The Ultimate Guide for CRT Gaming on a Modern PC

in my recent video that's titled the real reason why CR2 monitors are better I said I would do a followup showing people how to actually get a CRT to work on the modern PC but I feel the need to also explain how one can acquire a CRT monitor for those that haven't already and there's a reason for that thanks to certain videos on YouTube Some people may be led to believe that getting back into CRTs can be difficult and an expensive Endeavor well like with PC gaming in general it can get very expensive the more high-end the product is but common CRT models from the 2000s like the 17in dell and Samson SN master I use today offer quality that is acceptably close enough to something like the now highly coveted view Sonic eer and I can say that with some Authority because I also own an eer well not anymore I don't want to talk about it but in a way I actually prefer these two monitors they come in Black which looks way better than than the beige set when sitting next to a modern LCD they also aren't as bulky as the vew Sonic both in the rear and the front with slightly thin the bezels and still at a very affordable price even now but not everyone believes this in my last video there was a comment that mentioned that CRTs are no longer affordable I I mean yeah if you take the lazy route and just go on eBay and search CRT monitor but guys there used to be as many CRT monitors in prac Al every household as they are dishwashers just get up off your lazy butt and put in a little more effort go down to a pawn shop visit the garage sale E-Waste facilities or stop by your grandma's and inquire whatever happened to that PC she used to have 15 years ago odds are she still has it in the Attic or something there has to be a CT somewhere in your town that is in decent working condition it doesn't cost a noral leg unless you live in the middle of nowhere or a snobby wealthy town with citizens that would Hur at the mere sight of a '90s Ford Focus which I guess if you lived in a posh place like that then price probably isn't really an issue but as for the rest of us yes CRTs will become harder to find for a decent price in the years to come but at the time of this recording it's actually usually the collectible monitors like the vew sonics and the trinitrons that can cost a lot but a basic Samsung Dell LG it's not too late there is always an unwanted CRT somewhere nearby that people want to get rid of but haven't gotten around to doing it for whatever reason I mean throwing away CRTs are actually a bit harder than just chucking them in the nearby dumpster and yeah some people do just do that but they shouldn't that's E-Waste that's really bad so my Samsung sync Master which is not yet a premium display in the Retro Gaming market cost me about $40 granted this was maybe 2 years ago or something like that my Dell which is only slightly less capable to the sync master came to 0 because I got it from an aunt that was relieved but also confused when I asked her if I could have it and I get why she didn't understand why I was so giddy as I carried what was to her this big paper weight to my car CRTs can be invasive in their very nature especially when space is limited but they don't have to be and that's because they do not replace a Modern Display especially for productivity use cases this is why I recommend that you have a setup that utilizes both a Modern Display and a CRT CRTs are better than modern displays at one thing only and that is gaming this means the display doesn't need to be as big since you don't need to have as much screen real estate for showing Danse small text in websites or spreadsheets or clusters of multitasking apps but for just video games a 17 in is perfectly fine however if you feel you can afford to use some something bigger like 19 in or more then go for it but a 17in CRT is sometimes old people can deal with but still the strength of CRT Still Remains even in these more restrictive scenarios okay let's stop wasting time getting a CRT to run on a PC that has a graphics card older than a decade or so was really easy since a lot of them had analog capable ports either they used VGA which is usually the only connector CRT monitor has or DVI so you'll need to get your hands on a DVI to VGA converter but since the dvi's analog signal is the same as a VGA this adapter is usually small simple and cheap without compromising on image quality since no signal conversion is taking place but be careful make sure your graphics card's DVI port has the right pins for an analog signal since DVI can sometimes only do digital and this is the issue with modern graphics cards which don't have any capability of sending sending out an analog signal even if it has a DVI port so we'll need a sort of digital to analog converter or DAC of some kind now fortunately VJ is a standard that doesn't seem to want to die because of how common it is and I have some good news unlike an episode of My Life in gaming or retro RGB converting a digital signal from something like an HDMI to VGA is very inexpensive simple HDMI to VGA Dongo is all you need in fact I have three different variants all three of them work the same now if you're like me that uses a graphics card that only has one HDMI port and let's say your main LCD or OLED displays plugged into that HDMI port that usually is not a problem you can get a display port to HDMI converter for either your main display or for your CRT and don't worry about having two video conversion adapters between your PC and your CR2 monitor it won't add any additional lag or compatibility issues since no real processing is taking place in this adapter because of just how sophisticated display port is which is able to detect and adapt to the HDMI protocol and as far as I know all modern cards can do that so you'll only need an inexpensive passive display port to HDMI converter like a dongle or even just a plain old display port to HDMI cable which I personally don't need since I'm using the monitor that does connect through a display port but for those that don't there's that op and that is pretty much it well actually only in terms of Hardware there is stuff we'll need to do in software to get the most out of your CRT so once you have everything plugged in Windows should be able to detect the CRT if not automatically then you'll need to manually switch from your Modern Display to the CRT by bringing up the project menu by holding down the windows and PE key and just cycle through four separate options by either using your mouse or by just hitting the P key whilst still holding down the windows key this is great if for some reason the CRT is has a black screen it doesn't show anything so just by tapping the key you can then switch back to your main display without needing to blindly navigate through the project menu with a mouse a quick side note the project menu usually gives each monitor one of two labels first screen which is strangely referred to in the menu as PC screen or second screen now I get that project menu is designed for people that are using literal projectors that plugged into their PC so they can tell the difference but it works the same with dual monitor setup so can be a bit confusing now which of your two monitors will be assigned first screen depends on which Port it's plugged into so sometimes depending on how your graphics card handles the port hierarchy the CRT can become first screen with your main display set to Second this isn't a big deal but if you don't like the arrangement then you'll have to swap some cables around and yes you can change the this in your video card settings but that only affects Windows the buot up sequence your motherboard bio settings menu and sometimes the Windows login screen will always be displayed on the first screen okay so even though I'm using an Nvidia card all you AMD card users out there should be able to do all these exact same things in theory but since I'm a filthy in video shill some of this stuff might not apply to you but really AMD is capable of all of the same stuff I will be mentioning from this point on now if you're an Intel Graphics user there's no guarantee this will work even though it might because really most of the stuff is handled by windows and not entirely your graphics driver except there is one thing that I think applies only to in video cards and that is Windows sometimes doesn't detect the CT for whatever random reason and it turns out this is actually a firmware bug that applies to pretty much all nid cards prior to the 20 or 30 series so for those users you'll need to download the Nvidia Graphics firmware update tool for display port 1.3 and 1.4 Link in the description below uh this is not a driver update it is a firmware update so I would recommend that you have your PC plugged into a UPS because if the installation is interrupted it could very likely break your graphics card so why is this firmware important especially since we don't even need display port 1.3 or 1.4 in this situation well it turns out that this fix for the bug that affected the display ports monitor detection capability improves the detection capability across the board including the card's ability to properly detect the CRT even if it's plugged into HDMI and not just display port okay with all that annoyance out the way even though this next bit may seem to be very technical just follow my instructions and you'll be just fine usually at this point windows will be able to detect the CRT no problem the technology is so old however that a lot of the time Windows doesn't know the crt's full capability so often you will only have access to a handful of resolutions and refresh rates to choose from and a lot of them may not be very comfortable to look at if the refresh rate isn't higher than 60 HZ which gives the appearance of the screen flashing at you if you haven't seen my previous video on Coots check it out because it will explain why even though 60 HZ on the RTV doesn't have any noticeable flicker the computer monitor set to 60 is noticeable I'm not going to get into it now of why that is just watch that video if you're curious but needless to say we really should be aiming for at least 70 HZ that is the point where the flicker stops being noticeable by a human eye so every time a new monitor is installed Windows will request some information from the monitor like the name of the model what its capabilities are its native resolution and other stuff like that this information is then stored in the Windows registry but often windows will struggle with this and may not be able to gather enough information about the CRT Beyond maybe the model name but sometimes not even that so we'll need to manually tell the Windows registry what the crt's model ID is along with all the info it needs now don't worry we're not going to be messing around with Registries and stuff like that there's already a tool that can do all that for us go and download custom resolution utility or Cru a tool by toasty X I'm currently using version 1.5.1 I'll have the download link in the description below after downloading you may need to also unz up the folder go into it and you'll notice some executables launch the one simply called Cru but before you do you really should be running this app on your CRT and not on some other display so switch to that if you haven't already already the reason is because the utility will need to be able to identify the monitor that you're using especially if Windows can't even tell what your CRT is even called sure you could check on the back of the monitor itself to see what its model name is but that can only take us so far because we need to make sure we select the right display we definitely don't want to accidentally make changes to your Modern Display but don't get too worried if you mess something up or make a horrible mistake because one of those other executables in that folder called reset all will'll do exactly that by resetting all currently plugged in monitors to their default profiles again This only affects the Windows registry profiles none of it will mess with the actual monitors themselves so when you go to the drop- down menu it shows a list of all the different displays that are stored in your Windows registry or in other words every single display that has ever been connected to your PC in the past so this list can potentially be really long but all we need to focus on is is the one that has the word active in parentheses this is why we have to do this on the CRT so that the utility can detect which of these displays is currently in use especially if you don't know the name of the CRT in which case it may just refer to it as generic plug- andplay monitor however that's the worst case scenario in most situations there will at least be some kind of model name in my case Windows was able to detect my Dell model IDE 7720p and my Samsung synm CRT which I used a few months prior but even if you know the name of your monitor the active label is still important because there may be some duplicates that are basically red hearings I don't know why they are duplicates I don't know why they exist just ignore anything that isn't labeled active so once you have selected your CRT you'll see there's a bunch of resolutions that may or may not be activated so what just enable everything and then click okay uh no what's listed here are really only the the more common basic standard stuff and don't necessarily reflect the true capabilities of your CRT so we need to find out some things about this Monitor and there are two approaches to this the first is to go to your web browser and do a search of your displays name and model and chances are you'll find a page that lists the specs and features of your CRT the second approach if you can't find any info on what your monitor specs are then no joke you can just experiment try at a bunch of relatively High standardized resolutions at a somewhat low refresh rate like 70 HZ and if the CRT happens to not support that specific resolution then it just won't work the CRT will simply display a message like out of range you won't be able to break your monitor just by trying out a whole bunch of resolution and frequency profiles I mean it is more time consuming but totally doable however if you are able to find some technical info about your coot monitor there are some key things to note like what your displays max resolution and refresh rate is in my case this Dell I'm using can support 1280 x 1024 with 70 HZ being that resolution's maximum refresh rate and the absolute highz refresh rate is 120 htz with that refresh rate's maximum resolution being 640x 480 so the rule of thumb is as you lower the maximum refresh rate you can increase the resolution or vice versa and these different refresh rates would usually be in intervals of 5 Herz so like 70 75 80 85 Etc with one exception and that is 72 HZ since that is the standard refresh rate for Motion Pictures which is intentionally different from the frame rate of movies that are 24 frames a second just watch my other video if you don't know why 72 is so important in fact my Samsung sync Master's Max frequency at its Max rate resolution is 72 HZ and that's not a coincidence all right so let's go back to Cru we now know the max resolution and the max frequency so you can take off those two in Cru but if there isn't an option for one or more of those resolution frequency combinations then you're going to need to do a custom list like how here there is no 120 htz listed anywh but is kept off at only 75 so go over to the right here stand understanded resolutions and click on ADD here I'm going to select 640x 480 since that is the highest resolution that the CRT can handle at its absolute Max refresh rate of a 120 so after changing it to 120 click okay and there it is now let's do the maximum resolution which is 1280 x 1024 with 70 HZ being its highest at that resolution however I'm not actually going to be adding this resolution because out of all of these standard resolutions 1280 x 1024 is not a 4x3 aspect ratio but is in fact a 5x4 and this as well as most CRTs are usually 4x3 so according to the little amount of info I can find on the matter if a manufacturer wanted their consumer monitored to be fully Vasa compliant it had to support 1280 x 1024 and not just 1280x 960 which actually is the 4x3 equivalent but since windows and many windows games like to default to the monitors max resolution I don't want it to always default to a totally wrong aspect ratio so I'm just not even going to give Windows the option on a side note eventually we would get consumer grade 1280 x 1024 LCD monitors at the turn of the 21st century because they're grade for word processing and also web browsing so every time someone on eBay is trying to sell you a 4x3 LCD monitor 95% of the time it's actually a 5x4 monitor okay so we have Max refresh rate and Max max 4x3 resolution that the CRT is capable of producing now we can keep adding new combinations of resolutions and refresh rates you know in between these two extremes but for now let's just click on okay all right so it's saved but we need to execute the changes by running restart 64 since I'm using the 64-bit version of Windows the screen will turn to black for a few seconds as the new display profile is applied you can even hear the disconnect and connect by sound effect and that should be it but if you don't see an image then press f8 to undo the changes fix whatever error you made and then try again now some people might point out that many video card drivers have already built in features for adding custom resolutions yeah except in the case of the Nvidia control panel as an example if the driver doesn't believe your monitor can handle a certain resolution when in reality it can the GPU very often will handle the scaling instead of your your monitor custom resolutions are never treated as standard resolution so some applications including certain games won't even let you select that custom resolution they just won't detect it Cru is just much better in this regard because it is telling your PC that these are resolutions your monitor can natively produce and so all your games never question it if they offer that specific resolution it will work all right technically we're done but one of the most most annoying things with certain games is that sometimes a game will pick really random and strange resolution and refresh rate combos like Quake three Arena of all games I mean Quake three arena is like one of the most stable most well put together games of all time but I guess you can't be perfect because often not always but often this game likes to Def fall to 60 HZ not a problem for LCDs big problem for CRTs because of the flicker however like with most games Quake 3 won't run in a particular refresh rate if windows won't let it usually when you pick a resolution in a video game each option may come with a rather long list of frequencies that can run in said resolution so for instance if I picked 800 by 600 it may give me an option to select 60 70 72 75 85 and 100 but this is the best part about Cru you don't need to activate or add all these different refresh rates that isn't this resolution maximum in this case being 100 htz so just add 800 by 600 add 100 HZ and that's it don't add any other frequencies in that same resolution the result is that every time you select this resolution the game will be forced to run at that 100 htz refresh rate so every time I run 1280 by 960 it's always 70 and never 60 if I select 1024 x 768 it will always be 85 and so on now that that's for well relatively modern stuff but what about real retro resolutions like 240p or in the case of games for Doss 200p specifically 320x 200 which is technically a 16 by10 aspect ratio in fact all the PC games had a lot of 16 X10 resolutions to choose from aha so that's why back in the day LCDs were 16 X1 at first before 16x9 replaced it but anyways 320x200 used to be a very common resolution for dos gaming because it was a little faster and used slightly less vram or processing than the 4x3 equivalent of 320x 240 doesn't sound like much but trust me back in those days with those really slow 386 and 486 that did actually boost performance quite a lot but even though 320x200 is technically a widescreen resolution these games were still designed for 4x3 aspect ratio kind of kind of like how the NES and SNES ran games at 256x 224 which was not 4x3 on paper but the TV would always stretch the image to make it 4x3 so each pixel isn't perfectly Square they are slightly rectangular but here's the thing unlike retro game consoles desktop Coots from the '90s and 2000s never presented these games in their native resolution this is because high-res capable desktop monitors need to have very thin scan lines to be able to fit like over a thousand or more Progressive lines as opposed to a TV's 480 or 576 at most that are interlaced so half the work of that even so these tiny scan lines would actually be way too skinny for something as low as 200p so you'd mostly be seeing really thick black lines compared to what a similar signal would look on a CRT television so what most PC monitors would do is double the resolution for these really Low video signals so even though a game like Doom would send a signal of 320 x 200 the monitor would increase that to 640x 400 and that is a very important number because that is the resolution of Dos before Graphics based os's like Windows and Linux took over the PC ecosystem and this might surprise you but modern displays still by default support this resolution right out the box since many motherboard boots sequences and system bius menus run at 640x 400 so although a modern graphics card cannot support a very outdated 320x 200 image they can still output 640x 400 so we're going to add that in the standard resolutions list and set it to 70 HZ because that was also the standard for dos and fun fact this is why Doom ran at 35 frames per second if you know your math 35 is exactly half of 70 so we're adding this profile because if you run something like dosbox you will be able to experience dos games exactly how they were back in the '90s since even back then 200p games were always double to 400p video signal so I might as well show this now since we're on the topic the best way to set up dosbox is to go open the config in the text editor go to where full resolution is and put there original then scroll down to the render section and next to Tor input normal 2X and make sure aspect is set to false the normal 2x setting will make all low rares games run at Double resolution while higher rare stuff like the DOS prompt will be displayed in its native resolution of 640x 400 or any game that happens to also support that resolution and the reason for Full Resolution being set to original will allow for other stuff that isn't just 200p or 400p but also 240p resized to 480p or more specifically 640x480 another very common resolution in DOS gaming or any other number of resolutions that dosbox is capable of running and since everything is now running at 70 HZ this will help reduce the stutter that a 60 HZ display often suffers from because it no longer has to drop one out of every seven frames now that we're running the display at the same frame frequency as all 90s dos based gaming PCs did now the frame rate isn't going to be perfect in every game it depends on the game but that's really more of a dosbox problem that's not really an issue with your display or the way your display is configured how are you doing are you managing to keep up I could drastically simplify this tutorial but I think going deeper into not just the how but also the why of these specific steps that we're performing here and hopefully if you ever run into a problem you'll possess the knowledge know that may help you figure out a solution to that problem because of the understanding of how and why this stuff is the way that it is rather than just passively following steps that seem random or pointless at this point we can now add all the other more common resolutions stuff like 800x 600 1024 x 768 and so on along with their Max refresh rate that this specific monitor can handle however there's a lot more resolutions you can add for instance even though this monitor cannot support more than 70 HZ at 1280 by 960 it can do 72 Herz at 1200 by 900 and 702 is absolutely perfect for watching movies I I didn't think movies would look smoother on a CRT and yet they really do even if they run at 24 frames a second I mean sure if you had friends over we would still use something bigger rather than try to huddle around a small CRT but if you're one of those lucky ones that can get a very large desktop CRT 1280 by 960 or 1024 is not the limit there are some models out there that can go over 1440p I mean they are rare but the still somewhat common 19in CRTs with a 1600x 1200 max resolution is probably the closest uh 4x3 approximation to 1920 x 1080 in terms of total pixels on the screen so I don't think games on this old Tech are going to look worse when compared to a modern display I would like to point out that if you want better black levels without sacrificing the brightness of the image then you'll need to increase your monitor's contrast setting while lowering the brightness setting until the black pixels that appear dark gray turns into actual black and then once again head into your GPU control panel and go to the color settings and increase the gamma until you can barely see the dark Grays in the reference image older games and older versions of windows generally didn't look too dark back in the day but it is a bit of an issue today since modern windows and modern drivers are more balanced for modern displays than they are for old CRTs by raising the gamma in Windows whilst lowering your monitor's brightness it will help maintain the Deep blacks whilst not having it be too difficult to see darker shades of color in games and while we at it since we're still in the control panel uh especially For You Nvidia users go over to adjust desktop size and position go to the scaling Tab and under select scaling mode select aspect ratio and under perform scaling on select display instead of GPU this will help your monitor to as often as possible display the visuals at their desired resolution rather than having the GPU scale it in the software mode which will result in a softer more blurry look which we really don't want so this was a pretty long video I hope that this tutorial was clear and concise easy to understand and I hope that you'll be able to get your CRTs to run as well as humanly possible until next time

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Id: TWrc36BMLFs

Length: 29min 32sec (1772 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 19 2024