• frezik@midwest.social
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    11 months ago

    It will tend to turn the beam on when it’s off to the side, outside the normal range of the screen. X Windows users in the mid 90s had to put in their exact scanline information or else the screen could blow up. That went away with a combination of multiscan monitors and monitors being able to communicate their preferred settings, but those came pretty late in the CRT era.

    Edit: in any case, color screens need to have at least bands of red/green/blue phosphor. At a minimum, there will be breaks along either the horizontal or vertical lines, if not both.

    • grue@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      When you say “blow up” do you mean the tube would literally explode, it would burn through phosphors, a circuit board would let the magic smoke out, or something else?

      I remember configuring mode lines in X. Luckily, I never found out the hard way what happened if you got it wrong.