A Commodore PET Smartphone?

[Eudimorphodon]

5" might be the diagonal dimension of the non-border part of the VIC-II display; as weird as that seems, it makes the most sense, considering the viewable part of the CRT is taller than two half-height floppy drives.

I guess it's ruler time, yeah. Looking for high-res pictures it sort of looks to me like the part of the monitor exposed through the plastic is a little over 3" tall (a full-height drive bay is spec-ed at 3.25 inches high; the glass area seems to start a little above and below respectively the bottom and top of the bays, but the bays also have that divider between them which looks like it's, what, about 1/8th of an inch wide?), so the tube may be a little bigger than "five inches"(*). But that said, the overscan/border area does appear to chop at least, I dunno, 3/16th of an inch? off each side. So...

I've no idea what the newer phones are like. I just measured both the ones I have on me at under 7" sq. At 4" viewable, an NTSC CRT is 7.68" sq. I think one of my other phones is similar, and one *may* be close to 7.7" sq.

Using the calculator on this page, if we use a ballpark of 4.5" diagonal for the *active* area of the SX-64's screen (which at 4:3 gives us a display 3.6"x2.7") that's about the same area a 4.7" smartphone (a pretty common size today, ex: iPhone 6) with a 16x9 screen. (9.72 vs. 9.44 square inches respectively.) Of course, they're shaped differently, so if you want the text in your C64 emulator to be the *same size* as the text on an SX-64 you may need to move up to an iPhone 6 Plus (or similar)'s 5.5" screen, which at 4.8"x2.7" and 12.92 sq. in. ties it in height. (When held in landscape mode.)

So... yeah, I'd say if you prop up a keyboard in front of your Phablet with VICE on it the experience is going to be pretty darn close to an SX-64, and not *too* far off with a more reasonable-but-still-big mainstream 2015 phone, but maybe I'm eyeballing those photos incorrectly.

(* Now I'd like to see a picture of the SX-64's monitor posed side by side with a 5" monochrome to see if the tubes are half an inch different or something, sort of like how 12" was a common size for B&W TVs but color TVs were usually sold as 13".)

 

[KC9UDX]

So... yeah, I'd say if you prop up a keyboard in front of your Phablet with VICE on it the experience is going to be pretty darn close to an SX-64, and not *too* far off with a more reasonable-but-still-big mainstream 2015 phone, but maybe I'm eyeballing those photos incorrectly.

Not close, in my opinion. The Phablet will have a MUCH better display. I've got hundreds of hours programming on my SX-64, and that was a lot of work, only because it's very difficult to tell certain characters apart. The dot pitch on the CRT is larger than the pixel size of the VIC-II.

(* Now I'd like to see a picture of the SX-64's monitor posed side by side with a 5" monochrome to see if the tubes are half an inch different or something, sort of like how 12" was a common size for B&W TVs but color TVs were usually sold as 13".)

Some 12" monochrome CRTs are larger than 13" colour, in my experience. 12" or 13" designation can really be 12.5" nominal.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

Not close, in my opinion. The Phablet will have a MUCH better display.

Well, of course. (In playing this game we completely ignored how much more *information* the smartphone's screen is able to display compared to the VIC-II/CRT combination... it just ain't pretty.)

I've got hundreds of hours programming on my SX-64, and that was a lot of work, only because it's very difficult to tell certain characters apart. The dot pitch on the CRT is larger than the pixel size of the VIC-II

That's funny, because I vaguely remember that many reviews of the SX-64 made a point of raving how pretty and "jewel like" the screen was. (It's been a *long* time since I saw one in person.) Honestly, now that you mention it I vaguely recall that the C64's font wasn't that easy to read even on a normal sized television back in the day, but I don't know if that was really because the font itself was bad or just all the damage the display took going through an RF modulator. (No one I knew had a C64 hooked to anything but a TV and composite connectors on TVs weren't really all that common until the 90's.)

On the flip side the Osborne 1 I had for a while had an 80 column modification installed and it was actually sort of amazing how readable the 80 column text was on the tiny built-in monitor. No pesky dot pitch to get in the way there!

 

[KC9UDX]

Yep

It's why I really always preferred monochrome monitors.

For the first computer I actually owned (C64), I bought a black-and-white TV. I still have it, and it still has AC in the horizontal, so there's this bump in the border slowly creeping up the screen all the time...

I used an MDA monitor with my AT clone until I switched to Amiga.

I was probably the only guy anywhere using a 12" green monochrome monitor on an Amiga. Sadly, my B128 looks horrible on that monitor.

 

[KC9UDX]

O.k., here's what L.S. Starrett says about the SX-64 CRT. At least the best I could measure mine in a very confined space.

5.3" viewable, 4.8" at the VIC-II background area, that is, excluding the border or overscan portion of the display.