Here's a few sample close-up shots of what Dreamcast looks like on VGA:
As is typical of 480p content on 31 KHz monitors, there's a faint hint of scanlines, but you don't really notice them in some situations unless you press your face against the monitor. It's not like 240p content where every other line can be more or less blotted out altogether.
Checking the monitor's status screen, we see standard 640x480 VESA resolution, 31 KHz horizontal frequency, and an NTSC refresh rate of 59.9 Hz. Nothing unusual here.
Zoom in and check out all of those pixels.
...Anyway, I used a Japanese copy of Virtual On to test this stuff out, and since I have an American Dreamcast, I use a boot disc to load it. Specifically, I use something called an "Innovation Super Game Converter." When I've used this boot disc in conjunction with a VGA box in the past, the screen has always blacked out while the boot disc program is running. I didn't think much of it; I just assumed that, like a small but significant percentage of Dreamcast games, the boot disc wasn't programmed to support VGA and was a 15 KHz 240p/480i program like those games are.
But I hadn't yet used this boot disc on this monitor, and this monitor unexpectedly displayed the boot program just fine.
Moreover, it was displayed with
extremely pronounced scanlines, as you'd see in low-res games on low-res monitors.
This took me aback a little because I was certain that this monitor could not display genuine 15 KHz video signals. In fact, I attempted to boot up Bangai-O via the Kuro in 240p mode just to confirm it. Indeed, low-res games just don't fly on this monitor. Attempting to run Bangai-O gives me this error message on the monitor:
FREQUENCY OUT OF RANGE
H: 15.7 KHz V: 59.9 Hz
Which leaves me to ask: what's up with this boot disc? Checking the monitor status while this program is running reveals:
So... it's a low-res signal, but it's running at twice the typical horizontal and vertical frequency, and that means that it'll run fine--with scanlines, even--on a 31 KHz monitor?
