The Perfect 8-Bit Computer Monitor?
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- Опубликовано: 19 июн 2024
- 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
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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 
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Please do the two hour feature-length documentary on those MSX machines, that would be epic
Seconded, I would love that!
My body is ready for 2 hours of CRD talking about MSX. I know very little about them other than the fact it was a thing. I'd love to learn more.
I would certainly watch that in one sitting.
Yes, please
Yeah, that’d be rad
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.
for a random meeting of two commenters, we share a scary amount of subscribed channels. i tip my hat to you.
I spent extra on oem Sony PS2 cables, they make a difference.
Sharper cleaner isn't necessarily better when it comes to 16 bit consoles!!!!
@@flynick yes it it when using component cables on a crt
Is your father single?
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
I remember my family using scart to hook up our tv with our tv tuner up until like 2016 I believe 💀
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.
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.
France and Switzerland were the odd ones out in all of this, not the way around. And actually you had the superior system that accepted everything.
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.
In thé arabic countries thé MSX was Big
Thé sakr MSX was thé first computer to Implement arabic
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.
*Japan being Japan,* I imagine it was a forum to sell, exchange, or just keep up to date with the release schedule of the toys that come in Happy Meals-they are of at least the same quality as gachapon, and often more collectible since McDonald's regularly does tie-ins with the likes of Star Wars, Marvel, Minions, etc.
*On the other hand,* the other graphics on that button might have been logos for other companies that paid to place promotions in that magazine and McDonald's just happened to be offering ¥100 off Big Macs that month.
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…”
Hah, well played 😂
I got 6 of the fucks don't ask me why
But yea... don't wanna even think about packing one
Don't suppose you have a website where any of those surviving reviews could be seen, do you?
UPS could reduce an anvil to dust
Funny, nowadays fedex is the one with the bad reputation there
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
You have to admit, having Penguin Adventure in slot 2 resulting in sprite swaps in Gradius 2 is pretty hilarious though.
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.
Teknika made a dedicated computer monitor around 1983 that took separate luma and chroma. That was probably the best monitor ever made for the Atari 800 and C64.
In Europe, S-Video monitors were available much earlier, and consumer TVs with RGB input existed from 1977.
I don't know if it was quite that many years as the Commodore 1701 monitor (meant for the VIC-20) supports this input in either 1980 or 1981 here in USA.
funny thing is commodore didnt actually make monitors they were rebranded from other models etc,for instance the 1084 which had about 6 or 7 variants were either philips or deawoo,1701 was a jvc,1901 colour monitor was a thomson,you get the idea
@@trojan20112011 And they rebranded an amazing variety of monitors, it was crazy. But the 1701 is a super-duper classic that can still be a good choice today for retro stuff. Also the 1080/1902.
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.
Here’s something you might not know: MSX computers have actually been a somewhat common sight in the Soviet education system, since the USSR signed a massive deal with Yamaha to supply them these machines for schools
4:36 - in the UK it was normally channel 36.
In the 1970s and 1980s most British-market sets did not have a VHF tuner. Even many sets intended for taking on holiday etc.. One known exception being a Grundig set which proudly displayed GB UHF/VHF on its back cover. VHF became a more desirable feature from the 90s onwards with cable TV. 😇
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.
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.
It's how I learned about Pokemon... In 1991 or so, from a Japanese disk mag. Only found out it was Pokemon years later of course, because it was a graphical story in 100%Japanese 😂
I remember having a TV that supported S-video and a gamecube cable with S-video output as an option... but I was like 14 and thought the "S" in "S-video" meant "sound-video" and assumed that all those pins meant it had audio built in. When I used it, I never plugged in the audio RCA cables and didn't get any audio. I thought it was broken so I continued to use Composite up until we finally got a used HDTV with HDMI in my 20's.
When I had my GameCube and Dreamcast and hooked up s video, I almost had an orgasm. No more dot crawl.
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
it's absolutely wild, especially since they then came around once AGAIN and started selling them with SNES AV ports
@@CathodeRayDude I think they never actually sold those officially? iirc, people complained about the lack of AV on the revision so much that you could actually call their support line and get your console officially modded by Nintendo basically.
This was in the days of the "Grey Zapper," I'm guessing?
Because I know that the NES my folks got (boxy, orange zapper, came with two controllers and SMB/Duck Hunt,) had RCAs available for it
@@CathodeRayDude
*About the McDonald's logo,* that button is labeled オマケ, which loosely translates to _freebies._ Japan being Japan, I imagine it was a forum to sell, exchange, or just keep up to date with the release schedule of the toys that come in Happy Meals-they are of at least the same quality as gachapon, and often more collectible since McDonald's regularly does tie-ins with the likes of Star Wars, Marvel, Minions, etc.
*On the other hand,* the other graphics on that button might have been logos for other companies that paid to place promotions in that magazine and McDonald's just happened to be offering ¥100 off Big Macs that month.
@@Naedlus this is specifically referring to the budget redesign that came along around when the SNES/Super Famicom came out (also nicknamed the "top-loader").
I believe the grey zapper was actually the original design and the orange one came later.
Here in Europe the french made SCART a requirement by law, and to cut a long story short that ended up making most every TV sold in europe scart-compatible. which meant RGB in most sets. So while most 8 bit systems didn't support RGB out - when the 16 bits systems came, many had RGB. I grew up with the vic 20, commodore 64 and XT PC but my first own computer was an Amiga 500 (16 bit) and with that I got a monitor which I connected through RGB. So my prime years with gaming was using RGB.
The commodore 64 had monitors supporting chroma/luma. The 1084s which was the staple Amiga monitor also supported it. The Amstrad CPC came with either a black and white monitor, or a RGB monitor. our school had some z80 based computers called Tiki 100 and they had RGBI monitors (same as CGA, just more colors).
SCART was not that prevalent in Europe, plenty of cheaper sets didn't have it well into the mid-'90s.
@@AaronSmart.online I guess it depends on where in Europe. I personally remember it being pretty ubiquitous on TV sets but at the same time most people not using it or using things like composite signals through scart in most cases.
@@AaronSmart.online in most of europe TVs under a cretain price and under a certain screen size were usually excluded from the RGB-SCART requirement.
@@AaronSmart.online I think I saw the first TV with SCART around 1985 and by 1988 it was hard to find a TV without. Perhaps only low-end models didn't have it. It went really quickly.
I confirm that this was the case in France.
I got my first TV in 1984 for my Oric Atmos, and it was mandatory for color TVs to have SCART (did not apply to B&W models).
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.
And obligatory 8088MPH demo that squeezes composite CGA to the max
Another fun fact is that CGA composite in the 640x200 mode outputs exactly the same kind of signal as the Apple II, with the same timings, quirks and hacks. And Apple II was praised for its color capabilities, even though it would look exactly the same. Or worse, because of its lower internal resolution.
Interesting you brought this up... a related fun fact is tha the Tandy 1000HX (and SX and other 1000s with composite out) can't really do the CGA artifact color correclty, but also Tandy 1000s basically just output their framebuffer as "standard" color images without trying to do the color timing in a B&W image thing.
So something like Maniac Mansion can't do composite artifact color on the 1000HX he showed, but the 1000HX can output the 16 color Tandy graphics through its composite port with all the expected loss of sharpness, but "generally" correct colors anyway.
There is a subtle difference between the two methods, and that is a system capable artifact color can output a more narrow color pixel, and two narrow pixels to make one wider pixel generally output by the other method.
You can see this in artifact art on the Apple and CGA games where fine detail in color can be seen.
I've always wondered - wht was the CGA colour palette so horrible? Whats the reason there? I'm sure there was absolutely noone that thought these colours look pretty and go well together.
as a european, hearing someone geek out over something so pedestrian to us like scart is charming
Why do I kinda want a t-shirt that says "CMPTER DUMPSTER" in bold letters on it?
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.
MSX seemed to be briefly popular in the UK as well as Japan, being a right-hand drive format.
right-hand drive format lol... I see that you did there!!
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.
The FM track listing has the FF III Chocobo theme, something called 'Beat of the~" from the game Ys II, something called "Caravan theme" from the game Hector 87, and something from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penguin_Adventure, which was apparently Hideo Kojima's first foray as a game designer. Also the Japanese versions of the titles of late 19th century compositions Gymnopédies and Csikos Post.
Thank you! I suspected they were VGM, especially since I was pretty sure I had heard the track I played before.
I would actually unironically love a two-hour documentary on the MSX in your style lmao
> plugs it in the back
> "that's a really tight port"
nice.
it's details like this that keep me coming back.
I believe the MSX did have a decent following in the Netherlands. Philips being on the MSX train probably helped, as almost all of their generally lesser common products are far more common over here (CD-i, DCC, P2000, etc.) than in other countries.
Yeah, I still have my Sony MSX2 in the attic, in the late 80s, MSX was a very common computer here.
Yeah they made various models. My grandfather had a Philips NMS 8280 (MSX2)
I had a LOGO cartridge, program a turtle to move around
@@mipmipmipmipmip The only cartridge I have is a very slow modem.
It's almost like Philips is Dutch or something.
Always happy to hear your take on CRTs and old computers.
I had that exact monitor when I was a kid ... I plugged my Genesis into it all the time. It was the first RGB cable I made myself. I kick myself now for all the stuff I got rid of, if I had only known I was going to get into retro hardware in my 40's.
Had this monitor too… we got it for the TI 99 4/A although only used its terrible composite… but when we moved to Atari ST my mom built an RGB cable to connect to it. The early STs came with great 12 inch RGB monitors but we preferred using this one due to the larger size and being about as sharp.
Did get a Genesis later but only ever tried composite with it. I think I myself stupidly took it to recycling years later.
I love that hitbit so much, holy shit. Gorgeous machine, it looks like a prop from Blade Runner. And the little Casio looking like their budget keyboards and calculators... you have my full attention if you want to do an MSX centered video.
Great setup for filming the CRT, too! Looks crisp, but real, like I have it right in front of me.
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.
been there done that. Even bought an Amstrad CPC and chopped of the monitor, threw away the computer and hacked an already hacked DB25/23 to work.
Pics or it didnt happen..
Uu
My
This! 💜
I still have all my old cables and.... I inherited my father's cable stash. I got it all going back to the early 1970s. Nothing on earth beats a dad's old cable and a/v bits and bobs stash. I have taken on this mantel as I am ,and have been, a dad for 16 years.
Give me some cables, thanks.
Thanks for the excellent video! Here goes some tips about the MSX and FM:
- FM sound synthesizers need good speakers to sound good. Without proper bass and treble reproduction, it really sounds like a bunch farts and meows. This is valid even for the Sega Mega Drive (aka Genesis). Using the monitor/TV builtin speaker is the sound equivalent to use composite-video. While most people did it back then, but nowadays you just will be gettin the worst possible quality.
- The majority of the later MSX models had the FM sound extension built-in
- The MSX-FAN "drops to BASIC" to play those songs because that's what they're: MSX-BASIC MML music files. To go back to the menu, you can press CTRL+STOP to abort the BASIC program, then notice that the F2 key was conveniently redefined so when you press it, it will load the menu.bas back again. CTRL+STOP on the MSX is equivalent to CTRL+BREAK on MS-DOS machines.
- Unlike other home-computers where the BASIC was almost useless, the MSX version had full support for graphics and music, and had support to be extensible. When you plugged your MSX-Music cart (aka "FM-PAc"), the MSX-BIOS automatically recognized the cartridge BIOS/BASIC extensions and added it to the system capabilities.
- Yep, the MSX was truly plug and play. When you plug an extension, the system automatically recognizes it, and configures it for the user. No need for jumpers, complicated setups, bonkers drivers, etc. It's really instant plug and use. For example, your SD card interface is just a plain mass storage device instantly recognized and used by the MSX system original capabilities. There's no frankenstein hardware mangling going on.
- MSX-DOS can't run MS-DOS applications, but it can run all CP/M v2.2 applications. Most MS-DOS apps back then had CP/M versions too, so the MSX was intended to use them. These days, a lot of people forgot how big the CP/M was until ~1985. One huge advantage is that MSX disks use the FAT file system like the MS-DOS, while CP/M machines tended to use their own obscure proprietary file systems. The idea is that you could bring the Wordstar file you were editing on the expensive MS-DOS company computer to edit on your cheap MSX computer at home. Same deal dor DBase II or any other app that had MS-DOS and CP/M versions.
- The majority of Japanese MSX models don't need the 127V->100V converter, since their power supply was designed with enough tolerance that. This is the case of MSX computers made by Sony, Sanyo and Panasonic. They have been used like this for more than 30 years without a hiccup. But be aware that it's *NOT* the case of the computers made by Toshiba: those had terribly flimsy power supplies that will burn if you use them even with voltages as low as 110V. You must use the 100V adapter with them.
I love how you're slowly building up a magnificent collection of tech.
I'm a little envious but I love it
Japan actually did have a version of SCART called TTC-003 (informally called JP-21 by hobbyists). It had mostly the same pins as SCART but in different locations so the two were incompatible. Weirdly enough, despite Japan standardizing a SCART-like connector, it was almost completely unused in the consumer space.
Sony always did make pretty monitors! It’s a shame that they stopped making computer monitors.
guess again lool
They started again with the Sony INZONE lineup, and it's a really good HDR monitor for gaming
@@lululombard I'm really hoping Sony make a QD OLED monitor soon, a 16x10 aspect one in 27 and 32 inches would be amazing, it really needs to have rolling scan for good motion clarity at even 60Hz, perhaps going up to 240Hz, this would make it the first genuine gaming monitor since the likes of the Sony FW900 CRT, which is still the best modern gaming monitor that exists to this day, also to make it almost perfect, integer scaling and scanline filter overlays would make it great even for older or lower resolution games, a proper hardware g sync module or Sony could produce their own with these features, as well as tear free frames from say 30Hz to 240Hz, they could add BFI, but with native rolling scan it wouldn't be necessary, it could be still useful in some scenarios though, as for resolution, 5k 16x10 resolution is 4800x3000, or maybe even 8k 16x10, which is 8192x5120, giving a nice 42 mega pixel display, still a ways from looking as rich and dense as a 0.24mm dot pitch CRT, but will still be the closest to date yet, I would guess it will take at least a giga pixel display to match a high-end CRTs dot pitch.
I guess they saw PC as a competitor to their PlayStation and stopped making any hardware for it, at least that's my hypothesis, either way it's crap that they stopped making monitors, a late 2000s Sony CRT monitor would've been great to have nowadays instead of the 90s ones that are almost 30yrs old now.
@@Wobble2007 I don’t think we’ll ever see 16:10 again unfortunately, and OLED doesn’t need rolling scan for motion clarity. But I would totally love a Sony QD-OLED monitor!
RGB became common, because they were mandated since the eighties. Including the much later widescreen signals, it uses dc on one of the signal pins to detect anamorph signals.
SCART not only carries RGB it also carries Composite and S-Video, so you where mostly sure to get a picture but you had to get into the settings of your device to set the output to the formats the device supported.
Also RGB red and S-Video chromatic share a pin! That is why here are more devices that support S-Video but not RGB, as it requires extra electronic to switch between modes.
I didn't even start the video yet (ads, damn it!) and the appearance of the MSX already got me hooked!
No way, a Casio home computer. I was such a fan of their watches and musical instruments in the '80s, but without easy access to Internet I was unaware they made home computers. Had I been, oh my goodness I would've been admiring them from a distance. I still am a fan of their products. Your videos are always rich with information, and wit! 👍
I live in Sweden, and my family's first system was an MSX (an SVI-728 I believe). Don't think it was very common though, everyone else I knew who had a home computer back then had a C64. We sold it after a while and got an NES instead, which tiny me saw as a huge upgrade (those next-gen graphics!), but I do miss the MSX sometimes.
It's actually more commonly known as Peritel in France. But growing up in Europe i was chocked when I realized you didn't use SCART. I'm 36 and it always felt like technology from my dad's youth
One of the first real world use cases for SCART's bidirectional feature was for Canal+ descramblers in France in the early 80s, which used it to return the descrambled signal to the TV on the same cable as the scrambled signal, which was far more elegant way of doing things than daisy chaining multiple tuners and RF modulators behind each other.
Great video! 💜
I’m almost shocked to learn that PVM’s are able to display composite signals so much clearer than average displays/TVs. I thought the distortion, bleeding, washing, echo and noise are introduced at the “sender” due to bandwidth limits and modulation, and just unavoidable. Good to know!
A composite video signal is the sum of luma and chroma component signals. Unfortunately in the design of NTSC and PAL, the components interfere with each other when summed, creating artifacts like dot crawl. When producing a composite output signal, the components can first be filtered, which reduces these artifacts (at the expense of reduced resolution). But also on the decoding side, there are different ways of separating the luma and chroma components. Perfect separation is impossible, but higher-end TVs would advertise their use of a comb filter, which improves the quality of the separation.
MSX was also very popular in The Netherlands, since Philips supported it well. The VG-8020 that I still own also has RGB through a round DIN connector.
Awesome video =D =D =D Totally love the channel btw! There's a NEW MSX btw - TerribleFire TFMSX2! I am building one atm, just waiting on the VDP. A new MSX based on available parts that uses a USB keyboard, but original CPU, RAM, VDP, YM etc.
In 1989, I bought a RCA 27" TV, the model number of which I still remember: F27100AK. Despite buying it in the U.S. in Birmingham, Alabama, it had what I later learned was a SCART connector! Those sneaky French labeled it an EIA Multiport connector, and the manual said it was for "future use." It was a magnificent TV, with a plethora of connections in and out, including S-video, and now I'm just dying knowing it had RGB. I used it until the early 00's when it's power supply died (according to a repair place) and I was told it would cost nearly as much to fix it as to buy a new one. Probably nonsense. I still kick myself for giving it up. Excellent piece of NTSC tech. Used it with VHS, S-VHS, Laserdisc, DV tapes, Hi-8, and DVD. Good times.
Side cables allow to put monitor right next to wall. If you have connectors and cables on a back you need couple additional inches.
In my three commodore monitors, those connectors in the back are hidden underneath the plastic bump out for the end of the picture tube so that isn't an issue usually.
This is AWESOME! Great video, I am now lusting over this display. I need one.
@7:05 SCART is two-directional only for stereo audio and composite video. The idea being that you used the RF tuner of your TV set to receive the encrypted pay-tv broadcast, sent it over SCART to the decoder box which then in turn sent back the decrypted composite video and stereo audio to the TV. R/G/B on the other hand was only meant for on-screen display of accessoires like the decryptor box going *to* the TV, and there was no need to send RGB *from* the TV. Luma/Chroma is a late addition to SCART and repurposes the "G" in R/G/B to be the luma signal. Composite and R/G/B is thus supported in any 1980's European consumer TV, but S-Video is an option that started to get more popular in the 90s. SCART even has a signal to tell the TV that a SCART input signal is present. A pay-TV decoder box could detect the "composite" signal from the TV being scrambled, and have the TV automatically switch over to its unscrambled composite output instead of using the RF signal directly. The R/G/B enable signal is even more tricky: The TV is supposed to switch between RGB generated from decoding the composite signal and RGB input on the SCART connector at a bandwidth of several megahertz. The idea is to be able to display semi-transparent on-screen displays with the composite video signal still in the background.
@18:50 you blame it on the "IBM CGA composite output", but actually, 80-column text over composite is crap on any computer, this is not IBM's fault. CGA is meant to display 40 columns in color on composite monitors, 80 columns grayscale on monochrome video monitors and 80 columns color text on RGBI monitors only, and it does an acceptable job on all of these tasks.
@26:38 talking about knock-offs: Midnight Commander is a knock-off of Norton Commander. And your FILMTN clone resembles the competitor X-TREE more than Norton Commander. There were religious fights by DOS people on X-TREE versus Norton Commander just like Unix people were fighting over vi versus emacs.
Ahhh, these videos always come at the best time! Thanks for the upload, CRD!
thanks for going the extra mile as always. Such a fun monitor! As a fighting game player we only ever talk about the broadcast PVMs because they're very luggable to events with handles and such, but this thing is stellar.
I'm from Iraq and msx computers were actually popular over here and I believe also in another golf countries I'm only 20 years old and I used it to learn how to program in Basic
Awesome video thanks for sharing that find with us!
I enjoy your videos greatly. Thank you for the time and dedication you put into this
Thank you for baiting people into learning about the msx computers. They need it
The cracks on the back of the PVM computer monitor got me twice. Thought there was a dog hair on my monitor. 🤦♂
This is a Video that the Younger folks need to see and Understand . It's Important to have at Least 20 CRT Monitors in a Home where one Collects 1000's of Computers :) QC
Fun fact:
SCART is a French acronym. But growing up in France, I had never heard that term until I started following american retro console youtubers. In France, we called this a "péritel" cable (contraction of peripheral and television). Maybe the term SCART was used in other countries in Europe though. That I do not know.
The SCART name was definitely the one used in the UK, and Spanish and German pals were always familiar with the term too
2:10 Being an old biffer, my recollection of why tellies of that era did not have composite, let alone RGB video inputs was a matter of electrical safety. A lot of TVs cheaped out saving themselves an extra transformer by having a live chassis, IE, one which was referenced to ground.
From what I recall, the Sega Saturn in Europe came with SCART as standard. You had to buy the RF Unit as a separate purchase if you had an older TV. The second I was given a TV with SCART, I never went back to RF.
Consoles always shipped with the "easiest" option. For the Saturn that meant composite. Only in france the Saturn came with SCART included as standard
This is probably the best video of a CRT screen I've seen on youtube, PAL region flashing aside. That's a hell of an accomplishment; it's murder trying to even make that look passable, let alone this crisp.
The MSX was huge in The Netherlands in the 80s and 90s. Today the scene is still very active. 🙂
Heya, great video! I picked up one of these a while back from a local University surplus. Happened to pop up on their auction site which is amazing since I was actually actively looking for this monitor (or it's cousin, KX-14CP1) because of its cute form factor & side inputs. Assumed I'd have to risk an ebay delivery. Thanks for detailing the CMPTR input. I knew that could coerced to take a more typical RGB connector but never did the research.
Early colour TV-sets up to the mid seventies (mostly the delta tubes) did not use rgb internally, but luminance (y) and colour differential signals straight from input up to the crt. The colour mixing was done inside the crt. The y signal to the shunted cathode, and colour differential to the wehnelt cylinders. If reception of colour failed, the crt simply continued in b&w since the y signal was still present. The amplification stages were also more straight forward without using a colour demodulation matrix, y and y-b and y-r are already present in the RF signals, because this is how pal and ntsc are modulated. Later crt’s, starting a bit after the first inline crt’s, are indeed RGB driven using the three cathodes individually. (I am not sure if early trinitron is an exception.)
I just wanted to say your videos are great. I don't really have an interest in this particular topic but you still managed to make me interested the whole way through.
I worked in audio-visual setups and rentals in the early 80s, and these PVM "Tiltbacks," as we called them, were as common as sin. We used them for everything from computer displays to booth displays to live studio monitors. They were bought in bulk by our company due to their versatility.
As a kid in France I was fascinated by the MSX ecosystem, it truly was a more modern computing experience than the Spectrums and CPC 464 we used. We also had French built Thomson MO5 and TO7 in school, they were crap.
Then I jumped to the Amiga 2000, tried my first graphic design software on it, and soon after jumped to the Macintosh laying out pages.
The 80's was exciting for computer nerdy kids such as myself. There were constant leaps and jumps from one limit of technology to another. Forty years later we're still seeing technical advancement and progress, I'm not one to wish I lived in the past, the present is much more exciting.
I wish you were the friends the I never had :( Thank you for everything you do, your channel make me feel good and I learn a lot!
Greetings for Spain!
MSX were big here in Brazil in the late 80's and early 90's. I had one, built by a brazilian company called Gradiante. Since importing machines like Apple or even IBM was very difficult at that time, the MSX were a perfect fit for our market. Great video!
I only know SCART, because they were used as a standard for consumer devices in Europe. Even some modern flat screen TV's still have this connector. But not all SCART devices support RGB, sometimes it is just Composite or Y/C, which only the device manual can tell.
The SCART standard (EN 50049-1) states RGB as mandatory for colour televisions,. Y/C is optional. Interrestingly, for a monitor, RGB is stated as optional.
The MSX was quite prevalent in the Netherlands, too. You can still find them for sale quite readily.
Love all the info I can get on the MSX standard!
Great video. I just recently started getting into the MSX myself, and imported my first one, a Sanyo PHC-23. I think the standard was a collaboration between Microsoft Japan and ASCII Corporation, though, not Matsushita. The MSX seemed like it had quite a bit of games on cassette in regions outside of Japan. And the MSX2/2+ had tons of games on floppy in its later years. But like you said that's a whole other video itself.
INSTANT LIKE for mentioning the MSX. It is very rare to see someone from the US mentioning them. Some corrections, though, from a guy who literally wrote a book about them.
1) The standard was defined by Microsoft and ASCII, its japanese subsidiary. Matsushita was one of the manufacturers. The story that the M in MSX stands for Matsushita is not true. Even Kazuhiko Nishi, the father of the standard, gives different and conflicting meanings each time he is interviewed. The most accepted explanation is "Machines with Software eXchangeability".
2) The standard WAS successfull outside Japan, in places like the Netherlands (where Philips sold them), Spain and Brazil (where I'm from) where it took the market by storm. We still have a pretty active community around here, building hardware, software and even developing new machines compatible with the standard.
2) There were 4 generations of the MSX: MSX, MSX 2, MSX 2+ and MSX Turbo-R. The first three were 8-Bit, Z80 based. The Turbo-R was an attempt to take the design to 16 bits with a custom R800 CPU, but only Panasonic made compatible machines (called FS-A1 ST and GT).
Feel free to contact me if your ever wish to talk about the MSX. And thanks for the great videos!
Ooo, you have an Amstrad CPC! that's so cool! My first ever computer, and I still have it, in full working order. Such a great computer.
Did anyone hear about the msx mini that was released a couple years ago? It didn't cross the sea and very few were made. It was the model in the rounded triangle shape. Im fascinated with old tech and I don't hear about msx very often.
S-Video is the way to go for consoles.
Some of the effects don't work perfectly since they were tuned for NTSC signal but they at least work a little bit.
And that's enough to be a good tradeoff against color bleed and dot crawl.
As you've shown the ultimate solution might just be amplifying the NTSC signal to potentially criminal levels.
As a European (and a French at that, where the SCART standard was invented), I'd like to bust a myth: Yes, we technically had RGB. No, we had no idea. And most of us were using composite.
So, if your idea of 90's Europe contain young Europeans with a gorgeous video signal, laughing maniacally at your misfortune, you're off the mark by KILOMETERS (Google that thing ^-^).
I remember purposefully choosing RCA + SCART adapter (which is a passive dongle that sends composite through SCART) over SCART (that very well might have been RGB) because the option with a dongle seemed fancier and I assumed I would get a better picture... Extremely silly is retrospect.
So, I'm not saying that every one of us was in the dark, but probably 99.8% of us. We were just like you, enjoying games, really not concerned about how it looked.
If you had a SCART cable, most people didn't even consider if it was using composite or RGB. It was just the same connector on both ends and you'd plug whatever cable you had in and go. Reminds me of modern USB with multiple different standards using the same port, but you could plug any old cable in and it work work to some level.
Composite over Scart was the default option for consoles since the Super Nintendo. Because most TVs were build with SCART but console manufacturers wanted to cheap out and never put an native RGB SCART Cable into the package. You always had to buy it extra. You could argue it was for compability, but in the early to mid/late 90s, I've never saw a TV with an native composite port. It was all SCART. It was just in the late 90s to early 2000s where they start to put composite ports onto TVs, and even then it was mainly on small TVs for children and teens. The port was even on the front, so you even know it was made for the consoles. And they still had an SCART port on the back. I even had to buy an native RGB SCART Cable for the Xbox 360.
Plenty of earlier stuff supported only composite or svideo over scart anyhow. Come 2000's rgb was common tho.
Most common use was just vhs videos anyway and its not like those had rgb or would it make sense. Og Xbox era plenty of people sought out rgb cables tho
A lot of us did, even as a 9 year old I looked for it after I noticed that the picture on one of my uncle's console was loads sharper than my other uncle's console.
Can't remember exactly which one. We also actively sought out s-video when it was the best available option, most SCART-adapters here had a connection for it.
I remember shocking my friend by changing out his AV cable on his PS2 with an RGB SCART cable.
What's funny is how much extra effort went in to making video look so much worse.
ALL color TVs eventually convert whatever input they got into discrete R, G, and B signals. You could bypass almost _the entire front-end processing_ if you were using RGB inputs. That would have been an absolute bucket load of complicated analog circuitry until digital video processing got to be cheaper and easier to do -- which was WAY later.
Similarly, the vast majority of game consoles and computers dealt with RGB pixels, and often had RGB DACs, and then might add a special video processing chip to do the color mixing and modulating. .... If not a reciprocal bucket load of complicated analog circuitry, before it had been optimized down to one or two ICs and a few passives around it. (Although in some cases, this was all done in a "ehh good enough for analog" way, on a single chip, like the NES PPU.)
And then there's RF. The worst quality video, which required doing everything above to mix and modulate the signals.... and _then_ modulating the video and the audio _again,_ on a higher-frequency carrier. And then un-doing all of that on the TV side just to get the better (but not great) quality composite signal back again.
So much work for so much degradation to a relatively clean and pure signal. Not to even consider all the complicated processing done later on, like 3D comb filters, when tech got sophisticated enough to try and remove some of the artifacts of the bandwidth limitations and overlapping signals.
All of this, just so video broadcast over the air could be compressed into less bandwidth. This didn't need to be done for local sources of video, but when NTSC and PAL were conceived, there really weren't any source of local video. And then those video sources snuck in as "emulated" over-the-air radio signals, since no provision had yet been made for an injected video source.
Cool video and monitor! Would love a long video about the MSX
The 8 bit guy actually said the CGA is supposed to be composite because it uses the composite artefacting to generate more colours, almost turning a bug into a feature.
My early -mid 90s gaming monitor was the Nec Multisync crt 17”. More retro, a Sony Profeel was a great tv I used with an oric 1, but I opted for the cpc6128 and the inbuilt monitor. Excellent vid.
This was a fantastic video. Excellent work. I am sad I gave away my NEC multisync monitor.
In the mid 90's I had my Amiga 500 hooked up to my TV via RF, then I visited a friend who had his Amiga connected with RGB. Wow! Just wow! It looked absolutely amazing. It was possible to actually READ text on the screen without having to guess which letter was which. I borrowed some money from my parents and got myself an RGB monitor shortly after.
MSX MSX MSX !!!
(29:21) The disk search sounds, the load times, the nostalgia. :)
On an 8088-01 that automatically switched between 4.77 and 10 MHz, the screen load times were just about right (mostly). Most of the software I had at the time (shoveled onto early CD-ROM; I miss caddy drives) was in EGA, varying between graphics and text modes. Some were CGA, but I had very little VGA software despite having all the hardware for it. 1989-90 was an era I will fondly remember; thank you, Netherlands.
I had a (heavily) modified white Sony HB-G900P MSX computer, which looked very much like the Sony ad, which is the HB-F700P. The 900 was a special video editing version. It came with scart out, RGB digitizer in and superimpose out of the box besides the regular component and S-video. And RS232C interface with special Laser Disc support/control (!!!) and a PC compatible parallel port for that matter.
It has indeed a 80x24 (and 80x25) text mode, the resolution being 512x212 pixels. The MSX2 videochip also allowed swapping between 50Hz PAL and 60Hz NTSC in software on the fly.
Besides the OPLL2 based FM-PAC and built-in PSG, there was also MSX-Audio, MSX-Midi and the Philips Music Module (OPL1 + ADPCM) and Konami's proprietary SCC. In the 90s they made OPL4 based audio cards too (MoonBlaster was the first). And the DD floppies used FAT12, so you could actually read and write these on a PC too. The cartridge slots could each hold up to 4 other slots, either physically or baked into the ROMs. And subslots could have another 4 subslots, tons of expandability.
My modified MSX 2 was upgraded to MSX 2+, 7MHz, 1MB RAM, 192kB VRAM, MSX-DOS2 ROM, KUN-BASIC ROM, Custom (faster) DiskROM, FM-PAC, sRGB mod and SCSI HDD (through cartridge), besides tons of external stuff like a mouse, a midi keyboard, 2400baud modem, etc. An amazing versatile home computer; the Russians even sent such a Sony HB-900 into space with the MIR for video processing.
Hey! there you are buddy once I watch this ( I’m busy right now)I’ll leave a thought out comment. I just want to say to you how happy I am to see a new video. hope all is well in CRD 3.0 world
MSXs used to be somewhat popular back in the 80s over here in the Arab world. A Kuwaiti company called Sahkr used to import several models out there, localized them into Arabic and sell it afterwards.
I'm not that knowledgeable about them since it was before my time but it's fairly interesting never the less.
I absolutely loved the end of this video. One of my favorite things in retro computing is seeing the old limited sound chips in retro consoles and computers pushed to their absolute limits.
Some great retro songs that do this:
RoboCop Gameboy - Title Theme (by Jonathan Dunn)
Pictionary NES - Title Screen Theme (by Tim Follin)
Solstice NES - Title Screen Theme (by Tim Follin)
Thanks for the heads up on the soundtrack from 8 Eyes. I hadn't encountered the game, but the music is great.
i love all the ports on the side! It reminds me of Data's head when they open it up.
to be fair, being in the UK i distinctly remember getting a PS2 for christmas with the AV multi-out providing basic component and red/white audio and using a component-to-SCART adaptor (a plug with three RCA inputs on the back). even though technically we supported RGB i think most people did what we did.
That was composite as opposed to component.
One of the downsides of widespread SCART with RGB support was that in Europe very few sets offered component connections.
i will always confuse the two
The music on that diskmag sounded like Rock Around the Clock to me.
I would love you to do a video on the MSX. This was great :)
The MSXFAN disk looks amazing on such a device!
Awesome find! I know you can mod old CRT TVs that only have composite to use RGB, but this is definitely easier (and safer) than going through all that.
I bought a KV-1311CR from the thrift shop for $1.50 in 2008. they couldn't get rid of it fast enough! from 2008 until 2018, it was my kitchen TV with a comcast DTV cable converter box stuck to the side of it. I've only ever used it as a TV, and back then I was extremely happy with the picture. it was a 13" Trinitron and fit the bill for a TV that would be robust enough to sit on top of our trash compactor and not get knocked off or broken easily, and I was right. Here in 2022 it's sitting on a shelf in my current basement at another house, and after sitting from 2018 to 2021 in my garage, the power/volume/channel/input selectors have badly yellowed to a poop brown... but the rest of the TV hasn't. it's really weird, as if heat cycles from the summers did it. Mine had the degauss coil go out before I got it and so after my sister, a kid at the time, decided to take a magnet to it for a joke, I was able to get it professionally degaussed with a once-over on everything else from Ian Primus AKA Sark, AKA the CRT whisperer. thing looks good as new on the tube, and now aside from the yellowing, i'm planning on getting it apart this winter for a once-over on the inside and give it a well-deserved refurb.
In Europe, we had Euroscart on all TVs after the '80s. Even the smallest CRTs came with one Euroscart, while 54cm or larger typically had two. My Spectrum clone had RGB out. Out of my head, I don't remember a single color TV produced after 1990 that did not have that connector. VCRs, video CDs, DVD players, etc.; everything had RGB. Before HDMI, that was the standard of connecting things to the TV, and for cameras or other small equipment (that used 3.5mm jack to Svideo or composite cables) we used input/output adapters to and from SCART.