I’ve been thinking about trying to figure out a way to play my modern consoles on my sony PVM and BVM. I wanted to see if anyone here has successfully done it and how they went about it. I was thinking it would be cool to see the Breath of the Wild r on a CRT and other games really lend themselves to the look. It think it would be awesome to play Downwell on that type of set up. Hoping for a good discussion. Thanks!
I hooked my Switch, Wii U, and PS3 up to my XM29 for the sheer curiosity of it, and I also wanted to see what BotW looked like on a CRT haha! It does work, but obviously doing this using a multisync monitor makes it a lot easier as it accepts resolutions higher than 240p. All you need is a converter to go from hdmi to component and you’re all set! For a pure 15 hz low res monitor like a PVM though, you’d need a downscaler. If you haven’t already, check out this great article from Fudoh regarding downscaling: http://scanlines.hazard-city.de/
While I think newer consoles/games look best on modern displays, if you got the equipment it’s interesting to try for sure, like for example, seeing how fast the Wii U’s controller screen was able to keep up. It obviously lagged compared to the output on the CRT, but impressive to see that first-hand.
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Awesome, thanks for responding! I’d love to see some people post pics of their set-ups. Hopefully we’ll get some shots in this thread.
No problem! 
4:3 aspect ratio support is pretty limited on consoles compared to PC, even on PC some games just don’t support 4:3 without letterboxing, they still look alright but at that point I’d much rather play on my widescreen TV. More recently I picked up a Diamondtron 2070SB and have been trying to play games on it and the ones that do properly support 4:3 look awesome, might post a picture or two when I get home.
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Good to know, I’m fortunate in that my 14" Sony BVM does have have 16:9 support.
I’ve hooked up a few HD consoles to my 20L5. Splatoon’s motion controls felt so good on such a fast display. But the letterboxing is kind of a drag.
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I once modified an xbox video hookup to run off a 2" portable TV. After about 3 minutes of Halo 2 my eyes felt like they were bleeding.
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That sounds both awesome and terrible. Terribly awesome? Awesomely terrible?
In my experience it’s not really worth it unless you can find a 16:9 computer monitor like a GDM-FW900.
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Looks Awesome!
Man, I really want to try a set up like this now. Mind sharing the setup you used to get the signal on to your monitor?
Yea that’s pretty gorgeous. It really is amazing how good an HD picture looks on a CRT. They never should’ve stopped making them for enthusiasts. They should’ve just lowered production and increased costs and made them a luxury item for home theater/video game nerds.
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That’s kind of where we’ve ended up with these products anyways given the used market, so they may as well sell them to us new for bank and get in on this action!
I am playing on hooking up my 360 to my 31kHz arcade monitor (640x480) but I’m having trouble finding a definitive list of games that are 4:3 and support the resolution.
Apparently the AM2 classics are good to go, so that’s a start!
Nah, I mean they should have multisync CRT monitors that go up to 4K. Every available resolution should be native on a single display. And let’s add in free sync and hdr while we’re at it.
That is the display of my dreams and I’m bummed it will never exist.
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Nothing too complicated, most GPU that aren’t brand new from the last couple years like for example anything older than the GTX1000 series should still output Analouge through VGA / DVI, all you need is to find a CRT monitor and plug it in!
This is the closest I’ve found to what you’re looking for List of 4:3 aspect ratio support in Xbox 360 games
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This guy playing Fallout 4 on a B&W CRT always felt thematically appropriate. (Scrub back in the video for details)
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This is great guys! I love seeing this stuff. I’ve been doing research into getting this sort of set up going myself. It’ll be one peace of gear at a time before I get it set up. I have an extron crosspoint on the way for routing my signals. Then it’ll be an HDMI>VGA box, and then a couple more pieces of extron gear to process the signal and spit out an RGB signal.
As an aside I find this pretty funny. Both of the modern games you guys posted int this thread are both games I worked on.
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