Hello!


Games back in the day were optimized for CRT monitors and TVs. Sega sells their old Genesis games for modern platforms, and this difference is most obvious with these titles. The image looks a little off on a modern screen.

Morrowind was released at a time when LCD monitors were slowly creeping in to households, and Oblivion came out when CRTs were becoming obsolete. How does the image quality with these games differ between CRT and LCD?

Oblivion looks perfectly fine since it supports wide-screen resolutions. Just set the game to the native resolution of your LCD and everything will look crisp and sharp.

Morrowind only allows you to select from a few standard resolutions, none of which are wide-screen. Unless you're using a 4:3 LCD, this will result in some degree of image distortion (pillar boxing, stretching, etc). Or you can use a utility called MGE XE (Morrowind Graphics Extender) which provides native wide-screen resolutions and many other graphical enhancements (longer view distances, better shaders and lighting, etc.):
https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/41102/

Well, Morrowind (GoTY from GOG) lets me select at least the resolutions of my two monitors (attached to different PC's): 1680x1050 and 1600x900. Without MGE XE.
To avoid confusion: Better resolutions are available from the main menu, not from the launch screen.

The main question was how the image quality differs between CRT and LCD. The answer obviously depends on screen sizes, resolutions, refresh times, etc. And there are many ways to improve the optics of Morrowind and Oblivion (like MGE XE for Morrowind). In my mind, there is no conclusive answer to the question. I've always felt that Morrowind "looks good" on a 17" 1024x768 CRT. But I wouldn't argue against people saying that it looks a lot better on a huge high resolution monitor with all graphical enhancements installed (although I've never seen it).
How do you measure "image quality"?