What the death of the CRT display technology means for classic arcade machines
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The result is an emulation that is incredibly close to what I see when I walk downstairs and run my test code on the real Apple IIe in my basement. I guess that's what happens when a DSP person writes an emulator :-) (The original author has disappeared themselves from the internet, unfortunately.)
Of course, most people (Pittman included) felt that configuring the visually emulation too accurately was annoying and/or unbelievable. :P
[Edit] the bending, and shadowing to the right of the characters is amazing :-)
(Not many 50Hz Electron games, though! Firetrack is one.)
1. Light guns
Even on consoles as late as the Sega Saturn, the light guns were design around the timings of CRT refresh rates and thus many (albeit not all) LCD screen are not compatible. I would imagine this could be a real issue for collectors / restorers of cabinets as shooting games (eg Virtua Cop) were quite popular in arcades.
2. Early 3D systems as used on Sega Scope for the Sega Master System; and the Nintendo 3D System for the Famicom (Japanese NES)
These devices are less common and as far as I'm aware only available on home consoles. For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, it's active shutter glasses (ie disabled one eye at a time) and was timed around the interlacing on CRTs. At 50/60Hz (depending on your region) the effect can be a little unpleasant. But it's also pretty amazing to play when you consider the devices are approximately 30 years old.
LCDs, well, change all the frame at once. The issue isn't with the frame rate but at what happens when the device is drawing a single frame change.
Is this true? It doesn't seem like it is, if it were then we'd not experience tearing in games, etc.
The difference is LCD keeps picture until told otherwise, whole picture is emitting light. CRT has limited phosphor persistence, there is only one point/pixel being lit at any given time.
I have a "100Hz" CRT television that won't support light guns because the manufacturers decided they'd put this kind of image-"improving" technology in.
There are actually two techniques for light gun operation, one of which is "racing the beam" (unreliable in the presence of high retention phosphor) and the other of which is to draw a single frame of white squares for targets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NES_Zapper#Technical_details
The gameplay is obviously changed with technology, but for some games the core idea survived some heavy decades of transitions. The originals would probably be less engaging for today's kids, so it's only fair to ship them a 3D/VR/mobile version, and keep our nostalgia from trying to sell mechanical road runner to all arcades. CRTs will phase out in favour of everything else, and that should be ok.
[1] http://museemecaniquesf.com
[2] https://www.facebook.com/museemecaniquesf/videos/vb.51627194...
Outside of lightguns not working this seems like a non-issue to me. I'm sure the emulation community can find a work-around for this for the few people actually using lightguns under emulation.
>Have you guys seen Musee Mecanique
I live in Chicago and have access to all sorts of barcades as well as one of the largest, if not largest, arcades in a nearby suburb, so I'm pretty well versed in the arcade experience today as well as from my childhood. I went to Musee a few years ago and was expecting an experience like that, but instead the game floor was mostly these near turn of the century mechanical games. I was fairly disappointed, from a gameplay or mechanical perspective they were kinda terrible and largely uninteresting. They had historic value but that's about it and probably better off in a proper museum and lovingly maintained than beaten up for quarters. I think in 20-30 years this is exactly how CRT's will be seen. Kids will marvel at how terrible their low resolutions, framerate, color accuracy, and ghosting are.
I mostly agree, though I think it gets a little muddier when you consider that the artists of the day — while doubtlessly wishing they had access to "more perfect" displays — were often designing their art to take advantage of those distortions to get effects they wanted. So, if part of why we're doing emulation is for history's sake, we have to keep that in mind. The painters of ancient Roman frescoes probably wanted more vibrant pigments than they had and it might even be interesting and attractive to "enhance" one with modern pigments, but it's ahistorical.
That being said, I've never personally found added distortion in emulators to improve the experience. I'm always constantly aware of its artificiality and that far outweighs any potential gains in "authenticity".
Pac-Man was released in 1980, not 1982.
I'd be willing to bet that you could find or train people in Detroit right now to build these CRT's. All you'd need are a couple of people to train them for a few months.
They said the same thing about vinyl records, soon the industry would die. Detroit has become a hub for pressing records and as old machines become scarce they're now supporting a company making new machines.
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/inside-jack-white...
I collect and restore analogue oscilloscopes and even today you can still get original NOS scope tubes for many models that have ceased production 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago.
Especially considering a nice new OLED could be fashioned to look like a CRT.
1. I can choose any resolution without blurring... problem now worse with 4k screens (lots of angry posts in Stellaris forums due to UI that is hard to read in 4k and become blurry if you lower the resolution...)
2. Ridiculous response speed... playing Crypt of the Necrodancer or Super Hexagon is much, much more fun on CRT, all mistakes feel like it was purely lack of skill, instead of feeling something unfair happened. Ditto for fps... CS community in fact is hogging all CRT, the ones I knew for sale all ended in some CS player home willing to fudge settings to end with crazy refresh rate and response speed (there is even a video of a guy pulling 200+ fps by using interlaced mode!)
3. Better blacks and whites... in fact, this was the main reason, when CRTs died I also abandoned them, but all screens I had after had colour or contrast problems, I had to fiddle with settings constantly, one day my screen broke and a CRT was available nearby, when I plugged it in, I was blown away by the image quality that required only geometry settings, no endless messing with gamma, colour profiles and whatnot.
4. Not valid anymore, but until recently CRTs were much cheaper than flat panels of equivalent quality, at least on my country... but now with "new" stocks empty, used prices around rising, I even own a CRT tv that now on eBay costs more than the price it has when it was new... (this particular model is also the one used as reference for some SNES emulators CRT "filters")
See: https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3a2tx6/do_old_c...
In other words, you do not know how a CRT works.
Educate yerself, it's free: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathode_ray_tube
It's more helpful to put it into perspective with other radiation sources:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/20/Radiatio...
IOW, radiation dosage of using a CRT for a year comparable to ten bananas.
> CRTs can emit a small amount of X-ray radiation as a result of the electron beam's bombardment of the shadow mask/aperture grille and phosphors. The amount of radiation escaping the front of the monitor is widely considered not to be harmful. The Food and Drug Administration regulations in 21 C.F.R. 1020.10 are used to strictly limit, for instance, television receivers to 0.5 milliroentgens per hour (mR/h) (0.13 µC/(kg·h) or 36 pA/kg) at a distance of 5 cm (2 in) from any external surface; since 2007, most CRTs have emissions that fall well below this limit.
Except for all the old cabinets that just won't work with it I guess.
It seems to me there's no fundamental reason that an LCD can't be designed nowadays to paint the screen almost identically to the way a CRT did it, complete with an emulation of their "flaws" (with at least a line or two of buffering to pull that off). The fact that older LCDs use an internal framebuffer and are locked to a certain refresh rate seems like an artifact of the older technology rather than a fundamental limitation. Just as G-Sync and friends can start playing with the refresh rate it seems like nothing would prevent you from designing an LCD controller that doesn't wait for an entire frame but just starts painting the NTSC or similar signal.
If I'm wrong, I eagerly await informative corrections. But bear in mind I'm aware that I'm calling for fairly significantly different supporting electronics behind the panel, that work on a fundamentally different architecture than current LCD panels. I do realize this is a non-trivial modification.
You'd have to run numbers but it's possible this is more cost-effective than trying to source all the CRT parts and/or run your own manufacturing line; this approach would involve creating custom electronics (feasible even for a startup) and then sticking them on commodity screens, which is almost certainly much cheaper than trying to make CRTs.
Edit: Apparently I have gored some sort of sacred ox or something? I'm getting downmodded for this? Really? I'm talking about deeply redesigning how LCD screens work, so your current issues with LCD screens don't apply any longer. There are some things about how LCDs work now that are historical accident, not fundamental to the technology.
If I am correct about how the LCDs could be redesigned to work, I can imagine a world where you're paying about 1ms + the actual liquid crystal latency for the display which can apparently also be in low-single-digit milliseconds, which is probably good enough even for frame-perfect fighting games, but you're still going to have a screen that is fundamentally persistent rather than a scanning flash of light. (Possibly 3 or 4 ms if you're going to do some basic CRT emulation. Such emulation wouldn't be able to do full screen distortions induced by too much brightness, but even in the CRT era that was considered a failure, not a feature. It should be able to do slight persistence and local blurring.)
Which is still several orders of magnitude slower what is needed to simulate a scanning electron beam in order to make lightguns work.
This youtube video documents what a rather dedicated individual does to resurrect small-scale Nixie tube manufacturing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxL4ElboiuA And technologically, color CRTs are way beyond that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathode_ray_tube#Color_CRTs
[1] http://www.earlytelevision.org/crt_rebuild.html [2] https://www.thomaselectronics.com/repair-overhaul/
- Filament-cathode shorts can be burned out (by discharging a capacitor across the short) - Cathode poisoning can be reversed (e.g. http://www.ke5fx.com/crt.html )
Given patents usually expire after twenty years it seems very unlikely there would be anything still valid for CRT manufacturing (at least for these arcade machines from the 80s. There may still be a few flat CRT / WEGA patents and the like that are still valid from the mid 90s, but they won't be valid for much longer either).
From TFA: "In the very far future, the value of an authentic 1980s arcade game may become so high, that the monetary value will be significant..."
I guess I'll be hanging on to my I,Robot and pair of vector games for some time then...
It's a shame that emulation devalued real classic arcade games, but then it's also great that everyone can experience them. I too am guilty of writing and emulator ;-)
MAME can be interfaced to a laser setup for true vector graphics.
I came close once, at the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, where they had real hardware but, sadly, an LCD screen.
- higher dynamic range
- gracefull saturation behavior
and IMHO the absolute killer feature:
- a "fresh" sensor for each and every frame captured (no worries about scratches in the optical lowpass coating, no hassle with dust on the sensor).
Also absolutely no dependency on charged batteries if one uses a purely mechanical camera.
35mm film is considered to have a dynamic range around 13 stops. A modern digital camera will do about 13.9
Film has a few advantages and pleasant quirks over digital, but sensitivity and resolution aren't amongst them.
Digital cameras have been more sensitive than chemical film for some time now, hence I didn't mention sensitivity (film is clearly inferior).
Regarding dynamic range and resolution, it really depends on what kinds of stock you compare to digital. If you take a low sensitivity ISO 50 fine grain stock, that one will easily outperform current generation electronic sensors – except for low-ish resolution high dynamic range sensors with large charge collecting capabilities¹. But you get this at the expense of having to use slow shutter speeds or a fast aperture.
You're right that in the "usual" ballpark of operational parameters (ISO 400 to ISO 2000, ~30MP resolution) modern electronic image sensors are getting close or are on-par with standard application chemical film stock.
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1: Ironically chemical film stock resolution and dynamic range increase "in the same direction": Smaller grain → higher DR, higher resolution, but lower sensitivity. It's exactly opposite for electronic sensors since pixel size determines charge collection capacity and therefore saturation levels.
Their breakdown is based around top of the line equipment. If you think 50mp can be pulled from film, I'd like to see how.
And as long as you have the negs, you can keep your pictures almost forever. Try reading that fancy RAW, proprietary format from your 2010's camera in 2050.
An early-2000s consumer film camera, addressing roughly the same market as a modern iPhone camera, is not going to have nearly the lens quality, nor will the mass-market film stock have the grain resolution, nor will the 1-hour photo print have the transfer sharpness to survive a scan enlargement to a 1-meter-wide print. The result will look grainy and blurry compared to an enlargement from a recent iPhone.
An early-2000s 35mm SLR with professional film and a high-end darkroom print will look great enlarged, but then an iPhone is no longer an appropriate point of comparison.
[1] http://www.techradar.com/news/television/hdr-welcome-to-the-...
While this is a bit sad on some level, the art itself will survive the transition. After all, nobody these days experiences Romeo and Juliet in the way that its creator intended, yet it endures. What I'm more worried about are those games that are going to be completely lost once the hardware expires; we can preserve the game data itself all we like, but without proper emulators you're SOL (and unless CPU speeds start doubling again, we're never going to be able to even semi-accurately emulate anything past the Xbox 360/PS3 generation). To say nothing of online games that will vanish into the mist once the servers get taken offline...
Luckily all the new consoles use x86_64 processors for their main processors, so no low level emulation will be required.
Since there are very few exclusives, there's little demand for it to be emulated in the first place. And from what I understand, the XBox isn't fondly-remembered by geeks. The XBox was the console of choice for people who liked to make fun of geeks and nerds, and as such most people who have the skills and the desire to write emulators (i.e. geeks and nerds) have a pretty strong aversion to the XBox. That the most popular games for the XBox weren't the kind of games that were enjoyed by nerds doesn't help, either. There's very little overlap between emulator programmers and people who care about the original Halo or old Madden games.
This 33c3 talk gives a lot of fascinating information on how PS4 differs from your run-of-the-mill PC and what kind of issues they hit when trying to run Linux on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMiubC6LdTA
Technology aside, it's also a matter of interest. Many XboxOne and PS4 games already have PC ports, so there is less need and interest to create emulators. Nintendo consoles on the other side have many exclusives, so interest in emulating them seems to be higher.
Only time will tell.
Probably a matter of demand, too, since it's got very few decent games that aren't 1) available on another console, or 2) available as an (often superior) PC port
The PS4P increases everything except the CPU cores count: CPU clock to 2.1GHz, compute units to 36 (hence 2304 cores) and GCN frequency to 911MHz.
The art was created for a medium. If the medium is unavailable, the art is altered. That is not unlike photographs of paintings, at a macro level the art "survives", except some masters used layers of semi-translucent paint and three-dimensional structures which the photograph can not reproduce.
And the art thus survives in the same way thylacines or dodos survive as taxidermic mounts: a pale shadow (or washed out over-exposure) of their former glory.
> The first recorded mention of the dodo was by Dutch sailors in 1598. In the following years, the bird was hunted by sailors and invasive species, while its habitat was being destroyed. The last widely accepted sighting of a dodo was in 1662. Its extinction was not immediately noticed, and some considered it to be a mythical creature.
Which is, really, the same problem we've got with Shakespeare. Without really good footage of several performances, we can't really know how Shakespeare plays were really performed, we can just get as close as we can from the surviving evidence.
If I ever got a lift with the Doctor I would ask to go back to the 16th century and record as much music as possible.
I think "excessive verisimilitude" is the term for this annoying attitude.
The fact that most of the 80s arcade monitors were 4:3 ratio.
Sure - you can get 4:3 ratio LCD monitors today - but they are becoming harder to find. Furthermore, good luck finding them in a larger size than about 17 inches (19 inches, maybe). They never made them larger, from what I remember. The larger LCD screens were all widescreen (16:9?) - and still are. Even most of the smaller LCDs are wide format.
And you can't just stick a wide format LCD into an arcade cabinet and add "borders" - because there likely isn't room. So at best, you'll get an LCD stuck in, with a matte board around it, and the display smaller than the original. It'll look like crap, to be honest - and that's before the look of the display on LCD vs CRT...
The CRT people like grainy low res distortion so projecting onto the back of a purposefully bent and distorted piece of plastic should appear extremely similar to a CRT.
Of course this turns the problem of a CRT with finite filament life into a problem of a projector with a finite bulb life but presumably it would be easy to swap out the entire projector.
With considerable plywood hacking you MIGHT pull off attractive forward projection onto a screen for some games (not many of course) Or if you allow really ugly plywood hacking you can just place a projector screen in place of the CRT, ceiling mount the projector, and call it good.
A friend of mine rebuilt an arcade cabinet recently and his solution was to just rotate the display 90 degrees and offset it a bit to get it to fit. It might not be a valid solution for mini-cabinets since they were pretty tightly packed but according to him it was a pretty easy fit in this one.
The bigger problems were LCD processing latency and scaling. Most TVs that would fit were cheaper models (I guess it's getting harder to find sub 50" mid-range TVs) so they have a decent bit of processing latency even in "gaming" mode. But I don't think there's really a solution to the scaling problem without much higher resolution LCD panels because non-integer scaling is always going to have some shimmer when scrolling.
I've got a 20.1" 1600x1200 4:3 LCD monitor; I'm pretty sure that there were bigger ones before widescreen started eating the world.
Does this really happen with LCD arcade monitors? It happens with PC-based emulators because they usually can't make the OS/drivers/GPU/monitor switch to a refresh rate that matches the emulated hardware (which, despite the quoted "more responsive CRT" bit, is just as likely to be below 60 Hz as above it, and usually not by a large amount either way) but I don't see how CRT vs. LCD is a major factor if we're talking about monitors that are actually made for arcade machines.
The absolute loss of dead online games bothers me. I can't get too fussed about arcade games that are still 100% playable but with less nostalgic pixels.
The nostalgic feeling and experience of playing not only on a CRT, but actual machine from the 1990's can't be replicated on an LCD.
Static on the screen, the hum of the monitor, the flickering of the colors, the look of the glare on the surrounding arcades, the sound of coins dropping down the chute, are the little things I bought my arcade cabinet for.
I dread the day that my monitor fails. As it'll mean the death of this experience for me without traveling to another country.
They have light guns too (it uses a Wii-like infrared tracker): http://www.paradoxarcades.com/lightguns/
Nice emulations, but nothing is going to match the latency of a board hooked up directly to electron guns.
But if you think about it - if the screens we have today would have been available back then, what do you think would the game designers have preferred?
Also, screens will continue to get better. Gaming on [an arcade machine with] a HDR OLED screen could be amazing.
The best example of design-to-the-CRT by far is the original Star Wars. For starters it's a vector game - electron beam is deflected in lines to directly draw the objects. Vector monitors start with a very distinct look. Then they went further. For the enemy bullets (snowflakes or whatever you call them) they overdrive the electron gun which causes the tube voltage to drop, which in turn defocuses the beam and creates a wide-soft vector for those objects. And finally when you lose a shield (get hit) they draw a very much oversized square so far off screen that the electrons scatter off the back of the tube and flood the entire screen with a haze or fog as you take the hit. Oh, and the death star explosion also has a bit of a unique look as it involves more vectors than the hardware can quite keep up with.
That game was designed for the medium and is the pinnacle of genera. There is no substitute.
However, most games do not take advantage of being displayed on a CRT.
Do you think it's better to play Donkey Kong or Galaga on a CRT vs a LCD? If so, why? Just nostalgia?
Unfortunately, the hardware of the time could barely keep up with the graphics. If the hardware wasn't generating graphics on the fly (like the early Namco, Nintendo, and Midway systems), it needed a large chunk of DRAM for the framebuffer, which was even more expensive.
Some systems like the early Williams units economized by using a 4bpp buffer combined with palette hardware, but you were still taking nearly 48K of RAM, which was a sea of chips back then.
A VGA-sized buffer on this system would need 150K of RAM. That's triple the cost! HD 1280p? 10x the cost not to mention pixel clock speed, which the TTL chips of the time just couldn't do.
Also, if you have played games a lot on CRT, you will find HDR OLED not amazing at all. HDR OLED makes mistakes between were things are in memory vs the screen. so you think 'that thing didnt get me' and then it does even though it was pixel(s) away.
As for the safety I'd expect anybody servicing arcades to know what they're doing.
Don't get me wrong, this is a total waste of time - but the market is probably there for someone who wants it.
My point is that there's a market for these. The product I was selling wasn't scarce. My guess why people bought these games was that they were teens who couldn't get their parents to drive them an hour to the nearest store that carried games.
Museum of Play - International Center for the History of Electronic Games http://www.museumofplay.org/about/icheg
If you are in the area, you should stop by. They have every cool toy possible from many many years back. Brought back many memories.
Plus you can play many old arcade or pinball games!
More and more people are starting to realize that emulation is no substitute for the real thing, and the supply of functional, high quality CRTs will only continue to decrease.
I recently upgraded my second monitor on my home PC to a 144Hz gaming version. The smoothness and responsiveness of UI on that monitor side by side with the standard 60Hz is really remarkable, I'd forgotten how big a difference it makes. The PC physically feels much more pleasant to use. OTOH, my partner doesn't notice the difference at all.