I'm having a problem with my monitor.

I've been running certain old DOS programs through emulators (like
MAME), and sometimes when I fire up one of these programs, my monitor
goes to black and says:

"Signal out of range.
35.8 kHz.  V:  60.0 Hz.
Mode should be below 1280 x 1024 / 75 Hz"

I have to hit escape to get back to Windows.

Basically, is this a problem with my monitor or with the settings on
my program?  Is there a way I can configure my monitor to run such
simple programs?

The thing that bedevils me is that this is not always so:  sometimes
my monitor will run the programs just fine.