I've always found my VP730 to be good at unusual refresh rates and resolutions, but I doubt many TFTs would like scanline hackery.. That's just a TFT, not a TV, though.

I'll give it a go with Luminati and Copper later, although, wasn't Copper the demo that only worked completely with an ET4000 AX? I've got an S3 Savage 4 in my main pentium ii retro box, and a Cirrus Logic 5426 VLB in the other one, neither of which are likely to be 100%.

Iiyama prolite plb1906s - 19" 5:4 1280x1024 @ 75hz. It will do most oddball refresh rates, as long as they don't exceed 75hz at 1280 or 85hz at 640. Don't know about mode Q or mode X, but it does work with all interlaced resolutions I tried on it, and weird resolutions like 640x200 work as well. The auto adjust function on it is also brilliant, and it's LED backlit so blacks are great.

ynari wrote:

I've always found my VP730 to be good at unusual refresh rates and resolutions, but I doubt many TFTs would like scanline hackery.. That's just a TFT, not a TV, though.

I'll give it a go with Luminati and Copper later, although, wasn't Copper the demo that only worked completely with an ET4000 AX? I've got an S3 Savage 4 in my main pentium ii retro box, and a Cirrus Logic 5426 VLB in the other one, neither of which are likely to be 100%.

Cool, thanks for that! Let me know how well they do. Copper works 'well enough' on my S3 Virge and probably other S3 cards as well; it's an interesting test. Its 'wobble' effects are done by changing the start position of each scanline - some LCDs ignore this and you just don't see any wobble, but the picture stays put. Bad LCDs like my old Compaq 1720, will throw a fit and shut off the display, or dump it to the next available input and force you to do a bunch of menu diving to get back to VGA. That's what I'm trying to avoid. 😀

I can't say that I've tried all those things. But I have a Dell 2007FP that has handled pretty much everything I've thrown at it. C64 connected by S-Video. Amiga 1200 and 500 connected directly to VGA, no flicker fixer or scan rate converter, in multiple modes. DOS boxes running many games. Mac and Windows desktops on DVI or VGA up to the native 1600x1200. Might be worth looking into.

ab0tj wrote:

I can't say that I've tried all those things. But I have a Dell 2007FP that has handled pretty much everything I've thrown at it. C64 connected by S-Video. Amiga 1200 and 500 connected directly to VGA, no flicker fixer or scan rate converter, in multiple modes. DOS boxes running many games. Mac and Windows desktops on DVI or VGA up to the native 1600x1200. Might be worth looking into.

Wait, does this mean it supports 15 kHz hsync over VGA? That would be amazing!
I've had a couple of modern Dell displays on work machines & been really happy with them. Great blacks & vibrant colour reproduction. I didn't know they made any with composite+s-video though, gonna have to keep my eyes open.

I tried luminati and copper on my CRT and TFT; the results weren't exactly what I'd expected.

Luminati - it's very pretty, isn't it? Perfect on the CRT, absolute no go on TFT - instant out of range.

Copper - actually slightly better on the TFT! Neither work with the wobble effects, although the TFT very briefly shows the helicopter at the start. The zoom effect is buggy on all my hardware, and zoom and wave doesn't work at all. The image of a skull on a pole that bounces down is corrupt on my S3 Vision 968 and the Virge GX, but works fine on the S3 Savage 4.

I suspect my hardware or CRT is too modern to handle everything, will have to try on the 486.

Copper captured from a Belinea 101735 TFT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KeMtiYi808

KJason wrote:

Wait, does this mean it supports 15 kHz hsync over VGA? That would be amazing!
I've had a couple of modern Dell displays on work machines & been really happy with them. Great blacks & vibrant colour reproduction. I didn't know they made any with composite+s-video though, gonna have to keep my eyes open.

Yep. My only complaint is that it doesn't remember the screen position settings for those modes. So I have to adjust it every time I run a game or something.

EDIT: I think the reason it has 15kHz support is to handle the composite and S-video inputs, and it just happens to work through VGA as well. I didn't have much luck with a similar Dell flat panel that only had VGA and DVI.

The Dell supporting 15.75khz on the VGA port is uncommon, not all monitors with composite/S-Video support it on the VGA port. The Samsumg Syncmaster MP and MW series of TV/monitor combos likely support what you are looking for. They were available in both 16:10 and 4:3/5:4 varieties and included composite, S-video, component, DVI-D (with HDCP), VGA, and SCART 15.75khz RGB.

Check this out, I "stress tested" my Viewsonic VG150. This is a 15" 1024x768 TFT from ~2001 that I had lying around. As expected, it's not perfect, but it did pretty well. Unfortunately it's VGA only, no s-video/composite/15kHz/DVI support so absolutely no advantage over my CRT. But I thought this info might be useful for others.

"Copper" was the only outright failure (as expected) - it lost sync during the wobble parts and then 'reset' to a glitched mode that carried on until I changed it back manually (photos of this are on my other camera which I left at my office unfortunately.) PAL/NTSC-over-VGA didn't work (predictably.)

Here are the results:

256x256 - displayed 240 lines, clipped 16.

360x480, perfect

376x564, perfect

132x43 text mode, good (slightly ugly scaling)

DoWhackaDo - odd green bar where video mode changes mid-screen; smooth scrolling

Kukoo2 (384x564), perfect

Luminati - perfect (the aspect ratio is squashed on CRTs too.) Pressing up/down/left/right changes the refresh rate and vertical positioning; it generally handled this pretty well (up to 90 Hz.)

Timeless - ran both the original 56 Hz version and the 60 Hz 'LCD fix' with no issues

Sunflower by Pulse - highcolor fakemode displayed reasonable well. Some vertical banding but the scaling didn't spoil the effect too badly. I've seen worse.

If I can find a monitor that works this well *and* supports composite + s-video + 15 kHz modes I'd be pretty happy.

I have put together a small suite of utilities (mostly above) that can be loaded on a suitable VGA-supporting machine as a test bank. Is anyone is interested in contributing to a 'monitor compatibility database?' If so I'll upload this somewhere and post a few I've tested to start us off.

(I've loaded this suite onto my Thinkpad 365ED which is a 486 with a Chips & Technologies video chip so I can cart it around and test.)

KJason wrote:

I have put together a small suite of utilities (mostly above) that can be loaded on a suitable VGA-supporting machine as a test bank. Is anyone is interested in contributing to a 'monitor compatibility database?' If so I'll upload this somewhere and post a few I've tested to start us off.

(I've loaded this suite onto my Thinkpad 365ED which is a 486 with a Chips & Technologies video chip so I can cart it around and test.)

This sounds great, and a good companion to Gona's videocard tests:
http://gona.mactar.hu/DOS_TESTS/

Please do it. 😀

KJason wrote:

Luminati - perfect (the aspect ratio is squashed on CRTs too.) Pressing up/down/left/right changes the refresh rate and vertical positioning; it generally handled this pretty well (up to 90 Hz.)

Your photo shows only one color hue. Are you sure that its perfect and not only showing one frame (even lines) of the interlaced picture?

^^ It looked OK to me, the LCD response time is kind of slow which aided the blending effect a lot. It seemed to cycle colors as normally. (I've now put that monitor back in my storage room but can confirm this next time I get it out...)

Here is a link to the testing suite. I basically made it for myself but I'm curious what results others get with it. There's a readme and an example/template "database submission", but I haven't actually created the database yet so have fun with it in the meantime. I was intending just to make a big forum thread so everyone can contribute results. It's also hosted on my own personal dropbox but I definitely want to put it somewhere more permanent if lots of people end up using it.

I am very open to other, better suggestions on how to do this, as long as (a) it costs me exactly nothing (no self-hosted websites) and (b) I don't have to do a whole pile of work to 'commit' every single "database entry."

Also note: I am the OP of this thread. I'm just using a new account that matches my username on most other VC/tech forums.

xjas wrote:

^^ It looked OK to me, the LCD response time is kind of slow which aided the blending effect a lot. It seemed to cycle colors as normally. (I've now put that monitor back in my storage room but can confirm this next time I get it out...)

I did a capture of luminati here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdLBXWNYUqE
There are always two independent effects at the same time using different clean r/g/b color hues.
A few TFTs I tested showed a picture, however only one of the two interleaved frames. As result you see there only one effect in one color.

I think you're probably right, now that I've had a better look ... to be honest I was so shocked it displayed *at all* I didn't pay that much attention to the colouring. I'll compare it again when I get a few spare minutes tomorrow. Ambience doesn't work at all, it just goes "out of range" immediately.

(Also I discovered another mistake in my earlier post - the green line in Dowhackado is caused by the VGA card; it also appears on a CRT. The VG150 displays it well when run from a different system.)

I ran everything included in the test CD, the following failed with a Samsung Syncmaster 930MP.

-Kukoo2: Image shifted to the right, auto detect is likely having trouble here.
-Luminati and Ambience: Both give me "out of range" messages on the LCD. Apparently 85+Hz isn't possible with this monitor.
-Copper: Ran this on a ET4000AX for compatibility reasons. Works except for brief portions of the wobble effect, same as elianda's youtube video.
-15khz NTSC/PAL are not supported on the VGA port, need to use the SCART input for that.

I have a Samsung Syncmaster 940MW to test next. I'm hoping it uses a different ADC from the 930MP. I may decide to test the HP LP2475w I have here as well, but I won't get my hopes up on that being all that compatible.

...and with a Samsung Syncmaster 940MW

-Luminati and Ambience: Both give me "out of range" messages on the LCD. Apparently 85+Hz isn't possible with this monitor.
-376x564 tweak mode is falsely detected as a 16:9 widescreen mode! You can force the aspect ratio to 4:3 manually though.
-Copper: The helicopter wobble video doesn't blank the display, but no wobble is shown, just a flickering stable image. The ADC is likely correcting the sync errors ruining the effect.

Also, this monitor doesn't auto adjust on modes it doesn't recognize, you have to manually activate it from the OSD.

1Monitor:    Samsung SyncMaster 2443
2Native res: 1920x1200
3Scaling:    Interpolated
4Aspect rto: 16:10 (aspect ratio can be switched between "Auto" and "Wide")
5Machine:    486DX4, K6-3+, Athlon
6
7Video card: Tseng ET4000, S3 Virge DX/GX, Voodoo 5, GeForce 4 Ti4600
8UniVBE:     none
9Tested by:  5u3
10
11OVERALL COMPATIBILITY RATING:
12  11.5/14 - Good
13
14  Application          P   F   CP  Notes
15,-----------------------------------------------------------------------------.
16| Ambience           |   | X |   | Blank screen, message: "Not Optimum Mode"  |
17| Luminati           |   | X |   | Blank screen, message: "Not Optimum Mode"  |
18| Timeless (56Hz)    | X |   |   |                                            |
19| Timeless (60Hz)    | X |   |   |                                            |
20| Dowhackado         | X |   |   |                                            |
21| Kukoo2             | X |   |   |                                            |
22| Copper             |   |   | X | No wobble effect, everything else fine     |
23| Sunflower          | X |   |   |                                            |
24| Yo                 | X |   |   |                                            |
25| Impulse Tracker    | X |   |   | Ugly scaling                               |
26| CubicPlayer 132x43 | X |   |   | Ugly scaling                               |
27| Tweak 256x256      | X |   |   |                                            |
28| Tweak 360x480      | X |   |   |                                            |
29| Tweak 376x564      | X |   |   |                                            |
30| PAL-on-VGA         |   | X |   |                                            |
31| NTSC-on-VGA        |   | X |   |                                            |
32|-----------------------------------------------------------------------------|
33| Other notes:                                                                |
34|                                                                             |
35|                                                                             |
36`-----------------------------------------------------------------------------'

How about adding sea robot of love to the suite? It uses a 50Hz mode per default (override with parameter -M for standard 70 Hz).

Cool, thanks for taking the time to try these out! The Samsung Syncmasters seem to be doing pretty well; maybe I'll try to grab one of those too.

I created the actual database thread finally so please post results up there. 😀 Maybe we can make this into something useful.