Most SVGA CRT monitors I've used in 90's and early 00's actually displayed visibly discete scanlines in any video mode with less than 480 vertical lines, this i

Most SVGA CRT monitors I've used in 90's and early 00's actually displayed visibly discete scanlines in any video mode with less than 480 vertical lines, this includes classic VGA 80x25 text mode (actually 720x400, and in this mode the resulting effect is in fact somewhat pleasing to look at) and mode 13h (320x200 in 256 colors with double scan) which was popular for 90's games, the effect was even more pronounced with EGA's 640x350 (which is not double scan mode). Edit: also this effect was easily visible on Windows 9x startup/shutdown screen, which IIRC uses 320x400 unchained mode. Edit2: somewhat relevant to this is that many late 00's LCD monitors with only VGA input are not able to reliably keep synchronisation lock in double scan modes and there is significant subset of current monitors that will simply reject any 400-line mode (and there is significant subset of modern graphics cards that output classical VGA text mode as 640x480 or 720x480)