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A comment on The computers used to do 3D animation for Final Fantasy VII in 1996. Parent comment

Re:The computers used to do 3D animation for Final Fantasy V... by midnightclubbed on Thursday April 07, 2022 @01:48PM (#30947955)
The SGI monitors were 4:3 but I don't recall the resolution. I do recall that they were beasts, weight of a small elephant and a not dissimilar size - you needed to pull your desk away from the wall to get any kind of distance to the screen.

Over time their timings would drift and you could never get the entire screen completely sharp.

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Re:The computers used to do 3D animation for Final Fantasy V... by angst_ridden on Thursday April 07, 2022 @02:40PM (#30948653)
I just finally gave away a 17" Trinitron SGI monitor when cleaning my office.

That thing was a tank! I bought it at a CG house bankruptcy sale in the 90s for $2k, which was less than half the going price at the time.

But you're right, it weighed a ton. It did need periodic degaussing. And when a communication company half a mile away put in some satellite uplinks, I could see when there was heavy communication traffic by a slight color shift on one side.

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Re:The computers used to do 3D animation for Final Fantasy V... by cfn on Thursday April 07, 2022 @02:05PM (#30948165)
And there was a button you could press to "de-magnetize" the screen which made this awesome noise!
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Re:The computers used to do 3D animation for Final Fantasy V... by lostcolony on Thursday April 07, 2022 @02:34PM (#30948579)
Degaussing. Most(all?) CRT monitors could do that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjO2vVaxIWM
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Re:The computers used to do 3D animation for Final Fantasy V... by cfn on Saturday April 09, 2022 @07:59AM (#30967268)
Yes that was the word I was looking for. I gave away my last monster CRT 20 years ago and these things fade away from memory. Thanks!
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Re:The computers used to do 3D animation for Final Fantasy V... by throwanem on Thursday April 07, 2022 @02:54PM (#30948830)
Degaussing buttons were common on high-end CRT displays. They were always that fun!

In the mid-2000s, I worked at a place where we had several "decommissioned" Indys living a second life as Apache servers for some of our hosting clients - not uncommon in those days. We had one of the big 19" 4:3 CRTs on a KVM, too, and its weight put a noticeable if graceful curve in the MDF desktop on which it stood.

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Re:The computers used to do 3D animation for Final Fantasy V... by rbanffy on Thursday April 07, 2022 @07:41PM (#30951651)
There was a time I had a 20” Apple behemoth on my desk in the open plan office. Degaussing it made the image on every monitor within 3 meters curl up in magnetic agony.

It was a lot of fun.

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Re:The computers used to do 3D animation for Final Fantasy V... by AyyWS on Thursday April 07, 2022 @02:37PM (#30948611)
Like this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSAnvHq_aFE

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Re:The computers used to do 3D animation for Final Fantasy V... by cfn on Saturday April 09, 2022 @08:01AM (#30967278)
Yes but I could degauss mine when it was on. The image would rotate back and forth some 30 or 40 degrees which was fun.
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