Too long didn’t read - https://youtu.be/XkTvSQju_ec
Everyone has a special place in their heart for their first childhood computer. Mine was this machine with an Athlon XP and a Radeon 7500 32 megabyte. I remember as kid watching my brothers play counter strike 1.6, team fortress classic and all of those old school games. it was so much fun for me in the early 2000’s. It was so different then the consoles. I remember joining random servers and spamming on the mic, quickly being told to “shut the fuck up”.
I even remember one christmas eve, I spent the night joining random team fortress classic servers waiting for Santa, thinking to myself how the fuck is he going to get in the house, we don’t have a chimney. Long story short, I completely forgot about Santa.
It was hilarious how long it took to download some of these custom maps and sounds. Sitting there for 15 minutes, seeing “ultrakill.wav” “georgebush.jpg” and other random files downloading. Just to get bored of the downloading screen and leave.
But the CRT monitor was one of the things that brought me back, not necessarily the computer itself. CRT’s are goofy as fuck, they’re such a waste of space. They weigh enough to collapse most tables and you need to hire a moving company to just move it to the next room.
So I hit up one of my family members, “you have any shitty CRT monitors lying around? If you give me one, I’ll help you throw away the rest haha.” So my plan is Xbox one to a CRT. I’m broke as hell, I’m trying to avoid having a job for a while. I’ve had 5 jobs since July. I can’t give you a real reason. Probably because I don’t give a fuck about whether your pizza is cold or I ring you out slower than a sloth with a brain injury. But more than likely I pull a slickstain, It’s when you wake up 5 hours late for work and ghost everyone. I even had dollar tree call my dad one day because he was my emergency contact. It’s so stressful, you’re just J chilling and you don’t see any phone calls but boat loads of messages in your email from google voice “hey it’s Gary with pizza hut, is everything okay?” Alright let’s hop back into the actual topic.
But im super competitive when it comes to first person shooters, if I’m playing on a TV I want to blow my brains out. I notice latency more than you notice the dudes your girlfriend is talking to. So why spend the money I don’t have on a 1ms monitor when I can skip the bullshit and use a monitor from 20 years ago that uses cathode tube lasers, expel radiation and be vaporwave as fuck. Hipster chicks with jean jackets love that stuff.
So I get a text from my uncle “I left it in the front yard”, while I’m at my buddies house spending the night. I get home the next day thinking someone brought it inside, I look all over for the damn thing and then I call my dad. “Dad, where did you put that old school monitor at” he’s like, “Oh that thing, I just left it in the front yard. I thought you put it there” So I run outside to find it covered with a trash bag with snow around it. A part of me thought it wasn’t broken and a part of me says, who the fuck leaves electronics outside and expects it to survive.
So I lug this thing upstairs into my room and power it on, it makes this terrible electric noise like it’s going to explode with radiation and then shuts off. I’m just sitting there like fuck, I’m actually going to have to drag this thing back into the garbage. Then some quick googling later, it just has to thaw out before you use it haha. So I give it an hour, and bam. We’re in business. The most hilarious part is that after it turned on you could see melted snow dripping down the monitor.
I didn’t have any HDMI to VGA cables or boxes lying around so I ordered that and a VGA switcher off of amazon. I named the CRT Balogna, so bologna spelled wrong basically. If the CRT was a real person, it would be an old 78 year old russian lady with a borderline mustache and crinkles all over her face and body. She will do any job you want her to, but she’s not that as quick as the others.
So as a starter, I hooked it up to this laptop that my buddy sold me. Shouts out to Phil, it’s got this awesome dock with a boat load of IO on it so I can just drop it down and have bologna be my secondary or primary monitor. But I can just tell immediately. The response time is insane, It’s also 1600x1200 at 85 hz. Which is freaking awesome. Anything above 60 for me is a win. But it the monitor makes me feel weird and dizzy sometimes. Not sure if it’s that I watch too many TV shows in the 90’s problem and my eyes are shot, or it might be because it’s shooting loads of radiation to my chest.
Alrighty, so I ordered a VGA to HDMI adapter and a switcher box, so I can switch from the laptop to the xbox. But get this, I’m impatient as fuck. Two days are not going as quickly as I want it to, so I bought one from bestbuy. I’m totally not going to return it, I’m totally not going to return it. They will not see me at the return desk for a return when the package comes. It was not 30 dollars, it was not 30 dollars.
So let’s jump into my experience with using this monitor. I’ve been using it for several hours each day for about a week playing games and working out. This thing is amazing for COD. At first, it kind of made my eyes bleed. But once you get over that and tweak the monitors brightness and color settings to your liking, you adapt to it and honestly I prefer it so much more over my ultrawide.
There’s also a bonus that comes with the response time……What happens when you plug an HDMI to VGA adapter into the Xbox is that it shits its pants and auto defaults to 640x480. All that means is more frames for me. I shouldn’t and have not seen any frame drops yet. As the visual clarity goes, 640x480 has never looked any better. These modern displays can’t handle those resolutions without making them super blurry. But when you throw it on an archaic monitor or television, it looks so much better.
So who do I recommend these old school CRT monitors to? I recommend them to low budget competitive gamers who can’t drop the money on crazy 1ms monitors and I also fully recommend them to any classic gamers looking for something to play their games on that isn’t going to be plagued by blur, over processing and high response times of traditional HD TV’s.
Also this is random as hell but anyone notice this? Call of duty is loaded with so many egomaniac 14 year olds that smoke weed, wear jordans, yell at their mom and hangout with a bunch of losers. I get messages all of the time loaded with excuses on why they lost. Or how “I’m playing wrong”. Stop being a sore loser, get overself and realize that it’s your fault. It’s your fault that you underperformed and lost. You can’t claim a win with excuses, the world doesn’t revolve around you. The worst part is that you lost to some dude who was exercising, had the game muted and was listening to music.
Even if I lose to some guy playing like an asshole, I still message GG. Sportsmanship is where it’s at. Well anyway, that’s the end of the video. If you enjoyed it, subscribe so I can boost my low confidence and come out to my family as an asexual ninja turtle. I’ll need plenty of money for my costume. I’m thinking thanksgiving dinner next year.
I’m no writer, I’m no videographer or editor but I do what I want and I make what I want.