People Who Hunt Down Old TVs • Hacker News Board

Re: People Who Hunt Down Old TVs

#21

Post by toast0 » Tue, Sep 16, 2025, 4:43 AM UTC

RajT88 wrote: post #20

queenkjuul wrote: post #11

I'm not really a CRT fan tbh but my neighbor was throwing away a working 24" Sony Trinitron and you don't just let one of those hit the dumpster lol Hooked up my spare PS2 and got a light gun for it. Wish i had a way to play duck hunt though.

I have a 32" Sony something or other. One of the very last ones - HDMI port and does 1080i or 720p. What a find! 30 dollars, and about killed myself getting it in the house. The plan is to have all the light gun systems hooked up to it. Being able to get 1080i out of a PS2 while having the light gun work is a challenge I have not yet surmounted.

Unfortunately, you might have trouble with light gun games. Some of the HDMI CRTs do some video processing that adds video delay. :(

If you're US based, you would probably use component video (YPbPr) to connect to your 1080i display; you can hook a ps2 light gun to the Y cable (usually green) and it should work if everything else is cool.

Re: People Who Hunt Down Old TVs

#22

Post by cobbzilla » Tue, Sep 16, 2025, 4:56 AM UTC

trenchpilgrim wrote: post #2

Some images to demonstrate how retro games look on CRT vs unfiltered on a modern display: https://x.com/ruuupu1 https://old.reddit.com/r/crtgaming/comments/owdtpu/thats_why... https://old.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/anwgxf/here_is_an_e... Modern emulators have post-processing filters to simulate the look, which is great. But it's not quite the same as the real thing.

Absolutely. I love playing Atari 2600 games, and it seems sacrilegious to play on anything but an old-school CRT TV.

Also, I’ve heard a CRT is required for NES light-gun games like Duck Hunt. Anyone know if this is true? I don’t have an NES, and if I did, I’d hook it up to my CRT, so I still wouldn’t know the answer :)

Re: People Who Hunt Down Old TVs

#23

Post by retrac » Tue, Sep 16, 2025, 5:06 AM UTC

I think some younger people might have never really seen a CRT. And they're positively rare now. I encountered a CRT TV in the hospital waiting room recently and was a bit startled to see one. So for those only passingly familiar, if you get the opportunity, spend a bit of time experimenting with it visually. Jiggle your eyes, look away suddenly, and then back, and try oblique angles. Maybe you'll see what they mean about "you just can't recreate that glow".

It's hard to describe but the image is completely ephemeral. All display technologies involve sleight-of-hand that exploits visual illusion and persistence of vision to some degree, but the CRT is maybe the most illusory of the major technologies. It's almost entirely due to persistence of vision. With colour TV and fast phosphors the majority of the light energy is released within a few milliseconds of the spot being hit by the beam. If you had eyes that worked at electronic speeds, you would see a single point drawing the raster pattern while varying in brightness.

A bit of TEMPEST trivia: The instantaneous luminosity of a CRT is all you need to reconstruct the image. Even if it's reflected off a wall or through a translucent curtain. You need high bandwidth, at least a few megahertz, but a photodiode is all that's necessary. The resulting signal even has the horizontal and vertical blanking periods right where they should be. Only minor processing (even by old school analog standards) is required to produce something that can be piped right into another CRT to recreate the image. I'd bet it could be done entirely in DSP these days.

Re: People Who Hunt Down Old TVs

#24

Post by vintermann » Tue, Sep 16, 2025, 5:22 AM UTC

cobbzilla wrote: post #22

trenchpilgrim wrote: post #2

Some images to demonstrate how retro games look on CRT vs unfiltered on a modern display: https://x.com/ruuupu1 https://old.reddit.com/r/crtgaming/comments/owdtpu/thats_why... https://old.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/anwgxf/here_is_an_e... Modern emulators have post-processing filters to simulate the look, which is great. But it's not quite the same as the real thing.

Absolutely. I love playing Atari 2600 games, and it seems sacrilegious to play on anything but an old-school CRT TV. Also, I’ve heard a CRT is required for NES light-gun games like Duck Hunt. Anyone know if this is true? I don’t have an NES, and if I did, I’d hook it up to my CRT, so I still wouldn’t know the answer :)

Yes, light guns/light pens actually relied on vertical/horizontal sync of the CRT screen to identify the position you pointed at, so they won't work on a modern screen.

Re: People Who Hunt Down Old TVs

#25

Post by toast0 » Tue, Sep 16, 2025, 5:45 AM UTC

cobbzilla wrote: post #22

trenchpilgrim wrote: post #2

Some images to demonstrate how retro games look on CRT vs unfiltered on a modern display: https://x.com/ruuupu1 https://old.reddit.com/r/crtgaming/comments/owdtpu/thats_why... https://old.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/anwgxf/here_is_an_e... Modern emulators have post-processing filters to simulate the look, which is great. But it's not quite the same as the real thing.

Absolutely. I love playing Atari 2600 games, and it seems sacrilegious to play on anything but an old-school CRT TV. Also, I’ve heard a CRT is required for NES light-gun games like Duck Hunt. Anyone know if this is true? I don’t have an NES, and if I did, I’d hook it up to my CRT, so I still wouldn’t know the answer :)

The NES light gun works with the properties the CRT provides... Roughly what happens is ... When you pull the trigger, the next frame is all black, and then one frame per target with a white square for the targer. If you're on target, the photodetector (photodiode? photoresistor?) will make a step change when the beam hits the white square, and the game code is looping to detect that. If the light comes late, it won't count; if it's not a big enough change, it won't count. If the screen was too bright during the black frame (or you were pointing at a light the whole time), it won't count.

Most modern displays are going to show the square too late, some might not be bright enough.

If you have an LED matrix and the right driving circuitry, you could probably replicate the timing, and that might work too, but I've not seen it done.

More details and options for LCDs https://www.retrorgb.com/yes-you-can-use-lightguns-on-lcds-s...

Re: People Who Hunt Down Old TVs

#26

Post by natas » Tue, Sep 16, 2025, 5:56 AM UTC

you may enjoy this. My daughter is 10 years old, couple of months ago we went to an airbnb which had a crt tv and some vhs tapes. she looks at a vhs tape and asks, what is this? She had a look on her face like if she had just found a dinosaur egg.

Re: People Who Hunt Down Old TVs

#27

Post by Aloha » Tue, Sep 16, 2025, 5:57 AM UTC

IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #12

i have a 55" panasonic LCD. no apps or wifi.From 2003. Still works. We have roku, which at some point in the last 4 years, it went rogue and auto updated itself for who knows what telemetry . We almost never use it now. I plug my laptop via HDMI and the possibilities are still there.

At that age, are you sure its not plasma?

Re: People Who Hunt Down Old TVs

#28

Post by Waterluvian » Tue, Sep 16, 2025, 6:23 AM UTC

retrac wrote: post #23

I think some younger people might have never really seen a CRT. And they're positively rare now. I encountered a CRT TV in the hospital waiting room recently and was a bit startled to see one. So for those only passingly familiar, if you get the opportunity, spend a bit of time experimenting with it visually. Jiggle your eyes, look away suddenly, and then back, and try oblique angles. Maybe you'll see what they mean…

Also don’t forget to rub your palm across the screen to collect the fuzzies that built up.

Re: People Who Hunt Down Old TVs

#29

Post by jader201 » Tue, Sep 16, 2025, 6:25 AM UTC

I’ve got a 27” CRT right next to my 65” LG OLED C9 (which is starting to feel ancient, too).

It sits in a cabinet that currently holds an NES, SNES, N64, GameCube, and PS2.

It doesn’t get a ton of playtime, but when my now 21- and 18-year-old sons were young, I’d play on them quite a bit (they were already retro even then), and as they got older, they would too.

My oldest is particularly fond of the retro consoles and playing on the CRT, so he’ll hop on it when he gets the itch for something retro.

I feel like there’s a charm that will never fade, not only with retro consoles, but also playing them on a CRT.

I’ll never get rid of our CRT.

My oldest son wouldn’t let me, even if I wanted to.

Re: People Who Hunt Down Old TVs

#30

Post by mrandish » Tue, Sep 16, 2025, 6:49 AM UTC

emh68 wrote: post #15

Sometimes I think about the bizarre path computer technology took. For instance, long-term storage. It would stand to reason that we'd invent some kind of big electrical array, and that's the best we could hope for. But hard drive technology (which relies on crazy materials technology for the platter and magnets, crazy high-precision encoders, and crazy physics like floating a tiny spring over the air bubble created…

> like people in the 80s who swore that vinyl records "sounded better"

I'm not one of those people who ever thought vinyl sounded better than a properly recorded and mastered digital version and I've always believed a high-bandwidth digital audio signal chain can recreate the "warmth" and other artifacts of tube compressors well beyond the threshold of human perception, however a broadcast-quality, high-definition CRT being fed a pristine hi-def analog RGB signal can still create some visuals which current flat screens can't. This is only controversial because most people have never seen that kind of CRT because they were incredibly rare.

I got to see one of the broadcast production CRTs made to support NHK's analog high-definition video format in the 90s directly connected to HD broadcast studio cameras and the image quality was simply sensational. It was so much better than even the best consumer CRT TVs, that it was simply another thing entirely. Of course, it cost $40,000 and only a few dozen were ever made but it was only that expensive because these were prototypes made years before digital hi-def would be standardized and begin mass production.

In fact, I think if it was A/B compared next to a current high-end consumer flat screen, a lot of people would say that CRT looks more pleasing and overall better. For natural imagery a CRT could render the full fidelity and sharpness of a 1080 image but without that over-crisp 'edginess' today's high-end flat screens get. And those "cathode rays" can render uniquely rich and deep colors vs diodes and crystals. Of course, for synthetic images like computer interfaces and high-dpi text, a flat screen can be better but for natural imagery, we lost something which hasn't yet been replaced. I'd love to see an ultra high-end CRT like that designed to display modern uncompressed 4K 12-bit HDR digital video.