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A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)

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Re: A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)

#41

Post by Someone »

vidanay wrote: post #16
deergomoo wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was quite a popular technique to achieve fancy video effects on low powered hardware. A good example is the various parallax and scrolling effects in the intro cinematic to Link’s Awakening on the Game Boy/Color, achieved by changing various hardware scroll registers in the horizontal blanking interval (time between one line being finished and the other starting). The main limitation is that you can only do hori…

I seem to recall the article being about Apple II hardware, but it might have been Atari 2600. They are of similar generations. edit: Yep, you are right - the article is titled "Racing the Beam" https://www.wired.com/2009/03/racing-the-beam/

If so, “sprite location could be calculated right up until the moment the first row was drawn to the screen” is a tad optimistic.

In theory, you could, but on the Atari 2600, during screen drawing, the CPU cycle budget for each line was 76 cycles (see https://cdn.hackaday.io/files/1646277043401568/Atari_2600_Pr...). Rounding up, that’s 40 instructions, and if the current line is different from the previous one, you’d have to update memory from that same budget.

Because of that, reading of user input and updating of player/object positions typically/always was done during the vertical blank interval.

Re: A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)

#42

Post by caymanjim »

vidanay wrote: post #16
deergomoo wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was quite a popular technique to achieve fancy video effects on low powered hardware. A good example is the various parallax and scrolling effects in the intro cinematic to Link’s Awakening on the Game Boy/Color, achieved by changing various hardware scroll registers in the horizontal blanking interval (time between one line being finished and the other starting). The main limitation is that you can only do hori…

I seem to recall the article being about Apple II hardware, but it might have been Atari 2600. They are of similar generations. edit: Yep, you are right - the article is titled "Racing the Beam" https://www.wired.com/2009/03/racing-the-beam/

I was part of the Commodore 64 demo scene back in the 80s, and this technique was heavily used. You only had so many sprites available, limited color palette, could only use one font (with a small set of glyphs), etc.

By setting up "raster interrupts", which would execute code when the CRT reached a specific raster line on the 320x200 display, you could do all sorts of trickery. The raster interrupt would trigger after it rendered the first horizontal line, and then you could change the pointer to the sprite/font/palette/etc. for the duration of the next display line. A common effect that everyone would learn first was to simply change the background color, so that every display line was a different color, producing a rainbow background.

In a sense, the [video] demo scene was almost entirely about this effect. How much could you do in the tiny number of CPU cycles available to you between the raster interrupt triggered at the end of one horizontal scan line, and the start of the next line, as the beam wrapped around? You could just barely execute about a dozen CPU instructions. Usually you'd flip a couple pointers that the video hardware would look at when it started rendering again, and then you'd pad in a couple no-op instructions so that the change occurred "off screen". This really happened in the margins of the CRT that were covered by a bezel, which meant that on some displays the transition really was invisible to the eye, but on others, there would be flickering at the edges as the background color changed. I used to test my demos on multiple displays to try to minimize the effect, having to shave off an instruction or two in order to make things look better.

Re: A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)

#43

Post by deergomoo »

thedanbob wrote: post #12
bserge wrote: post #8

My eyes used to hurt a lot on CRTs. A few hours every day in front of one and I could not go outside without sunglasses, anything would make my eyes hurt. Everything was fine if I went a week without using a computer. With LCDs, that's not a problem anymore, and I like it.

I guess most people can’t see the flicker on a CRT set at 60Hz, but I can. It’s especially bad in a room with fluorescent lights. First thing I’d do upon sitting down at a new computer with a CRT monitor was to bump up the refresh rate to 75Hz so I didn’t get a headache. Taking standardized tests in the early 2000s on locked down computers in fluorescent-lit test centers was torture.

I’m fine with 60 but I’m in a PAL region so all of my 90s consoles run at 50Hz. That is seriously uncomfortable to look at now and I have no idea how we all put up with it.

Re: A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)

#44

Post by tonyarkles »

vidanay wrote: post #10
bserge wrote: post #8

My eyes used to hurt a lot on CRTs. A few hours every day in front of one and I could not go outside without sunglasses, anything would make my eyes hurt. Everything was fine if I went a week without using a computer. With LCDs, that's not a problem anymore, and I like it.

I think this had a lot to do with low quality fluorescent light ballasts in offices. I agree that it seemed to happen a lot more with CRT, but I have experienced it with LCD too.

In 2008 or so, I ended up going to a neurologist because I was getting these brutal headaches that couldn’t be resolved by my GP. They couldn’t find anything either. And then I quit my job and no longer spent my days starting at a CRT under shitty fluorescent lights, and all the problems went away. Magic!

Re: A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)

#45

Post by indymike »

nickjj wrote: post #24

CRTs were really good. They really were. I remember back in the day the HardOCP forum[0] had massive threads about people buying the FW900 in the mid-2000s. It definitely achieved legendary status. Sadly I never had a chance to use one. I remember having a 21" NEC that let me play Quake 2 / 3 at 120hz at 640x480 in the mid-late 1990s and I think I paid like $120 for it back then from one of those refurbished monitor…

For a long time the big advantage of LCD was just size and energy use. You lost a lot of the clarity with the conversion from analog VGA or SVGA signal in devices that predated DVI and HDMI connectors. It would be really hard to trade in my 28" 4k display for any CRT I've ever had.

Re: A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)

#46

Post by skavi »

throwaway2048 wrote: post #37
peatmoss wrote: post #17

I wonder if there’ll eventually be enough demand for new CRTs, and if manufacturing technology has improved enough to make a CRT that is less of an ecological menace. If cost were only partly a constraint, how good could we build a CRT today? I am still mesmerized by new display technologies / display technologies that I haven’t seen in a long time. Like the vector CRTs that exist in old Asteroids cabinets. The phosp…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface-conduction_electron-em... These have almost all the advantages of a CRT, but without a lot of the downsides like bulkiness and materials usage.

Reading through the history section pisses me off. That seems like some really impressive tech; I wonder where it’d be today if it had succeeded.

Re: A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)

#48

Post by simcop2387 »

liquidise wrote: post #39

As a former epileptic, the strobing that comes with CRTs is something i’m happy to be rid of. It wasn’t something I could see so much as perceive , but it’s a feeling my body still remembers. That said modern monitor tech still has big problems. Quantum dot has a chance of shifting the field in the next 10 years but right now any monitor effectively excels at only 2-3 of: color gamut, color accuracy, pixel density, r…

I'm curious if you've ever had the chance to see an oled monitor in person and if it reacts similarly to a CRT for you. They have a global refresh/flash instead of one that's rasterizing so it might not have the same effect and they don't have the same phosphor fade of a CRT either. I'm also curious about the LCD monitors that strobe the backlight to reduce apparent motion blur (basically they shut the backlight off during the time that each pixel is fading between colors in each frame).

Re: A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)

#49

Post by nickjj »

indymike wrote: post #45
nickjj wrote: post #24

CRTs were really good. They really were. I remember back in the day the HardOCP forum[0] had massive threads about people buying the FW900 in the mid-2000s. It definitely achieved legendary status. Sadly I never had a chance to use one. I remember having a 21" NEC that let me play Quake 2 / 3 at 120hz at 640x480 in the mid-late 1990s and I think I paid like $120 for it back then from one of those refurbished monitor…

For a long time the big advantage of LCD was just size and energy use. You lost a lot of the clarity with the conversion from analog VGA or SVGA signal in devices that predated DVI and HDMI connectors. It would be really hard to trade in my 28" 4k display for any CRT I've ever had.

> It would be really hard to trade in my 28" 4k display for any CRT I've ever had.

Agreed. I use an LCD today (25" 2560x1440) and I'm happy with it.

But I did wait until about 2007 or 2008 to get my first LCD which was a 1600x1200 Dell FP2007 (which still works the last time I plugged it in a year ago as a very temporary 2nd monitor while I waited for a replacement).

Re: A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)

#50

Post by liquidise »

simcop2387 wrote: post #48
liquidise wrote: post #39

As a former epileptic, the strobing that comes with CRTs is something i’m happy to be rid of. It wasn’t something I could see so much as perceive , but it’s a feeling my body still remembers. That said modern monitor tech still has big problems. Quantum dot has a chance of shifting the field in the next 10 years but right now any monitor effectively excels at only 2-3 of: color gamut, color accuracy, pixel density, r…

I'm curious if you've ever had the chance to see an oled monitor in person and if it reacts similarly to a CRT for you. They have a global refresh/flash instead of one that's rasterizing so it might not have the same effect and they don't have the same phosphor fade of a CRT either. I'm also curious about the LCD monitors that strobe the backlight to reduce apparent motion blur (basically they shut the backlight off…

I own a 77” LG oled that I positively love and have not noticed any strobing. I’m also no longer epileptic, so maybe that also plays a role?
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