The Perfect 8-Bit Computer Monitor?

I picked up a fantastic CRT monitor recently, by which I mean several months ago after which I just put it on a shelf because I couldn't figure out what to say about it. Here's what I have to say about it: It's good

Chapters:
00:00 Why most people want RGB CRTs
03:20 Why I want an RGB CRT
05:35 Computing on PVMs
08:55 Meet the PVM-1390
16:00 Video quality tests
20:30 MSX computers
25:20 Video quality tests 2 (MSX)
27:49 Conclusion
28:35 Bonus MSX software
34:00 Outro

[TadanoHitohito]

Please do the two hour feature-length documentary on those MSX machines, that would be epic

[hjf]

now that you mentioned the systems thing, this is pretty much standard for sets sold in south america. they usually were multivoltage too, but most important: practically all TVs here were all PAL/NTSC sets, because in the 80s people would go to Miami and buy NTSC stuff (tapes, VCRs, computers, and even TVs), but the countries actually decided on PAL as the color standard. In Argentina we had our own flavor of PAL (PAL-N or more properly PAL-Nc), and brazil was PAL-M (because of course, everyone wanted their own incompatible flavor so you wouldn't buy an imported set). So after a few years with color TV being mainstream, it was common for sets sold for the south american market to be PAL-N/M/NTSC. At the tail end of CRTs, Philips TVs had PAL-N/M/B/G/I and NTSC. I suppose the "tri system" PAL-N/M/NTSC is what the TVs for this market support. I remember a woman complaining that she bought some VHS tapes in France and "the shitty TVs they sell here don't support SECAM". LOL.

[deterlanglytone]

My dad had been a bit of a video quality nut. So when we got our Sega Megadrive he made sure to get RGB Cables, because he was annoyed by how "noisey" it was. But he only liked one or two games. Revenge of Shinobi was one of them.

[AkirIkasu]

I can help with some of those questions about the disk mag. I can’t answer why that last icon has the McDonald’s logo on it, I can tell you that it is labeled as “extras” or “bonus”, so it probably has some sort of promotion in there.

The reason why it goes back into basic is because it’s using the Interpreter to play back the music. I don’t know why but the preferred way to write music on Japanese computers was with the built in basic music command. Later on even with games programmed in asssembly or C, the music drivers would expect to be given music files in MML or Music Macro Language which was essentiallly just the kind of input that MS Basic would expect.

You should be able to get back into the menu by loading that segment of code again. I notice that it looks like f2 has been overwritten with a new shortcut, so that will probably work.

[PetesGuide]

Great video! About shipping CRTs: I reviewed big CAD monitors (read: 21”) for a decade. Had to return them after testing, usually at the magazine’s expense. If the boss was pushing me to contain costs, I would pack up the monitor, then call the vendor and say, “It’s ready, please verify where you want me to ship it, and BTW, we ship UPS.”

That was _always_ good for about 5 seconds of silence, followed by “Here’s our FedEx number…”

[macbuff]

I remember SCART. It was the HDMI equivalent of the 80s and 90s. As a kid, my parents hooked up the Amiga 500 directly to a TV with a SCART connector using a breakout cable that was compatible with the Amiga. It also handled stereo sound which was nice. It primarily gained traction in much of Europe (it was designed by the French). While it was kind of chunky and you had to be careful not to bend the pins, it nevertheless was quite useful and allowed an early plug and play experience in an analog era

[hsavietto]

MSX was big in Brazil (it was my first computer growing up), and as far as I know it has some level of success in Spain, in the UK and Netherlands.

[amateurprogrammer]

If you'd told me two years ago that there was a

* Sony CRT that looked like a computer monitor
* With picture that looked better on composite than most TVs do on S-Video
* With video inputs on the _side_ so you don't have to reach around it to swap what's plugged in
* With a built-in speaker that actually doesn't sound like garbage
* That can switch between video modes instantaneously
* WITH BUILT IN RGB AND SYNC ON GREEN
* *WITH BUILT IN SUPPORT FOR TTL VIDEO*
I don't think I would have believed you.

I also think we're about to see the biggest case of the Techmoan Effect the retrocomputing world has possibly ever seen.

[mikebailey]

Your closing recollections of finding music before the mp3 boom, really chime with my experience; throughout the 90s I would scour through any demos, games and even educational software, that I could find on the Acorn User or Archimedes World cover discs, looking for the golden nuggets of audio samples, which would often be in the form of a nondescript data file which had to be sliced and converted. I'd then use these to make my own weird tracker music. Finding complete tracker files with their own full sample libraries, then sent me off on hours of playing, replaying, modifying and re-editing. Such an exciting, almost illicit time, especially when compared to today's abundance and immediacy of streaming or downloadable media.

[BokBarber]

Fun fact: the Atari 800 was the first EVER device with S-Video compatibility. Atari invented the standard for their 8-bit line, however they never actually made any monitor to take advantage of it. Users would have to wait years for Commodore to come out with their own line of monitors for their own computer.

[Hafk]

One thing I love about Konami's MSX games is just how many they feel like they are alternate-dimension takes on their arcade/console games. Some of the design changes working out and some not but its just so interesting. Vampire Killer shows that Symphony of the Night was lurking in Castlevania's DNA right from the beginning! The MSX Gradius games in particular have all these extra hidden powerups, story cutscenes, requirements to get the true endings*, etc. All the kind of stuff that doesn't really happen in arcade/console Gradius shmups but makes sense in a shmup that was designed for a home computer.

*having to have a Gradius 2 cart in slot 2 to get the true ending in Salamander is bullshit tho cmon konami you knew better you jerks

[spudd]

There is one thing about CGA composite output: Artifact colours, a few games even use them, Maniac Mansion is one of them. Certainly looks better than the nasty CGA pallet that you get on a normal monitor.

[djsmeguk]

I wrote a speech synthesizer for the spectrum, when I was a teenager. It was terrible, but learning how to make the one bit speaker do stuff was mad fun. It started when I tried to figure out how manic miner did "polyphony". I ended up learning machine code to do it. I think it got published in a magazine, I sent it into Sinclair user.

[Hafk]

Disc magazines will always be one of the coolest things ever to me. When I got more into the Puyo Puyo series and learned about Compile's Disc Station I was floored. What a fun concept.

[PurpleMaleFroslass]

Thanks for giving the MSX a mention! Despite not growing up with one, the MSX is easily my favorite 8-bit machine. Having something so easily expandable with cartridges really should have taken off. You could even get a slot expander that turned one slot into four!

Oh, and I'm currently rocking a Panasonic FS-A1ST, one of the two Turbo-R machines, with a slot expander and way too many add-ons. It's currently on my desk in my living room.

[NJRoadfan]

The KV-1311CR was THE monitor of choice of Apple IIgs users. Much more versatile than the AppleColor RGB and likely the same cost or lower priced. Applied Engineering was a reseller and pushed it heavily as an option for their 8-bit Apple II RGB cards and for the PC Transporter. Pretty sure that model has the same tube as the PVM-1390, just the input board differs. There was also a version with SCART, the KX-14CP1.

As for, why composite? Well, you wouldn't have color video on the Apple II at all without composite video as the system relied on NTSC artifacting to create color from an otherwise black and white video signal.

FWIW, I have my Apple IIgs's text screen set to the same yellow text on dark blue color scheme as the CPC464. I didn't find out until years later that a computer actually came with that color scheme as default! It really does pop on RGB monitors.

[jmccrac]

Always happy to hear your take on CRTs and old computers.

[domramsey]

Amusingly, I remember making a very similar cable for my Amiga back in the day. It used an even more non-standard DB23 connector for video, which you couldn't get then and you can't get now. I ended up using a DB25 plug for my cable and physically sawing off the last pins then gluing the thing back together.

[whatr]

1:13 fun fact about the updated famicom and NES models: the entire marketing campaign and main selling point of it in Japan was indeed that it had AV, but the NES versions of the revision actually *removed* the AV and went back to solely RF output despite the devices being damn near identical

[Space_Reptile]

as a european, hearing someone geek out over something so pedestrian to us like scart is charming