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.

Comments

The warmth of vinyl

[Overzeetop]

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.

Re:The warmth of vinyl

[squiggleslash]

Well, kinda. Yes, the original authors probably wanted higher quality graphics, but they designed for hardware that couldn't show those graphics, and they made use of the features of the technology available to them, some of which aren't replicated in the 'better' replacements.

To put it another way, had better technology been available, they wouldn't have made the same design decisions, because design decisions intended to make something like awesome on a CRT can make things look worse on a better screen. Color bleed and interlacing would be two examples of things you make use of, that would make a game seem better on a CRT than not using them, but would make a game look awful if the technology is used on an LCD.