New *square* 1:1 26.5" LCD monitor 1920x1920

[Swift Griggs]

On Mon, 16 May 2016, ethan at 757.org wrote:
> Yea, for the classic arcades (70s, 80s, early 90s?) people tend to stick 
> with CRTs but for the later computer based games people use scaler 
> boards and LCDs.

I'm right there with them. There really isn't anything that's LCD-based 
that's come along to replace them or emulate the look... yet. I'm still 
hopeful, though.

> They shove widescreen LCDs in the cabinets and end up with this tiny 
> picture in the middle where the large 29" monitor used to be.

I've seen some hacks with widescreen monitors and folks using scalers that 
can do 4:3 conversions. Some of them are clever and look okay, but most of 
them look trashy and amateurish, IMO.
 
> There are plenty of widescreen lower resolution panels? 720p and 1080p 
> televisions?

Indeed, and some of them are pretty nice. I have an NEC widescreen that's 
made for signage that works pretty well. However, it's still widescreen 
(bad for retro & arcade). Many TVs would work pretty well if it weren't 
for one thing: overscan. They are just about all setup by default to 
overscan so much that your first 3-10 lines of text in an Xterm will be 
cut off the top and bottom of the screen. The signage monitors sometimes 
deal with this correctly (my NEC does). However, the vast majority of TV 
screens of any kind setup for low-res will need some serious video 
adjustments to "fix" the overscan (which usually isn't worth it). Also, 
those video-based screens often really wreck the colorspace. Now, of 
course, if you use MacOS or Windows, there are fixes for these issues. 
However, those aren't my only two OSs by a long shot.

> I think my MacBook has anti glare coating on the retina screen, but I 
> don't really use it outside.

Be aware of the issues described here, if you aren't already: 

http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/anti-reflective-coating-wearing-off-macbook-pro-displays/

Hey, if my eyes were still 20/20 I'd probably be doing the same, though.

> There are apps that let you directly set the resolution but that just 
> gets you tiny text.

MacOS has the nifty "scaled" mode for hi-res displays. That helps an awful 
lot (but only for OSX).

> I don't think a SGI would support that resolution? Or are you driving it 
> with a PC? That resolution is definitely non-standard.

Agreed. I don't know of any that would support that resolution. It's very 
funky and it'd only work if it were scaled from a 4:3 mode which would 
also cause distortion. I'll probably pass on this one since it's just too 
much hassle for my needs. However, I'm still glad to see something 
different come along in terms of aspect ratios. I thought we'd already 
lost that war for mainstream displays.

-Swift