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.