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

How are light gun games developed now?

[damn_registrars]

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?

Re:How are light gun games developed now?

[tepples]

The Zapper does not work with LCDs. It uses a circuit similar to that found in infrared remote control receivers. The circuit is tuned to sense light that flickers at roughly 16 kHz, which matches the horizontal scan rate of a CRT SDTV.

Furthermore, some NES games actually measure the time between the start of the picture and when the Zapper begins to detect light. This lets the game tell how far up or down the gun is pointed and narrow down the set of targets that it has to turn on in sequence. Operation Wolf does this, as does Zap Ruder (source).

If you have an LCD, you need to wait until 2026 for the Wii Remote patents to expire.

I realize this is bad for 'purists' but...

[Baron_Yam]

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.

Re:I realize this is bad for 'purists' but...

[AmiMoJo]

There are actually plenty of screens out there, just look on eBay or at your local charity shop. The problem is that arcade monitors are a bit special, typically more adjustable than a standard TV and accepting different signal levels. I expect we will start to see more and more conversion kits and signal conditioners to cope with this as supply dries up.

A lot of supposedly dead CRTs could be fixed, if people knew how or if it made economic sense. Sounds like the point at which spending a few hundred bucks to repair a screen is almost here. It's like with VCRs - they were so cheap you might as well chuck a broken one and replace it, but now you can't buy them new and second hand ones are a crap shoot people are willing to spend money maintaining good ones.

Wasn't there a "translator" made to handle this?

[ctilsie242]

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.

I grew up with arcades in the 80s

[MindPrison]

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.

Progress/

[ledow]

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.

Bad TV Adjust Box?

[Chordonblue]

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.

There is hope

[Oasiz]

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.

What it means? Nothing, but cost.

[NotQuiteReal]

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...

A deeper look at the CRT 'look'

[PhantomHarlock]

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'.