Comment by pezezin
12 days ago
I have recently been playing with CRTs again, and something that I have noticed is that for fast-paced games running at 60 or 70 Hz* I don't notice the flicker much, but for text anything less than 85 Hz is headache inducing. Luckily the monitor I got can do 1024x768 at 100 Hz :)
* The original VGA and thus most MS-DOS games ran at 70 Hz.
I remember when I got my first computer for myself, instead of sharing with others, it was "obvious requirement" that the screen runs at least 72Hz, preferably higher. Which was why 15" CRT had to run at 800x600.
Later on, and with graphic card that had more than 2MB of RAM, I remember experimenting a lot with modelines to pull higher refresh rates and higher resolution on the 17" CRT I inherited when my father switched to a laptop :)
Our first PC was a 486 with a crappy 15" monitor, but I was too young to remember the details clearly. I can consider myself lucky, my dad was a big fan of Sony and we soon moved to a nice 17" Trinitron :)
Funnily enough, my first "personal" machine was a 486DX2, with a 15" "multimedia" monitor (meaning it had crappy speakers built-in and pretty much useless microphone).
I don't really count it as "first PC" because by that time PCs have been in house for several years, but it meant I could goof off in games or Logo without asking for a turn ;)