[weblacky]

In ipmungam's case, it's an LCD, in the case of future users....it's going to be LCD. I agree that "consumer" CRTs of the day weren't fixed frequency, I'm unsure why SGI granite Trinitrons were, I assume cost and availably at that size of CRT made that decision (It was a poor one, but did lock people into specific monitors...which did make SGI money in the short term).

Before I saw 13w3, I'd only seen BNC fixed frequency and heard about the "cannot see the BIOS or DOS during boot" issue with people using BNC fixed frequency monitors with normal windows PCs back in the day from recycling centers for SUN and SGI monitors.

But here we are. VGA is nothing but an emulation for driving LCDs so you wonder why "newer" models aren't MORE tolerant of strange, old, standards and conventions (MONO, CGA, EGA, NTSC, RGB SOG, VBS NTSC, etc) and more flexible (built-in controller in LCD monitors should iteratively get better with time), but no...they are redesigned every time...forgetting more than they used to know.

I've seen several CRTs (Vewsonics at least) go "green tint" but work with SOG due to not tolerating SOG, I've seen more LCDs just go to sleep and refuse to work then tint on me. So it's harder to get a picture with a standard consumer LCD on an old SGI that it's ever been since consumer LCDs and multi-sync CRT standard met in the early 2000s and then diverged.

There are third party devices that can fix this...but for now ipmungam should just pickup a cheap 15"-17" LCD that handles it fine and move on. I still stand by that statement. I'm still finding old Dell 2007wfp or the like monitors from businesses for $10 each...people don't want 4:3 aspect, you can often talk them into near free pricing. Granted, new 4:3 aren't SOG tolerant either but 2006-2008ish is my sweet spot for SOG LCDs that look fine (no ghosting or washed panels).