You asked 2 conflicting questions there. I use retro hardware because it's fun, it's nostalgic, and it's a challenge. I use a modern display because it's convenient and doesn't take up space. I have a decent Sceptre LED that I use the VGA port for all my inputs, retro or otherwise. I don't like the way the displays switch resolutions between DOS/Windows 3.11 so I've been testing out an Extron DSC301-HD, but it doesn't fix the resolution issues.

I use 16:10 Dell LCDs with my old systems, they look good enough to me and have VGA/DVI inputs + will do 75hz at lower resolutions so look decently smooth. Personally I've never understood the attachment people have towards CRTs, I was glad to be rid of them.

Regarding 'what's the point', the point is to do stuff with old computers, the display it's outputting to is not an interesting part of that for me.

While I can’t imagine myself using LCD displays with my vintage boxes other than temporarily in my workshop or during installation process, I find your thought process odd.

First, there are tons of fun to be had by finding information, sourcing, repairing and building these systems. You also get to use vintage OSs as is on a real hardware, not through some emulation layer. What kind of monitor you have is just part of the experience, how important that is is probably a very personal thing.

Second, to me it is actually often more straightforward to build the vintage system than trying to make everything work with emulation. If you have good known vintage hardware, you can pretty much bet that games and software from the era will run flawlessly. With emulation you always add a layer of approximation somewhere and as a consequence you might end up with problems that are difficult to troubleshoot. And good luck going faster than 200-300MHz P2/3 on PCEM or 86box equivalent, which limits the win98 box experience a lot. And using win98 on dosbox is far from perfect solution as hardware is so abstracted and you introduce compatibility issues with less than perfect hardware emulation.

It was never about the CRT per se. The display problem is going to get worse until it gets better, because it hasn't actually been solved yet. No one has come up with an LCD solution that is as straightforward and works as well as a CRT.

All LCD solutions that "look good" involve feeding a VGA or TTL signal through another computer 100x more powerful than the machine the signal originated from, just to brute force sample the pixels and map them onto the LCD. That is not in the spirit of vintage computing.

At some point hopefully someone will come up with a CRT-like display technology that is easier to manufacture than an actual scanning electron gun in a vacuum tube.

Fish3r wrote on 2026-08-31, 15:22:

I use 16:10 Dell LCDs with my old systems, they look good enough to me and have VGA/DVI inputs + will do 75hz at lower resolutions so look decently smooth. Personally I've never understood the attachment people have towards CRTs, I was glad to be rid of them.

Regarding 'what's the point', the point is to do stuff with old computers, the display it's outputting to is not an interesting part of that for me.

This is my frustration, I would like to have a single set of screens per location shared to whatever pc I want to use
it costs pennies to include a vga port on a modern LCD but most of the new design lcd monitors are dropping “connectivity “

I have one screen with a single hdmi port. (For example)

I am looking at getting a low end 21:9 screen now that “teams” has broken functionality spreading an image so it’s going across multiple screens and no true full screen making text unreadable.
(What’s dumb is if it supported a true full screen and would stretch/distort the strange aspect ratios other folks have to fill it wouldn’t be an issue, nothing like someone sharing a 1:1 aspect 3k monitor )

Anyone know of any ultra wide screens that actually have vga? (Sad part is I could care less about DisplayPort vrs HDMI, plenty of lossless options from to)

My screens now are 2xdvi + vga, hdmi only, vga/composite/hdmi

Would like one that does it all without converting vga to hdmi (I have enough junk)

I found a used rather old 1080 21:9 ultrawide but it lacked hdmi and VGA, a newer 1440 21:9 had dvi+hdmi with audio amd free sync 144hz, seems that’s as good as it gets, would think some business customers would force them to throw in a vga.

Seems the only vga ultrawide is the Dell u2913wmt , you would think more than a single rare model would support various inputs

keenmaster486 wrote on 2026-08-31, 16:55:

It was never about the CRT per se. The display problem is going to get worse until it gets better, because it hasn't actually been solved yet. No one has come up with an LCD solution that is as straightforward and works as well as a CRT.

All LCD solutions that "look good" involve feeding a VGA or TTL signal through another computer 100x more powerful than the machine the signal originated from, just to brute force sample the pixels and map them onto the LCD. That is not in the spirit of vintage computing.

At some point hopefully someone will come up with a CRT-like display technology that is easier to manufacture than an actual scanning electron gun in a vacuum tube.

I think with something like 8k oled panels we should have enough resolution so shadow mask overlays will provide near perfect CRT emulation as far as IQ is concerned. You still need some extra device, like a a line multiplier/scaler which can add that overlay. Scaling imperfections should also become less of an issue with very high resolution panels and if you still have competent scaler/multiplier with all the required analogue inputs, you don’t need to count on that display’s built-in scalers handle everything perfectly.

Modern scalers or multipliers like Retrotink 5X Pro/4K or OSSC Pro are freakishly good. I have 5X Pro, but OSSC Pro should be even better with PC resolutions. It also handles black frame insertion as well as HDR injection (5X Pro got HDR with firmware update, but no BFI), so the CRT emulation should be pretty damn good already with correct type of display. None of these scalers can do 8k+, but I have no doubt in my mind that when the 8k+ displays are widely available, we will get scalers/multipliers for them. Like we did with 4K. Otherwise panel technology is pretty much there already as far as the refresh rates and response times are concerned and input lag isn’t an issue anymore if you choose your display correctly.