I want to go full soijak for a little bit and get me a Trinitron to play old games, what should I look for? 14'' seems right, but the model numbers and specs are confusing.
If you want to play retro games you need to get an old SD television. If you are playing 480p or more you can use a VGA monitor. I don't play og nes or anything so went with a VGA for my desk and an HD crt for movies.
You mean a TV? Old games that benefit from a CRT usually run at ~240p60 (320x240) resolution and PC VGA monitors almost never go that low. You can get them to run 240p120 but that's a bit strange since you need frames to be doubled and apparently that causes some motion blur to be visible and you will not be able to get 240p120 from anything other than a PC, so no using original hardware if you're interested in that.
Really you should just look for a decent TV with RGB or component input. If you're in Europe then that is super easy, EuroSCART already supports RGB and pretty much every TV sold here that isn't super ancient is almost certainly going to have it. You can go from a PC VGA output to SCART with a pretty cheap adapter (the signaling is almost the same) and the image quality will be excellent on pretty much any TV. Ideally you'd want to pick a TV with good geometry since geometric distortion is going to be easy to spot on smooth-scrolling games and that includes a very large number of old games.
I'm sure that's possible and DOS games might have been intended to run like that (though before VGA just running some 15kHz mode on PC was also a thing), but old console games and such didn't do that and just ran at ~240p and if you line-double them you're not going to quite get the "intended" look like you get without line doubling.
1 month ago
Anonymous
yea, you were talking about pc monitors so i just mentioned dos games, since they're the only really low res pc games
consoles do work differently, they use something sometimes called double strike, where instead of standard ntsc* timing where you draw 240 lines* to draw a field, followed by another 240 lines offset by 1 line to fill in the gaps between the first field to create an interlaced picture, you draw each field directly over top of the previous field, resulting in what is effectively 240p, it's a very small adjustment to the signal timing that any tv can handle, it's one of the cool things you can do with analog gear, you can stray from the intended specs to create something new. ntsc was never intended to have a 240p mode
* same for pal just different number of lines
* actual number of lines is more than 240, but 240 is the approximate viewable area and most consoles only generate around 224-240 lines of graphics
Component isn't really a thing on computer monitors as far as I know, you get RGB instead. I think you can probably find monitors intended for old home computers which would have both composite and some form of RGB input, then if you have component video sources I believe you can get converters which take component input and turn it into RGB.
If you want component and composite then you should be able to find that on some TV.
Worth mentioning VGA is basically RGB in a different format, so it can converted over pretty easily. Also some monitors, like the Philips 201b has both RGB and VGA inputs. I haven't seen one with composite though.
Hd crt tvs seem to have the widest range of connections, from component to HDMI. The catch is you get a ton of overscan on most models and resolutions are not as dynamic as PC monitors.
VGA is RGBHV, with separate horizontal and vertical sync signals
the RGB you get on TV's is RGBS, or composite sync (as in H and V sync in one signal, not CVBS "composite video")
converting the sync signals between the two is not hard, i've managed to drive a tv from vga output by literally just connecting the sync lines together (though it's probably not the best idea)
the main concern is signal timings, televisions expect 15kHz signals, while pc monitors expect 31kHz+ signals, there's also less common multi-sync monitors which would be ideal if you want one crt that does it all, but they were uncommon/high end at the time so probably even harder to come across now
1 month ago
Anonymous
Those are RGB, not component. I don't know if the tubes in those are particularly amazing or what, but in terms of connectivity any TV with a SCART input should have everything covered I believe, if you can get your hands on one of those. I'm pretty sure SCART supports RGB, S-Video and composite.
[...]
I've heard this "double-strike" term before and I guess you could look at it as some special "hack" in NTSC and PAL terms since those were always meant to be interlaced but in VGA/RGB terms I'm pretty sure it's just bog-standard progressive video with 240 lines. You can output 240 progressive just fine even from a modern PC and it'll work on a 15kHz screen.
[...]
I think the only difference between the actual video signaling on VGA and what people call "RGB" is just in the sync signals. Even the voltage levels expected on the color signals themselves are the same, so all you need to do is make sure that you've got the right sync signals (at the right voltage) for whatever the screen is expecting.
Can you smart folk help me out? I have an HD CRT tv (16:9) Panasonic Tau CT-30WX54. Some specs >480i, 480p or 1080i > when I hook it up to my desktop 3080, I can use zoom/aspect, but its not 1080i because the 3080 cant output > when I hook it up to my laptop with a gtx980, it outputs 1080i >raspberry pi 3b+, can do 1080i
now my issue, the overscan is ATROCIOUS. I don't want to use it as a desktop or anything, its mainly for movie/tv watching, however with the overscan being so bad I can't manage to see any of my taskbar or menus. So i set my Raspberry Pi to have a 60pixel underscan, well, it doesn't do anything, as if the TV is still showing the image in full and with the pi no zoom or aspect can be used.
Any decent solutions here? Should I really be going into my tv service menu and knocking the overscan back (im very nervous to touch this, not even sure HOW to get into that menu since documentation is so poor).
Advice? Are there scalers or other tools I can be using to make this happen? this is going to be 90% tv watching 10% ps3 era gaming.
1 month ago
Anonymous
i've never used a CRT HDTV, but even on SDTV's overscan is universal, when displaying things that have information on the edges, like a pc, you do have to compensate for it
maybe you can try to tweak it in the service menu if you have access to it, i don't have any experience with that though. i will say that overscan is there for a reason, if you make it too small you may sometimes end up underscanning depending on the picture content, that may not concern you
the last time i had a pc hooked up to a tv, i did not have access to the service menu, so i just hand-tweaked my modelines to adjust the resultant geometry, adjusting the amount of vblank and hblank affects the size and position of the viewable area as well
1 month ago
Anonymous
>Vblank hblank
I'll Google this
>technically speaking RGB is a component video format
I guess it is technically since the signal is split into multiple "components," but like you've also said nobody refers to RGB as "component" since all consumer devices with "component" connections are actually YPbPr.
[...]
I've never used one of those HD CRT TVs, so I don't really know anything specific. Ideas that come to mind:
1. Take the PC monitor approach, as in if the image doesn't fit on the screen, you adjust the screen's geometry settings. If the TV doesn't provide these settings in its normal menu, maybe there's a service menu? Even some SD CRT TVs have them, or at least some of them.
2. Can you maybe make a custom resolution and frick with the porch values? You can kind of stretch out or shrink down the image by adjusting how many "dead" pixels / lines there are outside of the active image, that way you can match the active image to what actually ends up on your TV's screen. No idea if this will work on that HD CRT TV, but in order to dial-in 240p on my SD TV I ended up adjusting vertical size from its service menu and horizontal size by tweaking the horizontal porch values since there was no horizontal size option in the service menu.
No idea about getting interlaced signal out of a 3080, I never tried that. I do get a nice 240p signal out of a 3080 Ti, but I'm not sure about interlaced. It's potentially tricky I guess, no idea if the driver likes it on the software side and I guess whatever VGA adapter you're using may or may not also get in the way. Interlaced was never really a thing on post-VGA PC as far as I can remember so support might be iffy, especially on modern shit. I remember reading that apparently Linux might be more friendly to outputting interlaced video than Windows, but I'm not sure how true that is.
I suppose I could make up a resolution that is technically smaller than the screen and just adjust it until it works. Can making up stupid resolutions damage anything?
If none of that works I think I'm going to bite the bullet, write all my TV settings down and go into the service menu to adjust the overscan back to basically right on the edge, I'm never really going to use an analog device on this TV.
1 month ago
Anonymous
It's not about making smaller resolutions. Like the image I showed, the video signal has blank "areas" outside of your actual image and adjusting the size of those will adjust where the active image ends up. For instance if your image is too wide and going off the screen on the left and right, you can increase the horizontal front and back porches to "squeeze" the image into the area that is actually visible on your TV. The active area in the resolution would still remain the same, as in 1920x1080. I don't know to what degree this will work on your TV but you can try adjusting the values a little bit to see how the image changes.
I don't really know how the TV is treating the signal either since if it's HDMI then it's obviously digital. I don't even know what purpose the porches and shit even serve in digital video (beyond legacy compatibility) since all digital screens know exactly how to display the active frame with pixel-perfect precision anyway, so presumably they know how to identify the active frame. Since your TV acts as a digital device with its own internal DAC then frick knows what the digital signal processing shit at the input will even do when you adjust the porches, maybe it figures out the active area by itself anyway and then adjusts the image based on its own settings, maybe modifying the values won't even do anything. I'd still give it a try to see if it works or not.
As for damage, can't say I know for sure but I would be surprised that feeding it a wrong digital signal can damage it. It's not like you're driving the analog bits directly, I would assume that if the digital shit at the input doesn't know what to do with your signal it will simply not work.
1 month ago
Anonymous
Yes it's digital via HDMI. Apparently at 1080i the Panasonic serves an unprocessed lagless signal (part of why some people like this set for Xbox and PS3). Just googling how to access the service menu and I'm going to yolo it.
1 month ago
Anonymous
I guess it might not be doing any digital scaling if you're already feeding it its maximum resolution? I've seen LCD displays which had less lag at native res than at lower res, but that doesn't really make sense for a CRT. Anyway, good luck with the tuning.
Those are RGB, not component. I don't know if the tubes in those are particularly amazing or what, but in terms of connectivity any TV with a SCART input should have everything covered I believe, if you can get your hands on one of those. I'm pretty sure SCART supports RGB, S-Video and composite.
yea, you were talking about pc monitors so i just mentioned dos games, since they're the only really low res pc games
consoles do work differently, they use something sometimes called double strike, where instead of standard ntsc* timing where you draw 240 lines* to draw a field, followed by another 240 lines offset by 1 line to fill in the gaps between the first field to create an interlaced picture, you draw each field directly over top of the previous field, resulting in what is effectively 240p, it's a very small adjustment to the signal timing that any tv can handle, it's one of the cool things you can do with analog gear, you can stray from the intended specs to create something new. ntsc was never intended to have a 240p mode
* same for pal just different number of lines
* actual number of lines is more than 240, but 240 is the approximate viewable area and most consoles only generate around 224-240 lines of graphics
I've heard this "double-strike" term before and I guess you could look at it as some special "hack" in NTSC and PAL terms since those were always meant to be interlaced but in VGA/RGB terms I'm pretty sure it's just bog-standard progressive video with 240 lines. You can output 240 progressive just fine even from a modern PC and it'll work on a 15kHz screen.
Worth mentioning VGA is basically RGB in a different format, so it can converted over pretty easily. Also some monitors, like the Philips 201b has both RGB and VGA inputs. I haven't seen one with composite though.
Hd crt tvs seem to have the widest range of connections, from component to HDMI. The catch is you get a ton of overscan on most models and resolutions are not as dynamic as PC monitors.
I think the only difference between the actual video signaling on VGA and what people call "RGB" is just in the sync signals. Even the voltage levels expected on the color signals themselves are the same, so all you need to do is make sure that you've got the right sync signals (at the right voltage) for whatever the screen is expecting.
>in VGA/RGB terms I'm pretty sure it's just bog-standard progressive video with 240 lines
i don't believe it's any different, at least it's not in a way that matters to the tv
and yes i only mean it's a hack in the sense that tv's weren't designed for it, though that's not to say it's dangerous for them >Those are RGB, not component
technically speaking RGB is a component video format, just not the one everyone thinks of when you say "component", that is, it's RGB component, not YPbPr component
converting between them is also not hard, though it does require active circuitry, YPbPr component video puts composite sync on luma (Y, the green connector) if anyone is curious, actually if you plug the green connector into a composite (yellow) plug, you can get a black and white picture, since it's only the colour which is incompatible between them
1 month ago
Anonymous
>technically speaking RGB is a component video format
I guess it is technically since the signal is split into multiple "components," but like you've also said nobody refers to RGB as "component" since all consumer devices with "component" connections are actually YPbPr.
[...]
Can you smart folk help me out? I have an HD CRT tv (16:9) Panasonic Tau CT-30WX54. Some specs >480i, 480p or 1080i > when I hook it up to my desktop 3080, I can use zoom/aspect, but its not 1080i because the 3080 cant output > when I hook it up to my laptop with a gtx980, it outputs 1080i >raspberry pi 3b+, can do 1080i
now my issue, the overscan is ATROCIOUS. I don't want to use it as a desktop or anything, its mainly for movie/tv watching, however with the overscan being so bad I can't manage to see any of my taskbar or menus. So i set my Raspberry Pi to have a 60pixel underscan, well, it doesn't do anything, as if the TV is still showing the image in full and with the pi no zoom or aspect can be used.
Any decent solutions here? Should I really be going into my tv service menu and knocking the overscan back (im very nervous to touch this, not even sure HOW to get into that menu since documentation is so poor).
Advice? Are there scalers or other tools I can be using to make this happen? this is going to be 90% tv watching 10% ps3 era gaming.
I've never used one of those HD CRT TVs, so I don't really know anything specific. Ideas that come to mind:
1. Take the PC monitor approach, as in if the image doesn't fit on the screen, you adjust the screen's geometry settings. If the TV doesn't provide these settings in its normal menu, maybe there's a service menu? Even some SD CRT TVs have them, or at least some of them.
2. Can you maybe make a custom resolution and frick with the porch values? You can kind of stretch out or shrink down the image by adjusting how many "dead" pixels / lines there are outside of the active image, that way you can match the active image to what actually ends up on your TV's screen. No idea if this will work on that HD CRT TV, but in order to dial-in 240p on my SD TV I ended up adjusting vertical size from its service menu and horizontal size by tweaking the horizontal porch values since there was no horizontal size option in the service menu.
No idea about getting interlaced signal out of a 3080, I never tried that. I do get a nice 240p signal out of a 3080 Ti, but I'm not sure about interlaced. It's potentially tricky I guess, no idea if the driver likes it on the software side and I guess whatever VGA adapter you're using may or may not also get in the way. Interlaced was never really a thing on post-VGA PC as far as I can remember so support might be iffy, especially on modern shit. I remember reading that apparently Linux might be more friendly to outputting interlaced video than Windows, but I'm not sure how true that is.
weird
I'm trans btw
I want to go full soijak for a little bit and get me a Trinitron to play old games, what should I look for? 14'' seems right, but the model numbers and specs are confusing.
if all you want is retro games you dont need to concern yourself with specs too much.
Any VGA monitor will do 480p and most alot more
19" 1024x768
If you want to play retro games you need to get an old SD television. If you are playing 480p or more you can use a VGA monitor. I don't play og nes or anything so went with a VGA for my desk and an HD crt for movies.
You mean a TV? Old games that benefit from a CRT usually run at ~240p60 (320x240) resolution and PC VGA monitors almost never go that low. You can get them to run 240p120 but that's a bit strange since you need frames to be doubled and apparently that causes some motion blur to be visible and you will not be able to get 240p120 from anything other than a PC, so no using original hardware if you're interested in that.
Really you should just look for a decent TV with RGB or component input. If you're in Europe then that is super easy, EuroSCART already supports RGB and pretty much every TV sold here that isn't super ancient is almost certainly going to have it. You can go from a PC VGA output to SCART with a pretty cheap adapter (the signaling is almost the same) and the image quality will be excellent on pretty much any TV. Ideally you'd want to pick a TV with good geometry since geometric distortion is going to be easy to spot on smooth-scrolling games and that includes a very large number of old games.
tons of dos games ran at 320x200, and they worked by line-doubling to 400p
I'm sure that's possible and DOS games might have been intended to run like that (though before VGA just running some 15kHz mode on PC was also a thing), but old console games and such didn't do that and just ran at ~240p and if you line-double them you're not going to quite get the "intended" look like you get without line doubling.
yea, you were talking about pc monitors so i just mentioned dos games, since they're the only really low res pc games
consoles do work differently, they use something sometimes called double strike, where instead of standard ntsc* timing where you draw 240 lines* to draw a field, followed by another 240 lines offset by 1 line to fill in the gaps between the first field to create an interlaced picture, you draw each field directly over top of the previous field, resulting in what is effectively 240p, it's a very small adjustment to the signal timing that any tv can handle, it's one of the cool things you can do with analog gear, you can stray from the intended specs to create something new. ntsc was never intended to have a 240p mode
* same for pal just different number of lines
* actual number of lines is more than 240, but 240 is the approximate viewable area and most consoles only generate around 224-240 lines of graphics
>Trinitron to play old games
Crappy CRTs are more comfy for old games.
CRTs aren't a replacement for the love of a woman
Me too but clean it ffs
how the sell do I fix the v-hold when there is no v-hole knob?!?!
im freaking out
LOOK THEY DID THE THING THEY POSTED THE CRT!!!!!
>CRTroon cope thread
are there any CRT monitors with component or composite input so you can have an all in one compact CRT?
Component isn't really a thing on computer monitors as far as I know, you get RGB instead. I think you can probably find monitors intended for old home computers which would have both composite and some form of RGB input, then if you have component video sources I believe you can get converters which take component input and turn it into RGB.
If you want component and composite then you should be able to find that on some TV.
Worth mentioning VGA is basically RGB in a different format, so it can converted over pretty easily. Also some monitors, like the Philips 201b has both RGB and VGA inputs. I haven't seen one with composite though.
Hd crt tvs seem to have the widest range of connections, from component to HDMI. The catch is you get a ton of overscan on most models and resolutions are not as dynamic as PC monitors.
VGA is RGBHV, with separate horizontal and vertical sync signals
the RGB you get on TV's is RGBS, or composite sync (as in H and V sync in one signal, not CVBS "composite video")
converting the sync signals between the two is not hard, i've managed to drive a tv from vga output by literally just connecting the sync lines together (though it's probably not the best idea)
the main concern is signal timings, televisions expect 15kHz signals, while pc monitors expect 31kHz+ signals, there's also less common multi-sync monitors which would be ideal if you want one crt that does it all, but they were uncommon/high end at the time so probably even harder to come across now
Can you smart folk help me out? I have an HD CRT tv (16:9) Panasonic Tau CT-30WX54. Some specs
>480i, 480p or 1080i
> when I hook it up to my desktop 3080, I can use zoom/aspect, but its not 1080i because the 3080 cant output
> when I hook it up to my laptop with a gtx980, it outputs 1080i
>raspberry pi 3b+, can do 1080i
now my issue, the overscan is ATROCIOUS. I don't want to use it as a desktop or anything, its mainly for movie/tv watching, however with the overscan being so bad I can't manage to see any of my taskbar or menus. So i set my Raspberry Pi to have a 60pixel underscan, well, it doesn't do anything, as if the TV is still showing the image in full and with the pi no zoom or aspect can be used.
Any decent solutions here? Should I really be going into my tv service menu and knocking the overscan back (im very nervous to touch this, not even sure HOW to get into that menu since documentation is so poor).
Advice? Are there scalers or other tools I can be using to make this happen? this is going to be 90% tv watching 10% ps3 era gaming.
i've never used a CRT HDTV, but even on SDTV's overscan is universal, when displaying things that have information on the edges, like a pc, you do have to compensate for it
maybe you can try to tweak it in the service menu if you have access to it, i don't have any experience with that though. i will say that overscan is there for a reason, if you make it too small you may sometimes end up underscanning depending on the picture content, that may not concern you
the last time i had a pc hooked up to a tv, i did not have access to the service menu, so i just hand-tweaked my modelines to adjust the resultant geometry, adjusting the amount of vblank and hblank affects the size and position of the viewable area as well
>Vblank hblank
I'll Google this
I suppose I could make up a resolution that is technically smaller than the screen and just adjust it until it works. Can making up stupid resolutions damage anything?
If none of that works I think I'm going to bite the bullet, write all my TV settings down and go into the service menu to adjust the overscan back to basically right on the edge, I'm never really going to use an analog device on this TV.
It's not about making smaller resolutions. Like the image I showed, the video signal has blank "areas" outside of your actual image and adjusting the size of those will adjust where the active image ends up. For instance if your image is too wide and going off the screen on the left and right, you can increase the horizontal front and back porches to "squeeze" the image into the area that is actually visible on your TV. The active area in the resolution would still remain the same, as in 1920x1080. I don't know to what degree this will work on your TV but you can try adjusting the values a little bit to see how the image changes.
I don't really know how the TV is treating the signal either since if it's HDMI then it's obviously digital. I don't even know what purpose the porches and shit even serve in digital video (beyond legacy compatibility) since all digital screens know exactly how to display the active frame with pixel-perfect precision anyway, so presumably they know how to identify the active frame. Since your TV acts as a digital device with its own internal DAC then frick knows what the digital signal processing shit at the input will even do when you adjust the porches, maybe it figures out the active area by itself anyway and then adjusts the image based on its own settings, maybe modifying the values won't even do anything. I'd still give it a try to see if it works or not.
As for damage, can't say I know for sure but I would be surprised that feeding it a wrong digital signal can damage it. It's not like you're driving the analog bits directly, I would assume that if the digital shit at the input doesn't know what to do with your signal it will simply not work.
Yes it's digital via HDMI. Apparently at 1080i the Panasonic serves an unprocessed lagless signal (part of why some people like this set for Xbox and PS3). Just googling how to access the service menu and I'm going to yolo it.
I guess it might not be doing any digital scaling if you're already feeding it its maximum resolution? I've seen LCD displays which had less lag at native res than at lower res, but that doesn't really make sense for a CRT. Anyway, good luck with the tuning.
>so you can have an all in one
its called shaders on an oled
Only 80s monitors that were made for microcomputers. These are quite pricy and sought after these days.
Those are RGB, not component. I don't know if the tubes in those are particularly amazing or what, but in terms of connectivity any TV with a SCART input should have everything covered I believe, if you can get your hands on one of those. I'm pretty sure SCART supports RGB, S-Video and composite.
I've heard this "double-strike" term before and I guess you could look at it as some special "hack" in NTSC and PAL terms since those were always meant to be interlaced but in VGA/RGB terms I'm pretty sure it's just bog-standard progressive video with 240 lines. You can output 240 progressive just fine even from a modern PC and it'll work on a 15kHz screen.
I think the only difference between the actual video signaling on VGA and what people call "RGB" is just in the sync signals. Even the voltage levels expected on the color signals themselves are the same, so all you need to do is make sure that you've got the right sync signals (at the right voltage) for whatever the screen is expecting.
>in VGA/RGB terms I'm pretty sure it's just bog-standard progressive video with 240 lines
i don't believe it's any different, at least it's not in a way that matters to the tv
and yes i only mean it's a hack in the sense that tv's weren't designed for it, though that's not to say it's dangerous for them
>Those are RGB, not component
technically speaking RGB is a component video format, just not the one everyone thinks of when you say "component", that is, it's RGB component, not YPbPr component
converting between them is also not hard, though it does require active circuitry, YPbPr component video puts composite sync on luma (Y, the green connector) if anyone is curious, actually if you plug the green connector into a composite (yellow) plug, you can get a black and white picture, since it's only the colour which is incompatible between them
>technically speaking RGB is a component video format
I guess it is technically since the signal is split into multiple "components," but like you've also said nobody refers to RGB as "component" since all consumer devices with "component" connections are actually YPbPr.
I've never used one of those HD CRT TVs, so I don't really know anything specific. Ideas that come to mind:
1. Take the PC monitor approach, as in if the image doesn't fit on the screen, you adjust the screen's geometry settings. If the TV doesn't provide these settings in its normal menu, maybe there's a service menu? Even some SD CRT TVs have them, or at least some of them.
2. Can you maybe make a custom resolution and frick with the porch values? You can kind of stretch out or shrink down the image by adjusting how many "dead" pixels / lines there are outside of the active image, that way you can match the active image to what actually ends up on your TV's screen. No idea if this will work on that HD CRT TV, but in order to dial-in 240p on my SD TV I ended up adjusting vertical size from its service menu and horizontal size by tweaking the horizontal porch values since there was no horizontal size option in the service menu.
No idea about getting interlaced signal out of a 3080, I never tried that. I do get a nice 240p signal out of a 3080 Ti, but I'm not sure about interlaced. It's potentially tricky I guess, no idea if the driver likes it on the software side and I guess whatever VGA adapter you're using may or may not also get in the way. Interlaced was never really a thing on post-VGA PC as far as I can remember so support might be iffy, especially on modern shit. I remember reading that apparently Linux might be more friendly to outputting interlaced video than Windows, but I'm not sure how true that is.
as in critical race theory
Enjoy your Cancer Ray Tube