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What the Death of CRT Display Means For Classic Arcade Machines (venturebeat.com)
An anonymous reader shares a VentureBeat report:The cathode-ray-tube technology that powered the monitors for nearly every classic arcade game in the twentieth century is defunct. Sony, Samsung, and others have left it behind for skinnier and more lucrative LCDs and plasmas, and the CRTs that are left are about to sell out. The current stock of new 29-inch CRT monitors is dwindling. Online arcade cabinet and parts supplier Dream Arcades has fewer than 30 of those large displays sitting on its shelves. When it sells out of the current inventory, it will never get another shipment in that size again. "We've secured enough [of the other sizes] to get us all the way through next year," says Michael Ware, founder of Dream Arcades. "After that, that's it." The future of arcade-cabinet restoration is looking bleak. "The old arcade games are like aging people," says Walter Day, founder of high-score-keeping site Twin Galaxies. "They have old livers and aging kidneys. There will come a day when very few arcade cabinets have original components. Time will wear them out." To be clear, it's not that games like Donkey Kong or Pac-Man will suddenly become unplayable. The games can run on newer LCD screens, but they may not look as the developers intended.
This is somewhat orthogonal to the topic, but the CRT was a requisite for the home user to play light gun games on systems like the NES. However in the arcade we still see new installments of Time Crisis and others, and they are even done on wide screen monitors. This suggests to me that they have moved to LCDs, but I can't find good information on how they work if they did. Anyone know the answer?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I'm not terribly troubled by it. My MAME cabinet has an LED screen in it, which means lower power requirements, a sharper image, and no real worry that the main screen will burn in.
If the retro community is big enough, somebody will produce a 4:3 aspect ratio, slightly convex LED with a thick glass cover - and perhaps even an onboard function that can simulate burn in.
It still won't be the same, of course, but neither are the guts of most arcade systems anyway.
I was reading that someone made a translator that could take the VGA signal from games made for CRTs, and "convert" it to display accurately on LCD monitors, where the fringing aspect (as in Apple ][s) was accurately simulated. Perhaps this might be the way to go.
and I understand this, but any mature adult knows one thing about aging -- you cannot go back, no matter how one might try. Being almost 50 myself, I grew up in the arcades of the late 70s and early 80s and have fond memories of the very first games. I still enjoy playing games like Defender and Galaga, but now play them on a laptop. Yes, yes, the feeling is gone. There are no teenage girls cheering you on, no smoking, drinking gallons of soda, you name it...
These games were designed around the CRT displays. Their video generators and art assessts were created with interlacing, scanlines, phosphors, phosphor decay, limited color gammut, pin/barrel distortion, rectangular pixels, etc.
There are already emulators that use GPU shaders to emulate the look and feel of old diplsays and they do a pretty good job.
Three are also some FPGA based devices you can buy that accept a composite input and output to HDMI, using the FPGA to spit out a picture that looks closer to that of a CRT on your large crisp digital progressive scan display with perfect square pixels.
I expect someone will develop a solution that has an input box designed to accept the analog signals generated by various arcade boards and will output HDMI/DVI/whatever - Then it's up to you to find an LCD panel and mount it in your ancient wooden arcade cabinet.
I don't take this problem seriously for most machines, because they can use software filters and high resolution displays to emulate the look pretty closely. But vector games will require crazy high-resolution displays to get the same effect, and those aren't cheap. I wonder if you could just bounce a laser (or simply a highly focused light) off a MEMS mirror or something. Or maybe you'd use multiples?
I've thought about building an upright arcade machine with a good-sized pivot LCD, I've got two 25.5" and I use one on my PC and the other one is sitting around. To me, using a LCD is a massive feature because I can build the machine shallower.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
>To be clear, it's not that games like Donkey Kong or Pac-Man will suddenly become unplayable
No, but some that rely on timing as a mechanic will. Bust a Groove (Move) is one example - the refresh rate on a plasma / LCD / whatever isn't the same as a CRT so your inputs are all off by a split second and register as incorrect.
The games can run on newer LCD screens, but they may not look as the developers intended.
I have an arcade cabinet with an LCD screen. I'm quite happy with how it looks, intentions be damned. I had the option to get one with a similar number of games (mine has ~140 classic games) but with a CRT display.
The LCD screen is much bigger, and while the game graphics are in the same resolution, the out-of-game graphics resolution is much nicer and the software makes use of it. Also, when looking at CRTs now, I don't get nostalgia any more. They just seem old.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
And I even had a whole bunch of the arcade machines in my home (my parents weren't terribly happy about that, they saw it as gambling machines), but nonetheless they where a lot fun to mess around with, I used so called "gender changer" plugins to change PCBs from various manufacturers to work with my arcade cabines, oh the fun times!
That aside - I don't find the LCD panels so terrible as a replacement. I've just recently built my first own Arcade machine ever (it's mame based of course), but I built it out of the blue, no blueprints - just on the memories from the arcade halls, and it turned out fantastic. In fact, it is so good - that I don't really miss the blurry scan-lines and out of focus convergence RGB issues the old CRTs back then had.
And, I've buried the LCD deep into the arcade so I can't really spot the difference, it's not easy to see there's not a "curved" crt inside there, and it looks amazing. I instantly felt the nostalgia when I fired it up.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Unless it is the actual glass itself, and not the supporting electronics, then rebuilding them could continue to ensure availability. It may, however, simply not be cost effective to rebuild them , especially if a LED display offers an essentially drop in replacement at a much lower cost. Cognoscenti may decry the loss of originality but arcade owners looking to make a profit won't care; especially as users adapt to the new displays or grow up with them never seeing the original. A collector might pay to get a rebuilt CRT but collecting is far different than running an arcade or having a machine or two in a bar.
I play some on MAME and find them as playable and enjoyable as they were on a machine when you add an X-arcade joystick/trackball.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
... someone will make them.
That is, assuming they don't become illegal to manufacture or regulations don't make them too expensive to make due to the lead and other toxic chemicals.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
As someone who very recently made the decision to put an LCD in my cab, what it means for me is less expense, less weight, less power and less time spent with my FUCKING LIFE ON THE LINE.
There's very little hardware outside of arcade land that's even worth opening to fix if there's a CRT inside it. Throwing it in a lake is almost more sensible.
I'll take the hit in accuracy and compensate with scanline generators for the nostalgic factor.
What should of been done ages ago. The amount of space those CRTs took up versus modern flat panels is huge. So there should be a way to take a basic CRT monitor input, create a small device that will receive said signal and convert it to a modern HDMI output. Heck, they can probably even upscale so that while still 8-bit graphics, they will be displayed on a high res screen. This should be the norm.
Not sure about that, but I know there is at least one emulator with a filter that takes the effects into account and tries to simulate them in a way where they will look on a LCD similarly to how they should on a CRT. It fakes it.
I imagine pretty much the same as the death of AM/FM radio for old wireless sets, or the death of leaded petrol for old cars.
They won't work the same, will require conversion, you'll have to keep a stock of old parts, or forever stay as an historical artifact that "doesn't work because we don't use those for that any more".
There's nothing a decent LCD can't replicate, and only the purists care. Those people who want to remember the game will load up an emulator, which is probably infinitely more convenient to use and have in the house nowadays than a huge great expensive cabinet with parts you can't replace any more.
Things move on. At least you *can* emulate the old games still. I'm all for emulation / preservation projects. But unless someone bothers to keep making CRTs in a variety of different sizes in an affordable manner, they've gone the way of the dodo - like Kodachrome film and Polaroid snaps.
The only loss might be to lightgun games that use certain technologies but, to be honest, pretty much those kinds of input can be emulated in much more convenient ways too.
This "problem" has been solved by several manufacturers with LCD displays that have circuity to handle the old CGA and RGB inputs. They have all sorts of timing and alignment controls, but with a nice modern LCD cabinet.
... but I thought I just read an article a week or two ago about a huge electronics recycler who it turns out wasn't really doing much recycling of old CRTs after all. They had warehouses chock full of old televisions and computer CRTs.
I can see where maybe a 29" CRT is an odd size that's difficult to source. But I would think you could reuse a working CRT tube out of a television or monitor for a game cabinet in many cases?
Tomorrow morning's Trump Tweet: "Globalization killed American CRT industry. Video games don't look as good. Sad."
Stella's (2600 emulator), implementation of 'Bad TV' adjusts is just amazing. It simply wasn't the same playing 2600 games with perfectly clear graphics. In fact, some of those old games COUNTED on a little bleed and fuzziness! I have mine set for RF with a little bit of drift - just like the old days with my uncle's G.E. 25" lightning-struck set.
If you haven't seen the 'Bad TV Adjust' feature on Stella, it's worth a look - and that got me thinking (always dangerous!)...
What if you could construct a box that would take an RGB-based analog signal, run it through the same formulas that Stella borrowed, and then output that to an LCD or OLED? That way, you could get all the scanlines and composite NTSC color drift you wanted... If it didn't delay things too much, that is.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
CRT renderings of the games was not how the designers wanted them to look, just as musical artists and engineers don't want to sound like a vinyl record. They wanted them to look like modern 4k, photorealistic games but were held back by the technology. No, what will be gone is the experience of the fuzzy-edged, low resolution games people remember playing as children. What we're losing is nostalgia, not veracity or design intent.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
but they may not look as the developers intended.
Now we know. Msmash is a time traveling mind reader. Knows what the original Donkey Kong developer intended!
Did it occur to people that this crisper better images is probably what the developers intended to create, but unable to deliver? Yes, it is different from what I saw back in 1980. But to think the developers intentionally went out to create exactly that image, is a stretch.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I call bullshit. Sounds like "Dream Arcades" is trying to find out creative ways to announce that they will jack up their refurbishment prices--and their profit margins...
1) An Indian manufacturer named "Videocon" still manufactures CRTs. So, while it's not Sony or some other high-quality manufacturer, they are still making them. In fact, as of a year ago, they were accepting leaded CRT glass for recycling into new CRT TVs. https://resource-recycling.com...
2) There's a warehouse in Columbus, OH, which will likely become an EPA superfund site, that was run by an electronics recycler called Closed Loop--which went bankrupt. It's full of old CRTs that I can imagine could be reused with some minor disassembly & testing. https://motherboard.vice.com/e...
Windows 3.1x calc: 3.11 - 3.10 = 0.00
This is a big issue with demanding gamers like those in the speedrunning community, a traditional (15KHz) CRT is a must for low latency.
The concern for CRT loss was valid, however things are finally starting to look a bit better..
I'll guess I will go a bit technical since I work with & troubleshoot "old system video stuff" quite often..
What old consoles / arcade games pretty much always used was RGB input, which was virtually artifact free. Although with consoles you usually had to resort to composite/RF/svideo, RGB being more common only in EU/JP regions. NTSC/PAL artifacts also can still be included easily with an otherwise superior image, but I won't get in to that here..
Biggest issue with flatscreens has always been that they only handle native resolution, anything else than native has to be scaled to be that specific resolution, resulting in blur and loss of image quality.
What's even worse, older systems and games sort of hacked around the typical broadcast standards where it kept transmitting one field instead of alternating between odd/even, this gave you a stable picture of 60fps (Closer to 59.94Hz in reality) with the expense of dark lines on every other scanline and only 240 lines of vertical resolution. "Stretching" of the image happened naturally as the lines for both fields would go from top to bottom, resulting in a crisp image that was rather flicker free.
Unfortunately almost no scaler that has been built actually respects this hack, hardwired to expect both fields, which is a 480 line image. While this works for TV broadcasts and looks quite good with such, it has very varying results with older systems as the flat panel will attempt to treat this low resolution image as something that's supposed to be higher resolution, resulting in awful scaling artifacts or the whole picture jumping/flickering.
However there are thankfully scalers out there that do, like the micomsoft xrgb series or a pure linedoubler like the earlier xrgb or ther more recent ossc.
With these, you can get pretty darn accurate results and can even simulate scanlines.
While CRTs look cool, they're not all so cool to work with.. they can get dark/blurry/get color offset even after a couple years of active use on some cabs. Not saying they all do but rarely do I see a crisp image on an arcade cab crt these days. Flat panels do have their own issues but I guess what I want to say here is that It is indeed getting harder and harder to find replacements for a reasonable price, unlike flatscreens where an older 1600x1200 panel from 10 years ago can be perfect.
Now I hate to sound like an advertisement but I highly recommend checking out the OSSC, It's a no compromise solution that does pure linedoubling, very good digitizing that keeps colors intact (along with noise filtering) and allows you to keep the original refresh rate intact, all combined are something that no scaler does. Personal results with flat panels and say.. a megadrive has given me pretty much emulator crispness on the picture and virtually zero latency (we are talking about a few scanlines as it doesn't have a framebuffer).
Anyway, tools are there to get a superb image out of older systems, including consoles that have RGB output available.
I wouldn't worry too much anymore as the quality you can get has already surpassed a CRT.
Currently the main problem is the entry price, which can cost you $200 or up.
Most likely in the future stuff like this is gonna come down in price and re-implemented & cloned for cheap in china.
Cheap scalers that do better than the average TV do exist but I'd say that they still fall short.
That's what I'd say if I were still repairing arcade games (gladly, that era of my life is well behind me now). CRT monitors that were used in arcade games were typically not the greatest quality and were constantly having problems. Electrolytic caps blowing out, flyback transformers (and the transistor driving them) blowing out, other miscellaneous problems.. then there's the cheapskate operators, who would insist on trying to patch back together 20 year old monitors with CRTs that had severely burned phospors (the worst being a Pac Man monitor so burned you could see the entire first maze, and the default high score, with the power off) because they were too cheap to replace them. While modern LCD monitors aren't terribly repairable (other than things like backlight inverters), they're also more reliable.
Of course there are fewer and fewer actual coin-op arcade games of any sort anymore. The home game console market and computer gaming have more or less killed it off.
Forget LCD, last time I built a MAME-box it took me weeks of running around different electronics store showrooms to find that one IPS-display that happened to have good enough contrast and colour to replace an arcade-CRT.
Also, when I inquired about the price, it cost like 3x as much as other similarly spec:ed displays.
In the end, the colours were reasonable, but the viewing angles are still very much lacking.
OLED has the best colours and contrast of any past or current display technology. That's what I'd hold out for when I get fed up of the blurryness and bad contrast of LCDs and want to upgrade my cabs.
Pretty easy to fix with modern electronics. The old board will output composite video. A 20Mhz sample rate is high enough to digitize the signal. A mid range discrete A2D and and fpga to convert to the digital of your choice.
Nice high school level project.
Several NES emulators do NTSC color bleed already because old games (Blaster Master, in particular) relied on it in order to not look like crap. I'm sure something similar can be added to MAME.
The answer to the question is it will cost more to get a CRT screen, since they are no longer produced on an industrial scale.
There is no reason you can't make one.
Maybe you can get this guy to make you a screen - he makes tubes, he just needs to think bigger...
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
, and the last one in Europe followed them in 2013.
With the death of CRT manufacturing, the supply chain for the exotic materials and supplies needed for rebuilding has subsequently dried up.
The Early Television Museum in Ohio has rescued some equipment from the last rebuilders, and is hoping to bring back at least a bare bones rebuilding capability, aimed initially at vintage TV collectors.
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
They intended them to look blurry, washed out and with burnt-in overlays?
Another game using the same principle as Operation Wolf is ZapPing, an air hockey simulator that's part of a Zapper test ROM called Zap Ruder. People who've played it say it feels as smooth as using a Wii Remote. Video
The point is though, existing CRT light-gun games will simply stop working when the CRT is replaced, and there will be no easy fix.
An MCU that reads a Wii Remote and translates it into light gun signals is possible.
It's still possible to get CRT tubes made in the USA, VDC still makes them and has a huge stockpile of NOS inventory (most arcade tubes are sold out though, no idea on cost for a new run).
There's plenty of places to find *most* arcade monitors and PCBs in other unrelated equipment such as old TV's or industrial equipment, although the Medium Resolution ones are tough to find.
Oh please, just build an emulator box that can mimic the aspects of a CRT monitory on an LCD screen. It won't be perfect of course but neither we CRT monitors.
Putting on my old school broadcast engineering hat for a second. There are a lot of differences between CRTs and LCD displays, and in terms of nostalgia and authenticity towards 'the way it was' yes there will be something lost. For starters, CRT tubes were driven with an interlaced signal - the gun would scan top to bottom every other pixel row in 1/60th of a second, then scan the rows between those bottom to top in the next 1/60th of a second. Each set of half resolution rows is called a field. NTSC television ran at 60 fields per second, which gave the motion equivalent of 60 frames per second. A lot of these video games ran using only one field, for a vertical resolution of about 240 lines, at 30 fields per second. In between those lines were black lines, which gave the games a unique look. Rather than doubling each line, which makes the graphics look blocky, the black lines tricked the eyes into making it look like it was a higher resolution than it actually was, it gave a pleasing look. On some emulators such as MAME, there is an option to add the black lines in, which approximates the look. for the games that ran the full 60 fields, it also had a unique look as you could make out interlace flickering. Another artifact is the slight glow / spillover from each pixel, and the rather large visible discreet R, G and B dots that make up each pixel area, which also had some black between them. Add to that the curvature of the glass, and the frequent misalignment of the RGB pattern giving a chromatic abberation towards the edges of the signal. (when the R, G and B lines diverge) plus the softness of the analog signal overall, and you have a pretty unique look. In truth, emulators display games far crisper than they ever looked to us. This tends to over-emphasizes the simplicity of the graphics in a negative fashion. It's very possible to get close to the CRT look, but it will never be quite the same. I think that increased computing power will allow for the emulation of all of the artifacts listed above in realtime, it's just a matter of someone understanding them enough to emulate them. you could even dictate a level of screen burn for the attract screens, which most games tended to develop after a number of years cycling endlessly.
In the mean time, get thee to an arcade expo such as California Extreme to experience it 'as it was'.
One fairly extreme (but also common!) type of this `design decisions based on existing technology' was games that used light-guns and relied on the specific timing- and redraw-characteristics of CRTs.
There are other techniques now available for making guns that work with LCDs and other display tech that don't work like LCDs do, but it seems like it'd probably be a bigger pain to adapt things so that a newer peripheral will actually work with the older arcade hardware, and I've having trouble even imagining how one would interface that with the old game software that can't be patched.
While there is some subset of old light-guns (that are basically dumb enough to trigger off of lightbulbs) that actually may work with newer display tech, for the others there just seems like such a massive `impedance mismatch' in trying to fit a display without any of the original design characteristics into an old light-gun game that the job is, if not impossible, pretty darned close to impossible.
What am I missing? I guess in the case where all of the original computing hardware has been removed and the whole thing is now running through an emulator, it should actually be possible to fake up a world of virtual CRT scan-timings and convert input from a more modern peripheral that actually gives fuller position/attitude info (extending the emulation to include simulating the both the CRT scanlines and photosensor in the gun); but as far as `restoration of classic arcade machines' goes, that still sees like it at least pretty drastically changes the scope of restoration'.
-rozzin.
I didn't have time to read all of the comments. My apologies if this is already well-tread ground.
There are hundreds of millions of CRT television sets out there, and if you do a search on Youtube you will find videos of people who are fixing (to a degree at least) television sets that have been sitting out in the elements for decades. Television sets that have not been abused will last, essentially, forever: Even if you have no electronics troubleshooting skills, you can swap parts with other televisions until the set works. The only real wear out component in most televisions is capacitors, and you can train yourself to do cap replacements. I would imagine for really old televisions you will need to make some internal adjustments. That's not rocket science, either. Download the service manual.
Right now people can't give CRT's away. Even thrift stores don't want them. But if for some reason the supply-demand curve swings around the other way, then people like me will start servicing CRT televisions and reselling them. If you can still buy vintage radios from the 1940's, then you can find a television set made in the 1990's. The "problem" is that manufactures can't profitably make them, and they may never do so again. Existing CRT televisions, though, won't be disappearing any time soon.
I'm looking forward to the day that we start going to landfills to retrieve electronics for recycling, but we're a long way from that level of desperation (or technical ability).
I will preface this by saying I grew up in the 80s, arcades, and even had 5 or 6 machines and about 30 boardsets in my day. I have burnt many a finger soldering up JAMMA or customized harnesses, and used to go to game auctions. It was a great time! I had friends that resurrected long-dead games from various ROMs they collected. I have seen and played one-of-a-kind games. I remember when people in the usenet community started building multi-game boardsets, it was very very exciting.
If you would have told me I could have a big, thin, relatively cheap monitor for a cabinet that replaced the CRT, without the downsides of screen burn, weight, or the distinct possibility of electrocution, I would have loved it. Yes, there is something about the original monitors, the smell when they get warmed up, the glow, the look, etc. But that's because that was the best we had at the time! Newer isn't always better, but in this case I believe it is.
I sold off my cabinets and boardsets about 10 years ago, it was sad to see them go. I am so glad that I got to grow up during that time. But I have a hard time being nostalgic for the CRT.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I was thinking about this recently for a similar project - I'll bet a piece of vacuum formed plastic with some rear projection paint combined with a pico projector could do a pretty good job of mimicking the physical appearance of an old CRT. Couple that with a bit of video processing to inject artificial scan-lines.
Blinky & Cathode are two pieces of software on OSX that do a really good job of mimicking CRT effects.
never drink kool-aid from a big vat
A CRT is not required, if you go to Chuck E Cheese or a movie theater arcade you can see that, you just need to calibrate for latency. A NES with duck hunt can work through an XRGB3 and low latency LCD monitor because it gets close enough to the 16ms response time expected by the game code.
Common TVs and upscalers have too much latency and also don't handle NTSC line doubling mode properly which leads to another display issue that could confuse the Zapper sensor.
The SNES Super Scope used an IR sensor and works fine on any display, although latency could cause a discrepancy between what is happening onscreen and where the game actually expects the targets to be located, so you could miss even if visually things line up.
Twinstiq, game news
In fact, MAME already seems to allow HLSL processing of games you are playing: http://docs.mamedev.org/advanc... The idea is simple - figure out the visual phenomena commonly seen on a CRT screen. Write a pixel shader in HLSL/GLSL that mimics those visual phenomena using realtime image processing operations. This might be a combination of visible scanlines, blurryness around pixels, some bloom, warping of the image and so forth. Even an old Nvidia 500 series GPU can comfortably do these effects in realtime at 30 FPS or more.
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
MAME's scanline filters look really great, though.
I still have CRTs and my MAME games look the very same on my LCD screens with the filters enabled.
Kriston
I own an old Star Trek:Strategic Operations Simulator sit down game. Years back someone bumped into color vector monitor and it stopped working. The logic boards still function but getting a working monitor is difficult, expensive, and they were prone to malfunction/fire.
I hate to say it but the only real future for the game is MAME. The port for ST:SOS works great. The only gameplay problem is working out input from the optical spinner might be more than my meager skills.
Classic arcades use 19" screens. Larger ones like 29" or so would mostly be 90s games and newer like Street Fighter II and stuff.
Atari 8-bit emulators do artifacting to simulate color on some games. http://atariage.com/forums/top...
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
"The way developers intended" We hear this statement way too often. It's totally disingenuous because it implies some sort mindset of purity to game development on CRT TV technology. While it's true games were developed with considerations of these screens they were played on, by no means is there consensus that developers saw these screens as integral to playing and enjoying their games. You NEVER hear people saying "I restored my 13 inch black and white TV with the 4 ft rabbit ears so I can get the true experience of what the creators of "I love lucy" intended.for me to see" I mean c'mon. We do need to fix the lightgun situation though. Some people have done so using WiiMotes and some raspberry pi or arduino hacking from what I've seen.
...::----::...
I am in no way affiliated with this sig.
....so you're saying that I can actually get something for my perfectly-functional (beautiful picture) Rasterops 20"+ monitor? I think it's a 21"?
-Styopa
They exist but are problematic. The first issue is that they induce atleast 1 frame of lag which at 30Hz is significant. Second issue is that CRTs are quite forgiving when it comes to video timing, much more so than the converters. One arcade game I've worked with, SideArms, has been tested with several converters and none produce even remotely usable results. What is needed is an LCD display that can handle 15kHz video inputs reliably.
My understand is that the NES system was based on timing of scan lines on the CRT
That's one of the two method that it can use.
Because the CPU of the NES is very slow, it's reported to be rather shitty on the horizontal axis, it's mostly good only for the vertical axis.
(And doesn't work at all with an LCD or a 100Hz CRT. It could at least work for the vertical axis on some laser scanning projectors, but forget about the horizontal axis, all these projectors ping-pong left and right)
Operation Wolf is reported by other to rely on this technique.
Most later consoles (basically anything until the Wii) counted exclusively on this method.
LCD-/100Hz- workaround used infrared light-sources and image processing (similar to how wii-mote works) and generate appropriate signal to simulate the position. (G1 Light Gun was produced for playstation this way).
The other method consist of quickly blink the screen and the various target black or white.
The game knows which target the gun is pointed at by knowing which targets were blinked white at the moment the gun detected a signal.
(e.g.: duck hunt turns first the screen black, then each duck is flashed white in turn. When the gun gets a signal it means it's pointing to the currently flashed duck)
in theory it should be able to somewhat work with a LCD, provided that all image post-processing is disabled and thus the LCD displays pixels as it is receiving them, so that the gun see exactly what the NES is trying to display.
(e.g.: when duck hunt first turn the screen black, the gun must imediately see black - so it know the light source it's pointing to is the screen. If there's a delay, the gun might still see light from the previous frame and decide that the player is trying to cheat by pointing the gun at a lamp)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I wonder if you could just bounce a laser (or simply a highly focused light) off a MEMS mirror or something. Or maybe you'd use multiples?
Such lasers are popular in nightclubs.
There are a few hacker who have adapted them to mame (google "openlase")
The main problem is that CRT Vector display have some persistance (the phosphores don't imediately turn black) and the image looks stable, whereas the laser make the image "blink" (unless you find a way to bump up the refresh rate)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Good riddance! there are countless warehouses full of old TV's and monitors with these lead-lined monsters in them, and no way to get rid of them. Screw the old arcade games.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
https://hardware.slashdot.org/...
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
This is not a serious issue.
If you go the Computer Museum in Cambridge (the real one, in the UK) you'll find plenty of 1980s kit hooked up to LCD displays.
It's not hard to do. This article is either over-playing the problem or these cabinet restorers do not understand that the important thing is the game, not the display, and that there are alternative display options available.
The thing is, most of those old games WEREN'T 'really' 30hz... they were 60fps.
A NTSC display could only display 30 complete frames per second, but the video chips on most legacy games didn't send complete frames... they sent 60 FIELDS per second (each of which contained ONLY the odd or even scanlines from each frame). CRT TVs were "dumb", and depended on the video signal itself to tell them whether the next field was odd or even (with one shifted vertically to fill the gaps between the other). So games simply never TOLD the CRT that a field should be shifted, allowing those 60 fields to be repeatedly drawn over the same half of the scanlines while the remaining half remained dark.
This actually caused problems with a lot of first-gen LCD TVs. They'd buffer a field, buffer the next, then freak out when they couldn't decide which one was supposed to be "even" and which one was supposed to be "odd". The usual result was either an empty blue screen (possibly with something like "invalid signal" displayed as well), or a mangled mishmash with what were SUPPOSED to be two independent 60fps frames forcibly-interleaved into the same 60fps frame and shown twice in a row.
In any case, even if the native framerate WERE 30fps, high-bandwidth VRAM can solve the problem for you... buffer a few scanlines, then do the effects processing in the time it takes a later scanline to do its horizontal retrace and output the whole thing through the VRAM's back door, so you're only adding a few scanlines' worth of latency instead of an entire frame's worth.
For Games to be emulated correctly, is required at least 60 FPS in this configuration. True: MAME can skip frames, but Gameplay becomes jerky. And the emulation is game dependent... Basically because in the golden age of arcades, developers had the option to choose what type of monitor can go in the arcade machine, resolutions of CRT were 320x240, 324x288, 256x264, and others depending of the game. Thus, there's no "magic setting" for all games.
To be honest, probably only purists will care about pixel exact emulation... But of course, there is the problem of light guns games. These will be effectively dead after the last CRT monitor dies.
Reference differences between CRT refresh and LCD refresh:
CRT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nQ_gEJ6B4A
LCD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wts8f1bNnbo
Couldn't you make a phosphorescent front projection screen?
In theory: yes, specially since there exist phosphors that only react to some laser frequencies (so you could even do RGB). (See Thunderf00t's Youtube video playing with blue phorphor balls and blue lasers).
You could in theory spent some resource in researching phosphors that reacts more or less to a laser, like older CRT's phosphor did react to its electron gun.
In practice: it's much cheaper to try to pump-up the frame rate and refresh the vector figure at a rate where the human eye's persistence of vision doesn't notice the flicker (much). (At least that's what I've read people are doing with OpenLase)
(And that's how the laser are used in practice in night clubs : drawing the vectors at very high refresh rate).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]