90s games and monitors

Panos

Panos

Panos

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As everyone else I have a pretty sizeable 27" 2560x1440 monitor.

Which is terrible to play some of my favourite games from the 90s and early 2000s.
Every game looks crap due to resolution and sharpness, and doesn't capture the atmosphere of the day.

Given that "new" CRTs monitor do not exist, and used ones after 10+ years of use show wear and tear (washing out colours etc) what are my options from your experience?
 
I still have 3 CRT in storage for the past 10 years and would probably be scared to turn one on in case the dust goes on fire. :p

Was always a back project to make a couple of arcade cabinets up and use them for that. Think one of them was a rather nice flat iiyama crt.
 
I wouldn't touch a CRT with a barge pole; I am not old enough to get misty-eyed about the benefits (as I was too young to care when I used CRTs) and instead just think of the drawbacks: noise, flickering and eyestrain, size, weight, reliability...

I would get a 4:3 or 5:4 17" or 19" LCD sreen. I have one of those old and formerly ubiquitous Dell monitors in 17" 1280 *1024 guise on my Windows 98 gaming PC, which is quite nice and can be had for very cheap or free if you look (old PCs coming with one on gumtree etc).

oB5pRxO.jpg.png


it's small enough to sit next to my main monitor and it might actually have a higher PPI compared to by 1080p 27" screen. The colours and brightness are adequate.

I also use my main monitor quite regularly with my Windows 98 PC. Even a lowly Riva TNT2 can do 1920*1080 (native for me screen) on the desktop and 640*480 - 1280*1024 looks alright as my monitor will run in a 4:3 mode rather than stretch the image.
 
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LewisRaz said:
Shame you arent nearer I have one of those old 4:3 dells up in the loft
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Yeah unfortunately. Thank you

almoststew1990 said:
I wouldn't touch a CRT with a barge pole; I am not old enough to get misty-eyed about the benefits (as I was too young to care when I used CRTs) and instead just think of the drawbacks: noise, flickering and eyestrain, size, weight, reliability...

I would get a 4:3 or 5:4 17" or 19" LCD sreen. I have one of those old and formerly ubiquitous Dell monitors in 17" 1280 *1024 guise on my Windows 98 gaming PC, which is quite nice and can be had for very cheap or free if you look (old PCs coming with one on gumtree etc).

oB5pRxO.jpg.png


it's small enough to sit next to my main monitor and it might actually have a higher PPI compared to by 1080p 27" screen. The colours and brightness are adequate.

I also use my main monitor quite regularly with my Windows 98 PC. Even a lowly Riva TNT2 can do 1920*1080 (native for me screen) on the desktop and 640*480 - 1280*1024 looks alright as my monitor will run in a 4:3 mode rather than stretch the image.
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To CRT, PPI and monitors resolution mean nothing as long as the tube can render the resolution and refresh rate.
Because of how the image is projected, the method is completely different to liquid crystals, hence a game at 800x600 on a 1280x1024 CRT monitor looks exactly the same at on 1024x768 or 800x600 CRT monitor or even a 2560x1440 CRT monitor (didn't existed but hope you take the meaning). There is/was no scalling involved.

On contrary, because of how LCD monitors are working, the above is not true. It will have to scale the image and the monent you do so, you lose it's properties completely. Yes 17" 1280x1024 might sound good, but the images, aka games, will be scalled to that resolution. And we are on the same boat as with the 27" 2560x1440 monitor.

arc@css said:
Mods.
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Yeah, trying to spend the next 1000 hours of my life with Assembly, trying to make Ravenloft and Ravenlot 2 run at higher res.......
These games didn't supported modding, and are pre-Windows and DX era.
 
CRT is still the ONLY way to see max Payne2 PC in all it's glory ;) Remedy used the CRT to good effect with a lot of strobe & CRT only tweaks. When you play it on a flat panel it does not look anywhere near the same.
 
Sony FW900 24" Widescreen (16:10) still the best CRT made and no need for G-Sync or high HZ to make a game look smooth due to LCD being so laggy.

A CRT at 60hz though would flicker as your sat in front of it unlike CRT TV over the other side of room would be smoother than any LCD, the above ran 1920x1200@85hz (can up to 96hz) and Max was 2304x1440p@80hz.

The lower RES's had as high as 160hz AFAIR.


https://hardforum.com/threads/24-widescreen-crt-fw900-from-ebay-arrived-comments.952788/
 
Even then, on a 1440p screen if the game only goes up to a certain resolution it could be quite a small image with no scaling. 1024x768 (a typical resolution from that period) for example takes up less than a quarter of the screen.

Although with a bit of tweaking many games can get up to high resolutions, you then tend to suffer from low resolution textures. IIRC 3dfx cards used to have a 256x256 limit on texture sizes which will have limited what a lot of devs were doing in the late 90s. Plus of course just generally worse models, effects etc.

I've traditionally held the view that Y2K was around the threshold of when games started to reach a standard that looks 'acceptable' when revisiting them, for example the likes of Deus Ex, Need for Speed: Porsche 2000 etc. By acceptable I mean to the extent that you can play the game and the graphics, although poor by modern standards, don't feel like they are being particularly detrimental to the gameplay. However as time has moved on I'd probably rebaseline that a bit now, I'd say 2004 is a real turning point (Far Cry, Doom 3, Halflife 2). Games from 2002 and prior can be quite hard work.
 
AWPC said:
CRT is still the ONLY way to see max Payne2 PC in all it's glory ;) Remedy used the CRT to good effect with a lot of strobe & CRT only tweaks. When you play it on a flat panel it does not look anywhere near the same.
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I'd love to see some kind of comparison because I don't understand how "CRT only tweaks" would work?
 
ic1male said:
I'd love to see some kind of comparison because I don't understand how "CRT only tweaks" would work?
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Only way to do this is buy a CRT & test yourself. Max Payne 2 uses some clever coding tricks from Remedy which utilise the CRT technology to create some stunning FX using strobe mainly & rapid colour shifts. Its only on the dream sequences but looks stunning & no flat screen can recreate this they look flat, dull & lifeless by comparison as the game was coded around CRT's. I even mentioned this to one of the lead dev's about this a few years ago on the Remedy forums & he confirmed that to me when I was asking about could they remaster in 16:9 as its hard coded to 4:3 aspect ratio!
 
HangTime said:
for example the likes of Deus Ex
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I replayed it about a year back using a high-res texture mod - which is a bit mixed as it kind of emphasises how blocky the geometry is - but about an hour in and largely I wasn't noticing the graphics - though I did have to use a few exploits to work around the rather dated mechanics - strange thing is many of those exploits don't seem to be exactly accidental as if someone thought in the future people would find certain things tedious and put in ways to work around them - given how complex and in some cases forward thinking the game design was it wouldn't surprise me.

Quake 2 (more mods and other 3rd party content) can still look pretty acceptable even today while playing it though doesn't stand up so well in comparisons when you notice the lacking shaders, etc. heh.

Some other games though the dated graphics I just can't get past.
 
thedoc46 said:
motion clarity with g-sync/freesync is now a thing of the past. love g-sync.. finally get that smoothness back after all those yrs.
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Pixel persistence on LCDs still doesn't match up with a good CRT which were essentially sub millisecond versus typically 1-16ms on a LCD even with G-Sync and/or techniques like lightboost or inserting blank frames at twice the refresh rate.
 
I’ve got 3 24” monitors in Surround which is epic for modern games that support it but completely crap for older ones that don’t, my solution is an old 12” lcd (bit like the dell posted earlier) which runs off my onboard graphics, any older games I just disable my 1070’s and play on the smaller screen, the small monitor is handy for web pages or monitoring programs like Afterburner whilst the other three panels are running a Surround game. :)
 
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