I, too, miss the days when you could write literally anything in XF86Config and that’s the signal it would send to your monitor. There was a warning in the docs that you could easily fry your monitor by sending a signal that it couldn’t handle that would cause physical damage so please be careful.
Also, the good monitors came with an all-plastic screwdriver attached on the inside of the case, so that you would have one available that you couldn’t electrocute yourself with on the big capacitor since at that point you’d already revealed that you planned to open the thing up and start fuckin with it.