Hacker News Reader

Comment by dwighttk | Hacker News Reader

Oh man I’m so much lazier, I would just set the G4 on top of the mini and try to figure out how to send video to the G4s screen, give up, and just use a new monitor.

View on HN

The 17” 1440x900 display would be an absolute dealbreaker for me personally, so I’d also have to figure a way how to fit a better display in.

Which would probably be trickier than everything else in this project, because where can you get a 17” 1440p IPS panel these days?

It's not so bad. Especially if you spend most of your time in a terminal, as I often do. It's somewhat nostalgic, even. Ah, my first display, a 80x25 text mode DOS 5.0 terminal on a CRT...sigh

I might be misremembering, but I feel like when LCDs became mainstream, they were ostensibly worse in resolution than CRTs. CRTs were commonly at 1024x768 for a while, but I remember running specially-selected ones at 1600x1200 or even higher (1860xsomething?). LCDs replaced my nice high res CRTs with 1024x768, and then I waited a decade for 3840x2160, which was definitely a step up.

I remember being ridiculously excited by my circa-2004 24" LCD. How could a screen be that big? 1920x1200 pixels? How can there be so many!? And now that is like a tiny garbage dumb LCD that you find in the storage closet and decide isn't worth the desk space.

(My favorite thing is the HDTV craze. You can still buy laptops with a 720p display these days, because "HD" is supposed to be a positive marketing term! But it's really 1995-era resolutions at 2022 prices!)

> they were ostensibly worse in resolution than CRTs

That fits my recollection too. I remember 1280x1024 being very common on 19-21" CRTs circa 2000.

My cheap 19 inch dell does 1600x1200. I sometimes run it at 1024x768 120hz and it's much clearer than my 240hz lcd

You can run them at 120hz with 0 input lag as well. I feel like we made a mistake phasing them out. There was even a wide screen trinitron which ran at 1080p 120hz, 20 years ago.

Some pro model CRTs were 1920 * 1280. I have a 21" Viewsonic in a closet that still works every time I try it, but wow is it heavy and bulky compared to what we're used to today.

That does sound delightfully nostalgic. Sometimes when I use my iPad for SSH'ing in to things, I get that same sense. I don't need a dedicated SSH box that badly, and I wouldn't gut an iMac for the privilege when it can run SSH natively, but that would be a fun box to have.

Some of them came with 1680x1050 displays which are still respectable.

It's not hard to find 4K 17" panels as spare parts for laptops, but they're generally 16:9 rather than 16:10.

Lenovo is releasing 16:10 screen for their next generation laptops lines. So it is a matter of time till replacement screens for those to come up on ebay. I guess?

Add letterbox bars to the front glass then, job done.

Inch is diagonal so a 17” 16:9 would be to wide.

Unless I’m thinking wrong we’d need something at (sqrt(17)*(16^2+9^2)/(16^2+10^2))^2, which should put us at 15.23”, I know 15,4” exists so that might be doable depending on how much room there is to spare, 5mm is a bit but it could maybe work.

Sorry I did this wrong yesterday, wrote it late in bed and lost an exponent a long the way, should be 16,54”

With the following calculation, 1.6 is for 16/10 sqrt((1.617/sqrt(1.6^2+1))^2+((9/16)(1.6*17/sqrt(1.6^2+1)))^2)

1600p, 16:10 https://www.panelook.com/LP170WQ1-SPE1_LG%20Display_17.0_LCM...

The arm that holds up the monitor is designed for a specific weight. It would be difficult to swap out the display.

Most of these arms lack the strength to hold up the original screen anymore. Probably due to fatigue of the spring. I still have one and it's just enough to hold it up but every time I hit the table it flops down :'(

Mostly an issue for the 17" and up. The 15" screens seem to be okay with the arm spring.

You might be able to find a metalworking shop that could manufacture a new spring for you. If you’re willing to pay for it.

I'm willing to pay for it sure, but I'm very worried about actually replacing it.. The force on that thing makes me feel like I'm unleashing a dragon and I have a feeling this is why they used very special screws, to avoid people messing with it.

It's also the shortest-lived Mac design ever so I wonder if this had something to do with it.

Too bad though because it was very beautiful and it had form and function, unlike current iMacs which are not height-adjustable at all.

And if you don't get it exactly right, the mouse ball pops out, expands to a massive size and tries to flatten you.

Pro tip/life hack: bring a small sack of sand to match the weight, but be ready to run if you misjudge.

New LED displays are much lighter, so you probably have lots of margin to just put in dead weight.

Honestly I have three of these things and they aren't great. Maybe for a side or "kitchen" computer. If Mac had a decent RDP protocol, that would be a great way to use them.

Same, I'm running a Samsung Neo G9 at 5120x1440 and I could still use more room. Total deal breaker, and almost silly considering it can power a much nicer screen.

The original hardware runs OpenBSD.

Is VNC (or another remote desktop) an option without all this surgery?

https://www.openbsd.org/macppc.html

You can install dualboot voidlinux and run pretty much anything ppc, so yes

Reply on news.ycombinator.com