can I upscale on a CRT to see how app will look on a HiDPI TFT?

[swapjim]

I'm running Windows 7 and I want to buy a HiDPI monitor. I'm running a lot of legacy apps (early 2000s and late 90s) and I want to see how will these look on that monitor.

I thought I could emulate this by running Win10 in a VM, max out the resolution of the host and guest, and then upscale the host to 150-175%. My current display is a 100-DPI 17" CRT that can do a 1600x1200 at 60Hz.

The results I got were not good. Some apps looked good, some looked mediocre, and some looked downright horrible! -- including the VBox additions installer. Even an OS window had text that looked blurry. I also noticed that when upscaling from 150% to 175%, the fonts changed a bit. Windows Explorer (the file manager) looked perfect though, which is why I used it as a comparison in some screenshots.

My question is: is my method good? How close is what I got to the real thing? Is this how my apps will look on the HiDPI monitor?

Here is a link to the complete pack of screenshots.

[ToastyX]

CRT monitors are too blurry at higher resolutions to see how it would look like on a high-DPI monitor. CRT monitors are usually around 0.25 mm dot pitch, while high-DPI monitors are closer to 0.12-0.15 mm. Some apps do have trouble scaling in Windows, but it won't look as bad on a high-DPI LCD monitor as it does on a CRT. You might get better results at 200% because then Windows can apply pixel doubling instead of blurry interpolation.