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You can't really replicate amber anymore. The thing about amber monitors and the others from that era, is that they were a single phosphor. Meaning, the amber was not mixed. It was a pure hue of amber with an individual pixel fully lit up.

To approximate amber now on an RGB display, you have to light up subpixels of differing values. It isn't the same because now you're mixing red and green light together.

More accurate to use just green instead because there is no light mixing with that, but it's still going to be only a subpixel and not the entire pixel. Probably easier to use silver for monochrome because then all 3 subpixels are used.

I liked amber monitors very much. They were comfortable.



A modern high resolution display (4/5k) has subpixels easily small enough to emulate the old monitors accurately in terms of color. What you can't get is the CRT curvature and the glare of the fluorescent lights bouncing off the glass.

Also, the green phosphor Apple and at least some other vendors used wasn't a pure #00FF00 green -- you'd have to light other color channels. This picture is a pretty accurate representation: https://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/comments/btaokj....


I consider it to be a pure green in the sense that it was a single green phosphor used in the display. It is true that in terms of light nanometers there are different shades of green and Apple's wasn't what RGB green is, but it was a fully green pixel.

I do own this exact monitor, I should recap it one of these days. The plastic is very yellow now sadly.

Quite a lot of phosphor formulations existed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphor#Standard_phosphor_typ...


The yellow can possibly be removed through the Retr0bright process if you are disassembling the display anyway.

https://retr0bright.com/


Current monitors can’t show the true color of either the amber or green phosphors. It falls outside the gamut of the monitor.


It falls outside sRGB, yes, but it should still be inside of Rec.2020


I’m not sure, but no monitor covers Rec. 2020 100%. Also most monitors don’t support Rec. 2020 to begin with.


It’s interesting to me that the standard “dystopian future” game often has amber monitors and not green or color.


For some reason I vaguely feel like they were more popular in movies, although now looking it up, I’m seeing lots of green phosphor monitors… weird.


Are you thinking of Fallout?


Fallout yeah, but I've seen it elsewhere (and in some movies, too).


I may be misunderstanding but aren’t monochrome OLED panels (which are available in various colors) comprised of single-color pixels? If so it seems like they’d be the closest possible analogue.


You might be able to approximate the color but you can't replicate the glow/bloom effect of the phosphor with monochrome OLED.


The bloom is highly overstated (probably due to photographs). The monitors were not very bright compared to monitors today, and since there was no shadow mask the dot was very sharp. Color monitors could have significant bloom however, depending on their quality.

What you may be thinking of is the persistence effect which is very long with the green phosphors.


Replace the display with a 640x480 marix of dome LEDs and you'd get a nice amber back. DPI might be a bit poor.




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