- Joined
- Dec 2, 2006
- Posts
- 8,793
Here's a little story about how I got back into CRTs.
Just like you, I would always hook my stuff with composite or whatever I had handy onto modern LCDs, be it my Mega Drive, Playstation or what have you.
Some games were really hard for me and couldn't grasp why; eventually, I decided that I just wasn't as good as the younger me and called it a day.
Still, there was one boss of Rocket Knight Adventures I just couldn't beat, it looked like I couldn't move in time, I was reacting too slow and that really got on my nerves. After some days I decided to just put the game away and get onto something else.
Then I read about those amazing Sony BVM/PVM monitors and snagged a nice hi-end 800 lines BVM, 14" for ~40€ (a BVM 14M4DE), so I started making my own RGB cables and started playing some games. Needless to say the picture was amazing, I was speechless at how much I was missing with LCDs.
Finally, I fired up Rocket Knight Adventures and as soon as I took control of Spark, one thing became apparent: it was like the game was reading my mind, it moved the character before I would press the button.
After the initial shock I realized I was so used to the lag that my brain would intentionally slow down my reactions to get in sync with the lag; this is why I was getting the impression of the game reading my mind.
I cleared the game with 1 life, on my first try. The impossible boss became a breeze.
Now, a CRT is kind of impractical these days, but for fuck's sake go get a nice scaler because if you play those old consoles you're really missing a lot (and making playing these games a lot more frustrating then they used to).
P.S.: Eventually I went full retard and got myself a SEGA Astro City arcade cabinet. I'm back to being a happy kid.
Excellent Post. You pretty much summed up why I still do my old school gaming on a crt monitor.
Plug and Play, no messing around with settings, looks awesome and zero lag.
I do understand that some people have reasons for using scalers, whether it's Space, My Gf or Wife won't allow it or simply they just dont like the look of a bulky crt monitor.