CRT vs. LCD for 90s Gaming computer

G

garrable

Weaksauce
Joined
Jan 14, 2012
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Hey everyone, I'm looking for a bit of guidance.

I'm putting together a Windows 98 SE machine for some old games (Simcopter, Jane's Simulations, etc) I have trouble with in XP and Win 7. As part of the process I'm gonna buy a 4:3 monitor to go with the machine, but I'm stuck trying to decide on LCD or CRT.

Obviously CRT would be true to the era (my old viewsonic 17" comes to mind) but they take up so much damn space.

What have others done in this situation?
 
I think the resolution flexibility of a CRT suits games from the 90s. Some are locked into really low resolutions that would look like garbage on a 4:3 LCD who's native resolution is the only one that looks good. CRTs scale infinitely better
 
Thanks y'all, that's kinda the way I was leaning, just trying to convince myself to clear some deskspace for a CRT lol. Off to craig's list to find a deal...
 
and as far as monitor goes CRT is only option for DOS/W98 games. New games can be run on 1920x1080/1200 or whatever but older games were often limited to resolutions like 320x200, 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768 etc and those look terribly bad on LCD, especially old ones that are mostly not even 4:3 but actually 5:4 and stretch vertically everything except 1280x1024...
 
i run COD UO and warcraft2 on win7 with a 24" lcd. works fine
 
I would suggest a CRT, like others have mentioned here.

But another option, if you can't find a decent CRT, is an LCD that can handle scaling internally. I recently tried a couple of older 800x600 games on my LCD, and they appeared good enough to me.

But that was using a 90 series NEC. One of the cool things about them is that they not only handle 1:1 scaling, but you can scale in realtime using the OSD. So if that 800x600 box is too small at 1:1, yet full screen is too pixelated, you can scale it 1.5x... or whatever amount you want. I tried it on my baby-sized NEC 1990, and it works pretty well. 5:4 makes little difference on it, as you can simply show in a 4:3 ratio if you prefer. You will get black bars, of course, depending on the ratio and size you choose... but it's not that bad.

Again, it's one option if a decent CRT isn't available.
 
I'm curious if a CRT is hard to find these days? I would imagine there are millions of them sitting in closets/storage around the world but not sure if that is the case or not. I too was thinking of building a W98 machine for all my old games that dont run well on W7. For that matter how hard is it to find a legit W98 O/S?
 
CRTs are very easy to find. Just check CL or Freecyle.

But finding a good CRT in decent condition is a bit harder. You'll want either a Trinitron or Diamondtron tube, and hopefully the thing hasn't been run into the ground.

There are still good ones out there, but it's a lot easier to find the 15-17" generic shadowmask CRTs from 10 years ago, that were a piece of junk even when new, than a decent Sony or NEC in newish condition.
 
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I have been scouring craig's list and have a few leads on monitors, but it is hard to find a quality monitor that hasn't looked terrible. As a bit of a packrat I actually have a saved iso of every windows version from 95 to 7, there was an article on PC Perspective where they found a lot of this stuff at a local computer shop (the article kinda started the whole process of the build for me).

http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Editorial/Gaming-Its-1999-Building-Legacy-Windows-Gaming-PC
 
As an alternative, you could always run those games in a virtual machine. But still, unless you run in window mode, the odd resolutions will still look better on a CRT display.
 
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