=false
LCD vs CRT page 18 read "The Upshot" at bottom of page 19

You're basically saying my experience was risky. And, I explained that my experienced was a risk forced by eyecare issues. If I didn't have eyecare problems resulting from too much CRT use, I'd probably be saying the exact same things as CRT advocates because I never would have been forced to try a high risk desktop LCD.

onethirdxcubed wrote on 2026-01-30, 15:46:

Re the Toshiba T1950CT: That's an 8.4" screen, limited to 640x480 256 colors, and the earliest price I can find for it is $2799- […]
Show full quote

Re the Toshiba T1950CT: That's an 8.4" screen, limited to 640x480 256 colors, and the earliest price I can find for it is $2799-3299 in the March 1994 PC Magazine. It's $2199-2399 by the end of 1994 though. That was a $400-$500 premium over the CS version so you really had to want it.

https://books.google.com/books?id=L2RD68Gg2sM … t1950ct&f=false

https://books.google.com/books?id=JRmzq4L7Hio … t1950ct&f=false

It's hard to generalize across the whole 1990s because things changed FAST in that decade; at the beginning very few people had DOS computers at home and if they did it was an XT class, by the end many people had Pentium II desktops and laptops. But even here there's a bit of a bias, just because the hardware existed in the 1990s doesn't mean it was available or affordable to consumers at the time.
For instance, a lot of computer equipment purchased for businesses was sold off cheaply in the aftermath of the dot-com bust. My Libretto was originally used by an oil company executive.

Also the price of SDRAM dropped hugely and many people upgraded, so there's another blind spot in the retro community where people think 512mb of RAM is typical or even limiting for a Win98 build, when the absolute high end at the end of the 90s was 128mb, and 32mb was more typical.

Here's a history of LCD production from 1997, saying that 1996 was about the earliest that even a 12" TFT LCD was commercially mass produced and that's the smallest size which was generally packaged into a desktop monitor. https://www.rrojasdatabank.info/wp109.htm

I agree, and I'm not saying TFTs were mainstream in the 90s. What I am saying is that it's also not immediately wrong.

Many retro builds include items that were not mainstream and not wrong.

Flatscreens didn't exceed CRT image quality (except in sharpness at native resolution) until relatively recently, but people bought them because 1) they were what was available and 2) they were more convenient.

A CRT is unfortunately still the best choice of display for a 90s computer, though, and that's not because of anything fundamentally wrong with LCD tech, it's because the display controllers in every flatscreen monitor even to this day treat low resolutions as something you "shouldn't" be doing and maliciously apply as much blurring as possible to the pixels. Plus modeswitching is slow because no one cares about it enough to make it fast.

MattRocks wrote on 2026-01-30, 16:38:

The facts are: […]
Show full quote

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2026-01-30, 15:09:

This thread is another example of world class trolling MattRocks. Impressive work. *golf clap* […]
Show full quote

MattRocks wrote on 2026-01-30, 13:50:

Memories that contradict records are not facts. Your memories reflect a point of view in a particular place and time. And, your memories do not reflect every point of view in every place at that point in time.

This thread is another example of world class trolling MattRocks. Impressive work. *golf clap*

BitWrangler wrote on 2026-01-30, 15:00:

I feel obliged to point out for readers in the 2050s that although personal quadcopters were invented 5 years ago, neither me, any of my family, friends, or as far as I know anyone in my city is flying around in one. Cars, buses, bicycles, ebikes remain the most practical method of personal transport as of this date. This is just to clarify that just because they exist and everybody is "forgetting" to mention it, that they are impractical, hugely expensive, have major compromises, and do not fulfil everyday peoples everyday needs at present. So this is for that one guy that's gonna find the news article about them and say it must mean that we were all using them right now.

Hey, speak for yourself. My great great great grandbrother's best friend's pharmacist's uncle's brother-in-law worked on this in 1923...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Bothezat_helicopter
Why would he have bothered if there wasn't a market for it? And if there was a market for it, then people were buying them, right? And if people were buying them, they had to be not only available but be THE STANDARD method of transportation, right?

Therefor, everything else that everyone else understands to be true about this topic is false and the reality that you and everyone else on earth remember is, in fact, not real.

Reality is whatever pops into my head at 3AM, end of discussion.

Take that imaginary internet person.

The facts are:

• TFT screens shipped in some laptops from 1992.
• TFT screens are manufactured on a "mother glass" that contains dead pixels - 90s had low yields because makers would cut "good squares" between the dead pixels.
• Early top-end TFT were around double the price of a top-end CRT; but all the top-end was prohibitively expensive for most consumers.
• We see Hitachi selling high-end desktop TFTs in 1996. Eizo and others would be in this class of CAD and Print money-making deployments.
• We see IBM selling desktop TFTs in 1997. IBM's marketing has moved to "consultant's counter" and I imagine a doctor in New York or London.
• We see Apple selling TFT desktop monitors in 1998. Apple has a more prosumer market.
• Brands like Apple and IBM mean sales are rising, and more sales means more waste because the dead-pixel problem remained!
• And, no-name TFTs with dead pixels appeared: These were the waste that brands like IBM/Apple/Toshiba/Hitachi were creating and that nobody wanted to be associated with.
• And that is how I could have had a no-name TFT with three dead pixels around ~1999, and obviously only suitable for use with people/software that tolerate a few dead pixels.

What you call trolling is just a genuine person having the confidence to admit they actually bought a screen that nobody else dared to. It wasn't a loved brand. It was known to have flaws (dead pixels). Nobody knew how long it would last. Not many people dared to try, and even fewer wanted to admit.

That's not trolling. That's honesty.

The words "games" or "gaming" do not appear in your list.

The entire premise of the thread was this (quoting you, in your original post):

"It seems to me that most 1990s PC games may have been designed around the most limiting displays that mattered - and those displays were not CRTs."

7 pages and dozens of posts later, you are now saying that the thread is about whether you had an LCD or whether they existed... or something. And rather than just accepting what others are saying, you're trying to make it sound like others genuinely are saying that LCDs did not exist in the 90s (which is absurd)... seemingly changing the argument to make sure it continues.

Reaching for ways to keep arguing about every reply that people make is, fundamentally, an awful lot like trolling, even if your posts represent your honest feelings.

keenmaster486 wrote on 2026-01-30, 17:09:

Flatscreens didn't exceed CRT image quality (except in sharpness at native resolution) until relatively recently, but people bought them because 1) they were what was available and 2) they were more convenient.

A CRT is unfortunately still the best choice of display for a 90s computer, though, and that's not because of anything fundamentally wrong with LCD tech, it's because the display controllers in every flatscreen monitor even to this day treat low resolutions as something you "shouldn't" be doing and maliciously apply as much blurring as possible to the pixels. Plus modeswitching is slow because no one cares about it enough to make it fast.

The 1993 laptop I recently acquired has a 640x480 TFT screen.

Later 90s TFT desktop screens would have been more optimised for VGA and SVGA inputs than 21st Century TFT screens because they were being sold into different ecosystems.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2026-01-30, 17:14:

The words "games" or "gaming" do not appear in your list. […]
Show full quote

MattRocks wrote on 2026-01-30, 16:38:

The facts are: […]
Show full quote

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2026-01-30, 15:09:

This thread is another example of world class trolling MattRocks. Impressive work. *golf clap* […]
Show full quote

This thread is another example of world class trolling MattRocks. Impressive work. *golf clap*

Hey, speak for yourself. My great great great grandbrother's best friend's pharmacist's uncle's brother-in-law worked on this in 1923...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Bothezat_helicopter
Why would he have bothered if there wasn't a market for it? And if there was a market for it, then people were buying them, right? And if people were buying them, they had to be not only available but be THE STANDARD method of transportation, right?

Therefor, everything else that everyone else understands to be true about this topic is false and the reality that you and everyone else on earth remember is, in fact, not real.

Reality is whatever pops into my head at 3AM, end of discussion.

Take that imaginary internet person.

The facts are:

• TFT screens shipped in some laptops from 1992.
• TFT screens are manufactured on a "mother glass" that contains dead pixels - 90s had low yields because makers would cut "good squares" between the dead pixels.
• Early top-end TFT were around double the price of a top-end CRT; but all the top-end was prohibitively expensive for most consumers.
• We see Hitachi selling high-end desktop TFTs in 1996. Eizo and others would be in this class of CAD and Print money-making deployments.
• We see IBM selling desktop TFTs in 1997. IBM's marketing has moved to "consultant's counter" and I imagine a doctor in New York or London.
• We see Apple selling TFT desktop monitors in 1998. Apple has a more prosumer market.
• Brands like Apple and IBM mean sales are rising, and more sales means more waste because the dead-pixel problem remained!
• And, no-name TFTs with dead pixels appeared: These were the waste that brands like IBM/Apple/Toshiba/Hitachi were creating and that nobody wanted to be associated with.
• And that is how I could have had a no-name TFT with three dead pixels around ~1999, and obviously only suitable for use with people/software that tolerate a few dead pixels.

What you call trolling is just a genuine person having the confidence to admit they actually bought a screen that nobody else dared to. It wasn't a loved brand. It was known to have flaws (dead pixels). Nobody knew how long it would last. Not many people dared to try, and even fewer wanted to admit.

That's not trolling. That's honesty.

The words "games" or "gaming" do not appear in your list.

The entire premise of the thread was this (quoting you, in your original post):

"It seems to me that most 1990s PC games may have been designed around the most limiting displays that mattered - and those displays were not CRTs."

7 pages and dozens of posts later, you are now saying that the thread is about whether you had an LCD or whether they existed... or something. And rather than just accepting what others are saying, you're trying to make it sound like others genuinely are saying that LCDs did not exist in the 90s (which is absurd)... seemingly changing the argument to make sure it continues.

Reaching for ways to keep arguing about every reply that people make is, fundamentally, an awful lot like trolling, even if your posts represent your honest feelings.

That's because games are not where the technology was defined in the first place. Games/Gaming is a cheaper market and no company targets the cheaper market first - they always start where the money is most plentiful.

Top end 3D graphics cards didn't target Games/Gaming either. WildCat etc were sold into systems that had to be certified to deliver accurate rendering in medicine or other critical industry - those systems were unaffordable to gamers. 3Dfx entered gaming as cheap compared to 3DLabs. The markets later converged, but importantly, those markers actually converged before it was accept that they had converged:

That is a repeating trend in technology adoption - and my core argument is that LCDs are not an exception!

Your real debate problem is that you are on the side of the fence that requires LCDs to be the exception to the rule.

Trying to gas light me isn't going to help anyone, so let's not go there. I am not changing goalposts - I am arguing that technology propagates over time.

MattRocks wrote on 2026-01-30, 17:23:

Games/Gaming is a cheaper market and no company targets the cheaper market first - they always start where the money is most ple […]
Show full quote

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2026-01-30, 17:14:

The words "games" or "gaming" do not appear in your list. […]
Show full quote

MattRocks wrote on 2026-01-30, 16:38:

The facts are: […]
Show full quote

The facts are:

• TFT screens shipped in some laptops from 1992.
• TFT screens are manufactured on a "mother glass" that contains dead pixels - 90s had low yields because makers would cut "good squares" between the dead pixels.
• Early top-end TFT were around double the price of a top-end CRT; but all the top-end was prohibitively expensive for most consumers.
• We see Hitachi selling high-end desktop TFTs in 1996. Eizo and others would be in this class of CAD and Print money-making deployments.
• We see IBM selling desktop TFTs in 1997. IBM's marketing has moved to "consultant's counter" and I imagine a doctor in New York or London.
• We see Apple selling TFT desktop monitors in 1998. Apple has a more prosumer market.
• Brands like Apple and IBM mean sales are rising, and more sales means more waste because the dead-pixel problem remained!
• And, no-name TFTs with dead pixels appeared: These were the waste that brands like IBM/Apple/Toshiba/Hitachi were creating and that nobody wanted to be associated with.
• And that is how I could have had a no-name TFT with three dead pixels around ~1999, and obviously only suitable for use with people/software that tolerate a few dead pixels.

What you call trolling is just a genuine person having the confidence to admit they actually bought a screen that nobody else dared to. It wasn't a loved brand. It was known to have flaws (dead pixels). Nobody knew how long it would last. Not many people dared to try, and even fewer wanted to admit.

That's not trolling. That's honesty.

The words "games" or "gaming" do not appear in your list.

The entire premise of the thread was this (quoting you, in your original post):

"It seems to me that most 1990s PC games may have been designed around the most limiting displays that mattered - and those displays were not CRTs."

7 pages and dozens of posts later, you are now saying that the thread is about whether you had an LCD or whether they existed... or something. And rather than just accepting what others are saying, you're trying to make it sound like others genuinely are saying that LCDs did not exist in the 90s (which is absurd)... seemingly changing the argument to make sure it continues.

Reaching for ways to keep arguing about every reply that people make is, fundamentally, an awful lot like trolling, even if your posts represent your honest feelings.

Games/Gaming is a cheaper market and no company targets the cheaper market first - they always start where the money is most plentiful.

Top end 3D graphics cards didn't target Games/Gaming either. WildCat etc were sold into systems that had to be certified to deliver accurate rendering in medicine or other critical industry - those systems were unaffordable to gamers. 3Dfx entered gaming as cheap compared to 3DLabs. The markets later converged, but importantly, those markers actually converged before it was accept that they had converged:

That is a repeating trend in technology adoption - and my core argument is that LCDs are not an exception!

This is exactly what I was talking about. This is just so scattered and going in so many different directions, and the point seems to change with every post so that the argument never ends. It's like the RV100 discussion all over again.

Can you post in one sentence what the point of this thread was\is?

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2026-01-30, 17:29:

Can you post in one sentence what the point of this thread was\is?

The point of this thread is that display technology (including LCDs) propagates from high-margin professional markets into consumer uses over time, and game developers inherit those constraints later rather than defining them first.

MattRocks wrote on 2026-01-30, 17:17:

The 1993 laptop I recently acquired has a 640x480 TFT screen.

Later 90s TFT desktop screens would have been more optimised for VGA and SVGA inputs than 21st Century TFT screens because they were being sold into different ecosystems.

There is probably no one on this website more intimately familiar with the drawbacks of 1990s laptop screens than I am, and I say that very wearily, looking across my office at the several boxes of old laptops I am trying to sort through right now, every single one of them with a TFT screen. I don't buy anything else.

I can tell you unequivocally that until the very late 90s, they were extremely geared towards business and productivity, and work well for that purpose, but a 640x480 or 800x600 laptop screen simply was never made to work well enough for DOS games as a CRT, for the very simple reason that the resolution is too low for scaling algorithms to produce a good looking image. And even if you could, no one figured it out in the 90s before the resolution of these screens increased to 1024x768 and manufacturers started adding simple (naive!) scaling algorithms that produced a slightly better, but blurry, image for 320x200 or 640x480 games.

It's unfortunate, but true that 90s laptop screens, even if they are TFT, are suboptimal for games compared to a CRT. Again, it doesn't have to be this way, but manufacturers simply didn't figure out how to present lower-than-native resolutions to laptop LCD screens in a way that doesn't look really crappy until after it ceased to be relevant.

90s desktop LCDs may be a different animal, and I am not familiar with them. But the 2000s LCD screens that I have used extensively perform the same as those later 1024x768 laptop screens that have the blurry scaling algorithm.

It works, but still not as nice as a CRT.

But again I don't think that was really a concern people had much back then. I think they thought "ooh this LCD is much more convenient, look how flat and light it is" and that was a perfectly valid reason to prefer them.

keenmaster486 wrote on 2026-01-30, 19:15:

There is probably no one on this website more intimately familiar with the drawbacks of 1990s laptop screens than I am, and I sa […]
Show full quote

MattRocks wrote on 2026-01-30, 17:17:

The 1993 laptop I recently acquired has a 640x480 TFT screen.

Later 90s TFT desktop screens would have been more optimised for VGA and SVGA inputs than 21st Century TFT screens because they were being sold into different ecosystems.

There is probably no one on this website more intimately familiar with the drawbacks of 1990s laptop screens than I am, and I say that very wearily, looking across my office at the several boxes of old laptops I am trying to sort through right now, every single one of them with a TFT screen. I don't buy anything else.

I can tell you unequivocally that until the very late 90s, they were extremely geared towards business and productivity, and work well for that purpose, but a 640x480 or 800x600 laptop screen simply was never made to work well enough for DOS games as a CRT, for the very simple reason that the resolution is too low for scaling algorithms to produce a good looking image. And even if you could, no one figured it out in the 90s before the resolution of these screens increased to 1024x768 and manufacturers started adding simple (naive!) scaling algorithms that produced a slightly better, but blurry, image for 320x200 or 640x480 games.

It's unfortunate, but true that 90s laptop screens, even if they are TFT, are suboptimal for games compared to a CRT. Again, it doesn't have to be this way, but manufacturers simply didn't figure out how to present lower-than-native resolutions to laptop LCD screens in a way that doesn't look really crappy until after it ceased to be relevant.

90s desktop LCDs may be a different animal, and I am not familiar with them. But the 2000s LCD screens that I have used extensively perform the same as those later 1024x768 laptop screens that have the blurry scaling algorithm.

It works, but still not as nice as a CRT.

But again I don't think that was really a concern people had much back then. I think they thought "ooh this LCD is much more convenient, look how flat and light it is" and that was a perfectly valid reason to prefer them.

In summary, you are saying 90s TFT laptop screens are suboptimal for games compared to 90s CRT desktop screens.

I agree, and I'd like to highlight that an IBM PC1 is suboptimal for games compared to a Commodore 16.

And, a CRT monochrome monitor is suboptimal for games compared to a CRT television.

So 286/386 PC and monitor was never sold as being games-first, but they played games.

The pattern I am trying to surface is that PCs were never introduced for games, and the games adapted to whatever PCs existed.

The 286 was bad for games, and 286 games like Alley Cat compare badly with Zelda. But Alley Cat matters.

Zelda is a game that plays on a games console, which triggers a "so what?" Alley cat is a game that plays on an office PC, which triggers a "interesting!"

If the pattern holds then the TFT office monitor must exist before games are adapted to it. And, it doesn't need to be the most optimal to be relevant.

Tying back to my opening post: PC games historically adapt to whatever hardware exists in offices, not to what is optimal for games.

I think by the time LCDs became commonplace in offices, the modern paradigm of game programmers targeting actual 3D video cards rather than the cheap-o cards in office computers had already set in.

A 286 was and is a amazing PC for games... wtf

theelf wrote on 2026-01-30, 21:01:

A 286 was and is a amazing PC for games... wtf

My friends with IBMs would come over to my Commodore to play games, until they had a NES and then we went over to theirs.

IBMs were for work, and they were expensive.

MattRocks wrote on 2026-01-30, 21:10:

theelf wrote on 2026-01-30, 21:01:

A 286 was and is a amazing PC for games... wtf

My friends with IBMs would come over to my Commodore to play games, until they had a NES and then we went over to theirs.

IBMs were for work.

I guess that largely depends on the games one preferred.

Many of the games I enjoyed in my younger years (early 90s) , on a 386, were Sierra and LucaArts adventures, Gateway (Legend Entertainment), Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (Mindscape), Silpheed, etc could be run on a 286 as well. I did not have an NES and I can't say I missed having one.

darry wrote on 2026-01-30, 21:19:

MattRocks wrote on 2026-01-30, 21:10:

theelf wrote on 2026-01-30, 21:01:

A 286 was and is a amazing PC for games... wtf

My friends with IBMs would come over to my Commodore to play games, until they had a NES and then we went over to theirs.

IBMs were for work.

I guess that largely depends on the games one preferred.

Many of the games I enjoyed in my younger years (early 90s) , on a 386, were Sierra and LucaArts adventures, Gateway (Legend Entertainment), Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (Mindscape), Silpheed, etc could be run on a 286 as well. I did not have an NES and I can't say I missed having one.

Those are turn-based sims? Would you say PC gaming has always been shaped by what PCs were already good at, not by chasing the optimal gaming experiences seen elsewhere?