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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.
NES lightgun just inserted a totally a black frame with white shapes where the target was and the gun sensed the light. At 50/60 Hz it was fast enough to not see it.
If they're using an LCD screen, the lightgun games work the same way as a WiiMote, basically. Just more accurate. There were a few "lightgun" games on the Wii, and that setup worked well enough.
If the game uses a gun that is permanently mounted to the machine, then obviuosly the gun is really just a big joystick, and the screen used doesn't matter.
They just use some other means of referencing position such as IR LEDs + camera (like a wiimote or in reverse), image capture/analysis, gun position sensing, or some combination of these things. Most use IR LEDs. Some older technologies such as the NES Power Glove used ultrasonic positioning.
A lot of the 2000's era arcade gun games such as Time Crisis 4 used DLP projectors from the get-go and were using these types of gun controllers from the start; so they are relatively easy to convert to LCD.
Classic CRT based light gun games -- while I'm sure it's possible to build some sort of device that emulates the original gun in hardware, it is probably a much easier job to simply run them in an emulator.
One saving grace to this article is that while it's true that the CRT business might be winding down, the tubes themselves do usually last far longer than the electronics and will be around for a very long time still. I have had to replace some components on my Wells Gardner CRT that I used in my scratch-built cabinet because it had gotten very dim, but after a new neck board and some new capacitors it's back to looking like new.
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