Where to buy new CRT Monitors?

there's some kinda neuroticism behind it i can't figure out.

unless the burn is actually visible (not "I know it's there" 😰) with the game on and the tube warmed up, i don't see the point in fretting.
some people lose their shit if a single dandelion appears in their immaculate lawn, same psychological tick happening maybe

it's some weird insecurity with novice collectors where if there's any screen burn they won't be considered cool or something.

nobody cares if there's screen burn on your Pac-Man monitor. if it's a game that was worth anything to the casuals they won't care at all. you'll get props for merely having it.
 
I have a friend sitting on quite a few of them. He always say he will give them away. It would be cheaper than a dumpster. I still have not acquired them.
 
They aren't 'breaking down' any more than vintage cars are. Most of them can be fixed with a bit of knowledge, (which you can get here), and parts that are readily available.

The reality is, the more you use anything, and the older something is, the faster it will break down. I certainly wouldn't want to rely on a vintage car for my daily commute.
CRT burn-in can't be fixed. Neither can bad electron guns. Also, any game with a working 23" b&w monitor is living on borrowed time, because the phosphor coating failing on those is a known issue.
 
I certainly wouldn't want to rely on a vintage car for my daily commute.

I would, if I did the work on it.

Just because something is old doesn't mean it's unreliable.


CRT burn-in can't be fixed. Neither can bad electron guns. Also, any game with a working 23" b&w monitor is living on borrowed time, because the phosphor coating failing on those is a known issue.

CRT's can be replaced, if they can't be rejuvinated.

They have not all dried up, and are still relatively easy to find.
 
10-13 years ago you could find them at the end of driveways in abundance. I had about a dozen of them I had to just give away. that's the part that sucked. I wouldn't want to haul them from state to state though. lol

also what was the deal with people cutting the cords off TVs?
 
10-13 years ago you could find them at the end of driveways in abundance. I had about a dozen of them I had to just give away. that's the part that sucked. I wouldn't want to haul them from state to state though. lol

also what was the deal with people cutting the cords off TVs?
Cutting the cord off used to be a universal sign that it was broken or unsafe.
 
I would, if I did the work on it.

Just because something is old doesn't mean it's unreliable.

As far as using it for a daily driver? You can't tell me it's as reliable as a newer car, otherwise people would still be driving 100-year-old cars... right?

CRT's can be replaced, if they can't be rejuvinated.

They have not all dried up, and are still relatively easy to find.

I listed 3 issues that can't be fixed by rejuvenating them :) Of course CRTs can be replaced. I didn't say they "all dried up", did I?
 
As far as using it for a daily driver? You can't tell me it's as reliable as a newer car, otherwise people would still be driving 100-year-old cars... right?


No, because most people don't know how to fix stuff.

I'd rather have a car that I can fix, than one a dealer can't, and just encourages me to buy a new one.

When you fix your own stuff, everything is as reliable as you are.
 
Things wear out, no matter how good you take care of them. Allow me to remind you of the 'modern' issue with 'vintage' POKEY chips, and the years of effort by several people to try and replicate it. Or the Bally MIdway games (Gorf, Wizard of Wor) that use a custom audio chip (that just recently has a replacement becoming available? How about some of the early PC-based games like the Parker Bohn bowling game that don't currently have an equivalent replacement? Namco Rock'N Bowl is another one. Stuff gets fatigued and breaks down, and when you can't find replacement parts, it's game over.
 
Things wear out, no matter how good you take care of them. Allow me to remind you of the 'modern' issue with 'vintage' POKEY chips, and the years of effort by several people to try and replicate it. Or the Bally MIdway games (Gorf, Wizard of Wor) that use a custom audio chip (that just recently has a replacement becoming available? How about some of the early PC-based games like the Parker Bohn bowling game that don't currently have an equivalent replacement? Namco Rock'N Bowl is another one. Stuff gets fatigued and breaks down, and when you can't find replacement parts, it's game over.


And when that happens, and there's enough demand, someone with the requisite skill steps up and reproduces that part, or hacks or reverse engineers it. We've been watching it for 30 years in this hobby, and plenty of others.

Pokeys are still plentiful. I have many. You can go buy an original one on ebay right now for under $50, it's in a Ballblazer cart. All you have to do is desolder it. And there are multiple reproduction projects for Pokeys (and many other custom chips) on top of that.

Parts are not impossible to recreate. It's just a matter of skill and resources, and there being enough of a need to make it worth someone's time. But the knowledge exists. It just takes getting to a tipping point for those people who have the skills to do the things needed to reproduce the part.

If CRT's ever get to the point where they are truly difficult to get, you're going to see more people and projects pop up around being able to save more of them in new ways, and use CRT's that were once thought to be unusable for arcade purposes. The well is far from tapped. You can watch people on youtube who make vacuum tubes from scratch. It takes specialized tools and skills. But there's plenty of preservation tech that exists outside of this hobby at this moment.

Part of what a lot of people do in this hobby is BRING that technology into the hobby, for the purposes of preservation. That's why there are more repro parts now more than ever. Chips, complete joysticks, artwork, entire circuitboards, etc.

Name one vintage collectible hobby that disappeared because nobody could recreate parts for it.
 
New is not always better. Things are not made to last anymore. My new car has had 6 or 7 recalls it's a pos give me vintage any day.
 
New is not always better. Things are not made to last anymore. My new car has had 6 or 7 recalls it's a pos give me vintage any day.

No, new isn't always better. I'm not talking absolutes but rather odds. If you take a cross-country trip for example, you'll have less problems with a newer vehicle rather than a vintage one.
 
Last edited:
And when that happens, and there's enough demand, someone with the requisite skill steps up and reproduces that part, or hacks or reverse engineers it.

That's just it - only *if* there's enough demand for someone to spend the time to reproduce it. Yes, there are replacement POKEYs now, but only because OEM replacements are going for $50, and those are 40+ years old (and don't bother with desoldering Ballblazer carts when you can pick up broken 5200 or 8-bit computers for less, and those chips are socketed). Do you think you're going to get another 40 years out of those? Who's to say the current replacements will last 40 years? Or that they're truly 100% functionally identical? As someone already mentioned, newer isn't always better, but as I already mentioned, things have a finite lifespan. Planes get retired after so many years because of metal fatigue. Solid state devices are no different. You can only power them up and run them for so many hours before the material breaks down and it fails.

As for making your own vacuum tubes... that's never going to be an acceptable option and you know it. There's several videos on YouTube showing how to convert standard TVs into RBG monitors, and there's probably at least a million of those still around. That's the more realistic option.

Yes, some parts are all but impossible to recreate. Sure, new blank boards can and have been fabricated, but what about the dozens of chips that go on it? AFAIK the original photomasks for the POKEY no longer exist, which is what would be needed to have new chips made. Even if you find a chip fab company in China to make new custom chips for you (POKEY, TIA, etc), who's going to put up the money to reverse-engineer it (since you don't have the photomasks) and run off whatever the company's minimum quantity requirement is? And remember, the U.S. basically has to outsource a lot of our tech outside the country, so how much do you think a new POKEY chip will cost you? lol Want an extreme but comparable example? It cost the U.S. some $26 billion total to eventually reach the moon. It would cost 10 times as much today to get back, and considering we can't reuse the same old 60s tech, everything has to be reinvented, at today's dollar. So yeah, realistically impossible to reproduce that old tech.

No, as far as the actual game pcb hardware, the future of this hobby is with either FPGA or PC+MAME. It's a question all of us will have to ask ourselves. How original do you want to keep your cabinets, and at what cost? How important is it to have that original Nintendo fluorescent light fixture? Do you really want to keep dealing with those 40+ year old early 80s Taito game boardsets, or is a FPGA replacement acceptable? What about those Cinematronic vector monitors? We're seeing people putting in the effort to create things like FPGA replacements for games like Pole Position and Turbo because those games are a major PITA to keep running at this point; if they weren't, we wouldn't see these new boards. Plus those games are popular. Nobody is going to bother investing in reproducing boards for an unpopular game. Some of us are fine replacing old power supplies with switchers, so why not game boards? +5v is +5v, and code is code. I'm after the same game playing experience, and if I can't tell the difference between the new hardware and the old, I'm fine with that.
 
it's some weird insecurity with novice collectors where if there's any screen burn they won't be considered cool or something.

nobody cares if there's screen burn on your Pac-Man monitor. if it's a game that was worth anything to the casuals they won't care at all. you'll get props for merely having it.
There are other reasons then just replacing for burn in. I have picked up about a dozen cabinets that either had no monitor or someone did a LCD converstion. Grab a consumer tv, get a k7000 off here and Bobs your uncle..lol
 
Back
Top Bottom