TECH TALES
The reality of gaming on a CRT MONITOR in 2024
When I was a child I spake as a child,” so it says in the Bible, presumably before the invention of the word ‘spoke’. “But when I became a man, I put away childish things.” It’s true, isn’t it: time passes, new hardware arrives and we box up our former treasures, their VGA leads dangling, pleading with us as we send them up to the loft. We forget about them, sometimes for decades, and then we see a TikTok of someone playing a Windows 95 game, feel an overwhelming urge to do the same, start Googling and realise that the old desktop PC we boxed up and banished in 2001 is worth a grand now on eBay and there’s a whole community of collectors with alerts set up for every possible listing about them.
The monitors accompanying those dusty old machines, though, are a different matter. Their value isn’t purely nostalgic. In fact, there’s a hardcore minority in gaming that swear CRT screens are superior in many ways to modern flat-panel monitors.
There’s a reason they got the boot off our desks in the first place. They took up vast amounts of space, and moving them even an inch required at least three powerlifters and a sweaty afternoon of dedicated effort. They were eye-wateringly expensive, not especially reliable, and repairs were a confusing ordeal. It was like outputting your display onto an aquarium.
What nobody ever called into question, though, was image quality. CRT monitors hold numerous advantages over modern screens, including bright colours, responsive refresh rates and a natural quasi-anti aliasing effect that occurs as a by-product of cathode ray tube technology. While modern OLED pixels are all individually controlled, CRT pixels are backlit in a way that’s more like shining a torch behind them to produce the image. That means CRT can’t compete with OLED panels for contrast, since the latter can turn individual pixels off to achieve nice inky blacks, but it deals with noisy images and jagged edges beautifully by blurring them.
THERE’S A REASON THEY GOT THE BOOT OFF OUR DESKS IN THE FIRST PLACE
LOOKING… CORRECT
The effect is that older games somehow just look ‘right’ on CRT monitors, in a way that our contemporary flat screens can’t rep licate. That was certainly this writer’s experience when I finally sourced a 17-inch Packard Bell monitor of the same spec I’d had in 1998, plugged it into my Win98 PC and recognised classic games looking exactly as I remembered them. This is why people pay hundreds of pounds (plus steep shipping costs, these things are heavy remember) on dead tech. The likes of Quake, Planescape:Tormentand GrimFandangohit your eye looking… correct.
And there’s a good reason for it – developers of the ’90s used to actively lean into CRT’s limitations to achieve a better image. They knew that if they purposely created nois
