Here's what you need to know for swapping 19" tubes. It's very simple.
Be sure that:
- The tube is ACTUALLY a 19" tube, and not a 20.
- The mounting "ears" (or tabs) are oriented correctly to fit your arcade monitor's frame. Usually this means the tabs need to be on the back side of the implosion strap.
- The neck needs to match your arcade monitor's tube neck (22.5mm versus 29mm)
- Shouldn't have a bonded yoke (makes it hard to harvest).
That's it. Beyond that, nearly every consumer television has a tube inside that runs with a heater voltage of 6.3 volts, and a 90 degree angle on the tube bell. YES, I'm aware that there are some funky ones out there that are not a 90 degree tube. But those are pretty rare, and I've really only ever seen this on 25" and larger tubes, not 19.
The 2nd bullet point about the mounting tabs (or the "ears") is one you may even be able to ignore too, depending on how the replacement tube is to be mounted in the game. You may run into back door or bezel clearance problems if you use a tube with the mounting tabs on the wrong side of the implosion strap, but you can sometimes get around that by using spacers to re-position the tube. YMMV.
The neck size, tube size, and bonded yoke issues are really the deal breakers. Satisfy those requirements, and you're likely to have a tube that will display an image when you hook up your arcade chassis to it. But, there are no guarantees. Some CRT gun assemblies are made differently than others, and they may not play nice with the arcade chassis. I've had a few tubes puke on me when I fired them with the arcade chassis hooked up. In those cases, I cut my losses, put the cooked tube back in the TV, dropped it off to recycling, and moved on to the next 19" TV. I've never had more than 1 in a row that cooked on me. Just an odd 1 here or there.