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Comment by smrtinsert | Hacker News Reader

The audio production world which goes to great lengths to reproduce audio equipment, I would love to see shaders faithfully replicate classic monitors.

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I think it would be interesting to mix the two ideas and have a (Dolby Atmos/Windows Spatial) spatial sound map model for some of these games that includes the hum and fuzzing noises of the CRT scanner and the terrible locations of old Harmon-Kardon PC speakers right beside that CRT and a tiny bit of random electromagnetic interference. Really go for that 90s PC gaming experience.

And a special key binding to make the screen briefly distort with an audible "THUNK! bzzzz...."

"Hold on, the monitor is acting up again, let me open up its menu three levels deep to force it to degauss."

I used to like pointing the back of the monitor at another monitor in the lab, and hitting degauss - just to watch the other monitor get influenced by it

And a turbo button for my PC

The Iiyama Vision Master Pro 454 should be one of those. And the Sony FW900 24" wide-screen trinitron. I had both those screens.

The Sony FW900 is without doubt the best CRT monitor ever built (IMHO). It was a ridiculous monitor, both in size, sharpness, colour accuracy and most of all weight.

I remember buying a used one for about £300 (I recall the retail price was close to £1000) and my housemate and I carrying the thing up to my room, almost breaking our backs. It was easily 40kg. But it was an outstanding monitor. The best CRT screen I've ever used by a long shot.

FW900 started at a cute $1999.99 in 2001

Dunno, I really hated Trinitron screens due to both horizontal strips as well as seeing individual pixel triplets and gaps between them (I guess my eyes are super sensitive to parallel/perpendicular lines; can't look happily at non-retina LCDs either). I found Samsung's Invar variants in their SyncMaster (757DFX and higher going up to 2048x1536) superior and much more natural (likely my eyes aren't that sensitive to diagonal non-perpendicular directions).

I didn't mind those lines across the screen. I could definitely see them but didn't find it bothered me. I couldn't go back to a non-retina LCD screen now though. And I suspect going back to my old FW900 might be something I wouldn't enjoy these days. But I remember at the time being blown away from it after having a variety of average to slightly above average CRT screens.

Actually, one of my earliest memories of using CRT monitors was my first PC (a Packard Bell 286) with the monitor having a dot pitch of about 0.3, or possibly even higher than that. The pixels were like bricks.

Eventually upgraded to a monitor with a dot pitch of 0.26 and I remember it felt like going from a standard LCD screen to a retina screen. It was quite the revolution for me at the time.

Me and some friends acquired some cheap Eizo 21" CRTs back in the day. It was an awesome display, but weighted >30kg.

The amount of heat it dissipated was huge, tho.

Not the same, but you might enjoy searching in Shadertoy [0] for tags such as TV or CRT.

[0] https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4dlyWX

We probably need 8k monitors for that to make sense.

A 4K one should be enough for example to emulate the tiny grill wires visible in the old Trinitron screens. Those lines were very hard to see and a lot thinner compared to a then single pixel thick line.

Seconded.

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