Difference between revisions of "General monitor advices"
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Although many of those monitors may already have digital DVI inputs, which provide better image quality than the analog VGA, DVI is not recommended for DOS games because of refresh rate issues. A major disadvantage of LCD monitors is the inability to display some more exotic resolutions, meaning that games that use them may only be displayed with display flickering and other problems. | Although many of those monitors may already have digital DVI inputs, which provide better image quality than the analog VGA, DVI is not recommended for DOS games because of refresh rate issues. A major disadvantage of LCD monitors is the inability to display some more exotic resolutions, meaning that games that use them may only be displayed with display flickering and other problems. | ||
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| + | == Related VOGONS threads == | ||
| + | *[http://vogons.zetafleet.com/viewtopic.php?t=34616 Games with higher resolution than normal for their era] | ||
Revision as of 03:05, 24 February 2013
Display devices with an aspect ratio of 4:3 are important for a proper DOS and early Windows gaming experience. Although widescreen monitors were existent at that time, they only started to became prevalent in the mainstream consumer space around 2005, meaning that most games up to this point were optimized for 4:3 and games with widescreen support were scarce. Although such games can be played on a modern 16:9 or 16:10 monitor, one would have to deal either with stretching the image or black bars.
CRTs are overall preferable, even if they have the problem of taking much space and are not built anymore. They support all exotic resolutions that were frequently used in the DOS days, tend do blur rough edges and dithering, and don't suffer from image quality penalties from scaling lower resolutions as much as LCD monitors do. Monitors with resolutions up to 1600x1200 and refresh rates of at least 85Hz are optimal.
Decent LCD monitors started to appear in the mass market in around 2001, at first commonly with 1024x768 (15") resolutions, which is already high enough to take advantage of late 90s 3D accelerators. Later 17" and 19" 1280x1024 monitors are 5:4, meaning the image will be slightly jolted when running 4:3 resolutions, but this is far less noticable than the strech on widescreen displays. LCDs have the obvious advantages of taking less space and putting less strain on the eyes on lower frequencies. When choosing one of these, one should look for monitors with reponse times optimally not higher than 25ms, because otherwise blurring in fast games will be very noticable. Also, good scaling performance is important for low-res DOS games.
Although many of those monitors may already have digital DVI inputs, which provide better image quality than the analog VGA, DVI is not recommended for DOS games because of refresh rate issues. A major disadvantage of LCD monitors is the inability to display some more exotic resolutions, meaning that games that use them may only be displayed with display flickering and other problems.
