Best CRT Monitor for Games (especially dos)

[Dimitris1980]

Hello,

i want to find a nice monitor for dos games, especially for the 90s for vga games 320x200 like fate of atlantis, doom etc.. I have a typical philips 14" monitor but the quality is not good. Especially next to my macintosh performa 6116 with the macintosh color display monitor, the dos graphics seem very ugly. The Macintosh color display has amazing quality and the games like monkey island, flashback etc look great on my macintosh. Is there a crt monitor 14" or 15" that can make dos games look so great (even though vga uses 320x200 resolution)?

Note: i want to disconnect my roland mt32 from my macintosh and connect it to the dos computer cause there are lot of games that support it and the music quality is unbelievable even today. (Lucky dos users).

Thanks and Regards

Dimitris from Greece 

 

[ArmorAlley]

Sony Trinitron screens had good sharp pictures back in the 80's-90s. Whether they still have a good sharp picture is another matter.

The designers in the colouredy-pencil office used Formac monitors with colour separation (5 cables with BNC) from the graphics cards, back when monitors battered ions.

However, shipping monitors is foolhardy so you really need to look at what monitors are actually available to you. One sometimes across a complete Mac with a 16" screen and a VGA port from around 1995-1996. I don't see why these wouldn't suit your purposes admirably.

 

[ScutBoy]

Search for "VGA CRT" or "Free monitor" on Craigslist. Chances are within a month you will get some hits on large (19"+) CRTs. Some nice Trinitron monitors will show up for free.

 

[EvilCapitalist]

Also look out for ViewSonic Professional Series CRTs.  They made both aperture grille (Trinitron) and shadow mask CRTs but both were excellent choices.  The one I have has VGA and BNC connectors as well as a built in USB hub in the base, which was handy.  Couple that with useable high resolution modes and fast refresh rates and it's a solid choice.

 

[John_A]

I remember that Eizo made some very good crt monitors. NEC and Lacie too.

 

[ScutBoy]

Search for "VGA CRT" or "Free monitor" on Craigslist. Chances are within a month you will get some hits on large (19"+) CRTs. Some nice Trinitron monitors will show up for free.

Didn't see at first that you were in Greece. Craigslist is probably not a good option for you

 

[Gorgonops]

i want to find a nice monitor for dos games, especially for the 90s for vga games 320x200 like fate of atlantis, doom etc.. I have a typical philips 14" monitor but the quality is not good. Especially next to my macintosh performa 6116 with the macintosh color display monitor, the dos graphics seem very ugly. The Macintosh color display has amazing quality and the games like monkey island, flashback etc look great on my macintosh. Is there a crt monitor 14" or 15" that can make dos games look so great (even though vga uses 320x200 resolution)?

Is it really a problem with the monitor or is it just the low resolution that's getting to you? There is sort of an apples-to-oranges problem in comparing the two given the lowest common resolution used by color Mac games is 640x480 and by comparison 320x200 is always going to look like a pile of Lego blocks.

Back when games like Duke Nukem and Doom came out I had a really cheap Packard Bell VGA monitor with what would be considered a super-cruddy-for-work dot pitch (.52 or something atrocious, basically TV grade) and based on that experience I'd almost say the *worse* your monitor is in terms of sharpness (assuming it has nice bright colors and decent contrast) the better those sorts of games are going to look. A sharp monitor will just emphasize the blocky-ness. Probably your best option is to just embrace the crude look as a charming artifact of the era.

 

[CelGen]

FYI, 320x200 is CGA, not VGA. VGA is 640x480 and the acronym is often abused for any monitor that used the HD15 connector.

Anyways it doesn't matter what size your screen is. Because CRT's are analog in nature they scale up and down really well (within what the analog board will physically allow) compared to LCD's where there's an optimal resolution and upscaling and downscaling modes on either side which are sub-optimal.

That being said, find a Trinitron as for decades they were the OEM tube of choice. Viewsonic's are meh, eizo and lacie's are still really expensive or worn out from heavy use, NEC's will sync to just about any resolution and refresh rate which for a PC doesn't matter much unless you can crank up the refresh rate up to 75 or 80khz.

 

[Gorgonops]

FYI, 320x200 is CGA, not VGA. VGA is 640x480

Wrong. The DOS games the OP is referring to were written to run in VGA mode 13h:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_13h

320x200x256 colors, the only 8-bit color depth mode universally supported by every VGA card ever made.

(Technically speaking the mode is double-scanned with 400 lines vertical sent to the monitor, which makes it look more "solid" than the "real" 320x200 low-res CGA/EGA modes on the original monitors for those standards, but the addressable resolution is the same.)

 

[Dimitris1980]

Thank you all for your answers. I know that vga has 320x200 resolution and the svga 640x480. I guess that i will search for a trinitron 14" or 15" monitor.  I have also a sony eizo 17". It is a great monitor but i have to get it from the basement. I believe that these games look better on smaller size monitor.

 

[John_A]

eizo and lacie's are still really expensive or worn out

A couple of years ago I was offered 2 Lacie Electron Blue IV 22" flat panels for 50$. I didnt buy them, mainly due to size and wieght. Sometimes I regret that decision.

 

[CelGen]

Wrong. The DOS games the OP is referring to were written to run in VGA mode 13h:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_13h

320x200x256 colors, the only 8-bit color depth mode universally supported by every VGA card ever made.

(Technically speaking the mode is double-scanned with 400 lines vertical sent to the monitor, which makes it look more "solid" than the "real" 320x200 low-res CGA/EGA modes on the original monitors for those standards, but the addressable resolution is the same.)

Who the hell allowed that to exist??

 

[techknight]

it feels like this has something to do with VESA, maybe one of the VESA modes. 

 

[IPalindromeI]

Who the hell allowed that to exist??

Because that was the highest colour mode the original VGA adapters allowed. It was the best lowest common denominator you could get with something better than 16 colours, albeit low-res. (Mode X got you 320x240 to use all the VRAM possible on base model VGA, but programming it was awkward and not guaranteed on clones.)

VESA allowed for higher resolutions and colour depths, but came later and still wasn't universally supported until Windows came standard with DirectX and made games bitbanging the GPU directly irrelevant.

 

[Gorgonops]

And more on this:

#1: VGA was introduced in 1987. For the era 320x200@256-out-of-a-pallet-of-256-thousand-colors was pretty good; it's better than the best an Amiga can do for anything but specially crafted static images (The Amiga's HAM mode technically lets you put the whole 4096 color gamut on the screen at the same resolution but is seriously limited in pixel placement; without using HAM the Amiga is only 32 colors.) and is about as high as could be achieved using cheap DRAM in a non-interleaved 8-bit wide configuration. It's easy to piss on it now but for the era VGA's performance was reasonable from a cost/performance standpoint.

#2: As noted, VGA *can* technically do a bit better using Mode X programming techniques. The best guess as to why IBM didn't officially support Mode X in the VGA BIOS involves an obscure "feature" of the original batch of IBM PS/2 machines: the very cheapest models targeted mostly at educational customers only supported a cheaper subset of the full VGA standard called MCGA, which despite using the same monitors as VGA isn't really compatible with it on a hardware level. (VGA is natively a plane-oriented video standard similar to EGA while MCGA only supports single plane "chunky" video modes.) MCGA's had only 64k of VRAM, which is why they chose to make the 256 color mode only 200 pixels high; a "Mode X" square 320-pixel wide mode needs about 83k of VRAM, and the MCGA mode also has the advantage of a very simple linear memory layout where one byte equals one pixel vs. each pixel being 2 bit nibbles scattered on four bit planes. (Which, again, MCGA hardware didn't support anyway.) So even though VGA *is* more capable than MCGA I'd say it was a reasonably defensible choice for IBM to settle on making Mode 13h a common denominator for educational and game software programmers to target instead of having two completely differently-programmed 256 color modes available depending on whether or not the machine in question was a PS/2 model 25 or a Model 50.

Granted IBM could have avoided the whole problem by not bothering with MCGA, but apparently the bean counters could still tell the difference in cost between 64k and 256k of VRAM when the PS/2 line was designed in 1986. In its defense MCGA is still better in most respects than, I dunno, the Apple IIgs' graphics.

 

[Bunsen]

Mitsubishi Diamontron CRTs were a clone of the Sony Trinitron technology (either licensed, or brought out after the patent lapsed).  They're great.

 

[CC_333]

Is *anyone* still producing CRTs of any kind anymore?

Anyway, I've used Trinitron CRTs (and I have a small Trinitron television), and they're excellent. The Trinitron in my Performa 578 is also quite nice, except for a small dark spot it developed toward the lower right corner because of my carelessness with a speaker magnet about ten years ago :-/

c

 

[Cory5412]

No, as far as I'm aware, the last CRT production facility shut down nearly ten years ago, and the last of the CRTs were cheap 17-inch monitors that were "merely okay" for extremely cheap computer bundles -- think, $300-500 Compaq-branded home desktops sold in 2006 using low end AMD chipsets and CPUs from 2003. Those had CRTs bundled.

Some CRTs are nice, but finding good LCDs hasn't been hard for at least ten years, and hauling and placing LCDs is easier.

If you look around and/or catch a sale, monitors like the IPS, LED backlit, VGA/DisplayPort/DVI Dell P1914S will cost less than $100 (I got mine for like $80) and these are just beautiful displays. I haven't tested it, but they should work with different sync sources, such as Sync-On_Green from Silicon Graphics systems. They also look good even when you're scaling up Sun's weird 1152x900 display mode, which is part of why I bought this one.

I kind of wish I had one or two bigger CRTs, but not enough to go get one.

 

[olePigeon]

Getting 4:3 1600x1200 20" LCDs that work with vintage computers is still relatively expensive.