End of infinity: Small Broadcast Video Monitor for Retrogaming

Retrogaming is best experienced with CRTs. There's least amount of delay and timing and scanline reproduction is authentic. SVGA CRTs designed for 70 Hz would perhaps be the sharpest, but their phosphors are a bit too fast so they flicker with PAL (50 Hz) and NTSC (60 Hz) refresh rates a bit too much in addition to requiring at least line doubling. They don't natively support the TV-era 50/60 Hz 240p modes, but were instead operated in line doubled modes where the common game resolution of 320x200 (70 Hz) was actualy drawn as 320x400. However, some SVGA monitors can be operated at twice the refresh rate at 120 Hz and 240p giving in some ways the best result. This still isn't fully NTSC faithful as there's no way to draw the image without a frame buffer, but it never the less is good for image quality comparisons.

I recently acquired a Broadcast Video Monitor (a kind of high quality TV-style display) so I could authentically and natively view PAL/NTSC signals.

Click to enlarge. Sony BVM-9044D (9" 450 line Trinitron) with analog coaxial RGB input (composite sync). Very clear scanlines. The signal is 240p 60 Hz NTSC. The displayed image has a resolution of 320x200. Horizontal resolution could perhaps be a bit higher, but overall I feel this kind of display would have been perfectly fine for DOS-era games.

Click to enlarge. Nokia 449Xi (15" >1000 line Trinitron) with analog VGA input (RGB). The displayed resolution is single scan 320x200 at 120 Hz.

Click to enlarge. Nokia 449Xi (15" >1000 line Trinitron) with analog VGA input (RGB). The displayed resolution is double scan 320x200 (so 320x400) at 70 Hz (standard mode 13h). Double scan results in very clear and sharp image.

Standard (S)VGA monitors can not be used to faithfully reproduce games such as those of Nintendo Entertainment System due to incompatible signal standards (PAL/NTSC vs. VGA). NTSC having a 15.723 kHz horizontal sync rate vs. VGA 31.46875 kHz. NTSC needs to be either line doubled or vertical scan rate doubled (or both). Doubling the vertical refresh rate would be desirable, but at the same time needs an undesirable frame buffer that adds some delay.

Difference between textmode (80x25) in 240p (60 Hz) with Sony BVM and 400p (70 Hz) SVGA monitor. VGA textmode characters are 9x16 pixels whereas in 240p the characters consist of 8x8 pixels. These correspond to resolutions 640x200 and 720x400.