Monitor for a sinclair zx spectrum Pc#
Monitor for a sinclair zx spectrum tv#

This is what my Workbench environment looks like now:Д¬ompare this with the photo at the start of the post the effect is most pronounced in the text underneath icons, and in the EaglePlayer (music player that looks like a HiFi) window. ItвЂ™s perfect! No stretched, blurred or odd-shaped pixels, just lovely crisp and clear squares. This can be seen most clearly when you look at an extreme closeup of the new display: This means that every pixel in this screenmode can be displayed by the monitor as a 2x2 pixel square (640 x 2 = 1280, 512 x 2 = 1024). This works out to be the perfect resolution for me as all the Amiga screenmodes I tend to run can be expressed as even fractions of this.ДЇor example, my Workbench is 640x512 pixels in 256 colours which for my setup (50Mhz 030 with 16Mb RAM) is a good balance between speed and display quality. I picked out the cheapest option which was an ASUS VB199T-P, a 19-inch SXGA LED IPS monitor with a native resolution of 1280x1024 pixels. So I went searching through eBay and various other second-hand sites but I finally found a site selling brand new, unused 4:3 ratio monitors - it seems like thereвЂ™s still a demand for the old ratios which is great news for us Amiga and other retro-computing enthusiasts. I then remembered years ago that before everything went wide-screen, вЂњsquareвЂќ 4:3 ratio monitors were pretty much all you could buy, especially the early wave of flat-screen displays. I canвЂ™t say exactly what triggered all this off, but I realised a little while ago how unnatural this looked and how much better screenshots always looked when presented in the correct ratio. ItвЂ™s connected to the Amiga using an Indivision AGA board, and while I sort of adjusted to how it looked, it never felt right to me because of the squashed and stretched feel. In this picture, I am using a standard modern widescreen monitor with вЂњFHDвЂќ resolution of 1920x1080 pixels. So you either end up вЂњcroppingвЂќ the display leaving black borders down the side, or you attempt to scale it up but end up with rounding errors and вЂњpixelsвЂќ that are wider than they are tall.ДЇor reference, hereвЂ™s a cropped photo I took when I first got my A1200 working again: This is because the native screenmodes of the Amiga - such as 320 x 256 for most games and demos - cannot be expressed as even, equal fractions of modern widescreen resolutions. These displays tend to make everything designed for a 4:3 ratio look stretched and a little blurry. Nowadays however (with the odd exception) all commonly-available displays from TVs to flat-screen monitors are all in wide-screen 16:9, 16:10 or wider ratios.

Monitor for a sinclair zx spectrum Pc#

Later, dedicated monitors like the Phillips 8833 Mk2 (which I originally had as a teenager in the 90s) became available and these offered a much improved, sharper image but were still in the 4:3 ratio as this is what the native Amiga, PC and gaming console screenmodes had been designed around.

Monitor for a sinclair zx spectrum tv#

When the Amiga was introduced in the mid 80s, pretty much all displays available to consumers were 4:3 ratio TVs, and you plugged your computer into your TV via a RF modulator box.