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People Who Hunt Down Old TVs

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Re: People Who Hunt Down Old TVs

#71

Post by pansa2 »

detritus wrote: post #62
reactordev wrote: post #56

I’ve been searching for years for the old CRT Viewsonic Mac monitor that used RGB inputs. (Might have been CMYK). You plug in the DIP head to the video out and you attach each individual connectors to the color connectors on the back. The thing was massive, easily over 24”. Beige plastic that we all love. Growing up my dad was a Mac guy and he had all kinds of Apple stuff. The weird page sized monitor, performa 600,…

It'd've been RGB :) But you've now got me mulling over the implications of a CMYK-based subtractive colour process 'monitor'. I'm guessing the refresh rate wouldn't be too hot..!

> It'd've been RGB :)

Yeah, sounds like one of those CRT monitors that has separate BNC connectors for each of RGBHV.

Re: People Who Hunt Down Old TVs

#72

Post by dfxm12 »

StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #41
dangson wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This helps validate my memories of SNES and PS1 games looking so much better when I was a kid than on an emulator today.

I played SNES and PS1 games on a CRT. I played them on LCD and OLED TVs. I can’t tell the difference. I mean I can tell that hdmi cables never introduce chromatic abberation something which was quite common on these old TVs when the SCART cables I used to use got old and I never had a LCD screen catch fire something which happened to me twice with aging CRT screens. I really don’t get the nostalgia or whatever it is…

I think if you're looking from a normal couch to TV distance, you probably can't tell the difference.

If you're sitting computer desk to monitor distance (close enough to read text), you probably can tell a difference. From there, I think there is some false nostalgia at worst or subjectivity at best. Did computer monitors even have (noticeable) scanlines? I don't remember them while playing Wolfenstein or playing around in MS paint on windows 3.1... Maybe playing gorillas in DOS, but I can't remember...

If you're emulating snes on a modern PC, people like to say "games were developed with scanlines in mind", but they were also developed assuming you'd have a small TV and would be sitting ~8ft away from it!

Re: People Who Hunt Down Old TVs

#73

Post by bayindirh »

everdrive wrote: post #68
Aurornis wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all sorts of anti-aliasing, lighting, etc, and a resolution race that can only be described as pathological I enjoy CRT nostalgia now and then, but modern high resolution games are absolutely amazing. The blurry, low resolution, low refresh rate CRT look is fun for old games, but playing in 4K at 100+ fps on a modern monitor is an amazing experience on its own.

They're blurry in brand new ways due to how sloppy AI upscaling is.

Plus the creative ways they generate new frames using AI without even rendering them. It's hilariously sad.

GamersNexus has a great video on it. I feel lucky that my golden era of gaming used 3DFX, early ATI and NVIDIA cards.

I don't have the space, time and enthusiasm to put together a compute-capable-space-heater to play games with great graphics but with meh stories, microtransactions, DLCs and thinly veiled gambling.

Re: People Who Hunt Down Old TVs

#74

Post by RajT88 »

toast0 wrote: post #21
RajT88 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks for the tip! I was not very far down this rabbit hole yet.

Re: People Who Hunt Down Old TVs

#75

Post by speeder »

StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #41
dangson wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This helps validate my memories of SNES and PS1 games looking so much better when I was a kid than on an emulator today.

I played SNES and PS1 games on a CRT. I played them on LCD and OLED TVs. I can’t tell the difference. I mean I can tell that hdmi cables never introduce chromatic abberation something which was quite common on these old TVs when the SCART cables I used to use got old and I never had a LCD screen catch fire something which happened to me twice with aging CRT screens. I really don’t get the nostalgia or whatever it is…

There are some effects that notoriously work only on rather specific combinations of screens AND cables. Those look horrible on emulators.

Usually it is effects involving transparency, some games for example literally rendered some things only on some frames and not the others, to achieve 50% transparency, others tried alternating scanlines, or the most crazy one: Sonic that made a transparent waterfall by relying on the fact that cables common at that time blurred pixels horizontally, thus it renders one column that is water and one column that is not, and hope they will be blurred into one single column that is 50% transparent water on top of the background.

Screenshot of the waterfall effect: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/1cGAP1i_4xQ/maxresdefault.jpg

Can't be shown with a screenshot: Axelay. I never seen that game running on a real CRT to compare, but on emulators that game look horrible, with distortions and flickering things everywhere, I was told this was not the intention at all, instead they relied heavily on CRT hardware to create pseudo-3D and transparency.

Re: People Who Hunt Down Old TVs

#76

Post by thworp »

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…

Imo OLED has completely eclipsed CRT by now.

I don't know enough to say where CRTs could be today if they had gotten the development $ that went into other tech. But to be as good as OLEDs they would have had to find something else than phosphor as the inner coating.

For response times, CRT will always remain the king of dark-to-light response times, but afterglow for bright-to-dark would always be a factor unless a different coating was developed. OLEDs have no such issues. Subjectively, the claimed < 0.1 ms response times are real and there are zero artifacts, no afterglow, no ghosts, just extremely sharp and defined motion.

Re: People Who Hunt Down Old TVs

#77

Post by xattt »

Aurornis wrote: post #66
everdrive wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once we lost CRTs we began this insane race for all these duct tape solutions; all sorts of anti-aliasing, lighting, etc, and a resolution race that can only be described as pathological. Try modern games in low resolution with minimal effects on a CRT. You'll be surprised how much better they look, but also how much better they run; you don't need such a powerful rig when you turn your graphical effects down when us…

> all sorts of anti-aliasing, lighting, etc, and a resolution race that can only be described as pathological I enjoy CRT nostalgia now and then, but modern high resolution games are absolutely amazing. The blurry, low resolution, low refresh rate CRT look is fun for old games, but playing in 4K at 100+ fps on a modern monitor is an amazing experience on its own.

Why not (metaphorically) both? Consider a 16:9 Sony WEGA CRT that had HDMI input but also standard composite inputs.

Re: People Who Hunt Down Old TVs

#78

Post by reactordev »

pansa2 wrote: post #71
detritus wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'd've been RGB :) But you've now got me mulling over the implications of a CMYK-based subtractive colour process 'monitor'. I'm guessing the refresh rate wouldn't be too hot..!

> It'd've been RGB :) Yeah, sounds like one of those CRT monitors that has separate BNC connectors for each of RGBHV.

They were absolutely BNC connectors!

Re: People Who Hunt Down Old TVs

#79

Post by retrac »

throw0101d wrote: post #65

If in the Toronto, Canada area, the television museum may be worth a visit: * https://mztv.com Pre-WW2 televisions seem to be quite rare: > To put this special set in some context, there are more 18th century Stradivarius violins in existence than pre-World War II TVs and, to make it that bit rarer, this TV has only had two owners. “I’ve handled 38 pre-war tells and this is the finest and even comes with the original…

That museum looks exciting!

> Pre-WW2 televisions seem to be quite rare

Pre-war television was rare. Electronic television came to maturity during the Great Depression. Early TVs were horribly expensive and given the economic situation of the 1930s almost no one could afford them! The UK started regular TV broadcasts in 1936 and by 1939 there were about 20,000 televisions in the whole country. And that was much further along than France, Germany, or the USA.

Most of those 20,000 were scrapped or sold during the war or they served as TVs faithfully into the 40s and even 50s, and then were retired. There are only a handful of working televisions of that vintage in the world.

Re: People Who Hunt Down Old TVs

#80

Post by mrandish »

JdeBP wrote: post #61
robinsonb5 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you do ever test this, and do it rigorously (i.e. using analogue and digital versions of the same recording, with no pitch inaccuracies) you'll find the strings will resonate equally well with analogue and digital recordings, all other things (volume, tuning of the instrument, etc.) being equal.

The problem is that all other things are no longer equal, and have not been for quite some time. Retuning digital audio to 440Hz equal temperament is an industry norm now, even for (say) re-issued 1970s stuff. You just won't get modern digital versions that are the same as the analogue versions, and the equal temperament stuff thus won't pass a resonance test unless the test instrument is also equal temperament, whic…

Auto tune pitch correction is entirely separate from whether a properly engineered digital recording can match an analog recording to a level well beyond the ability of human biology to detect any difference in randomized, controlled, double-blinded ABX testing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABX_test).

> The problem is that all other things are no longer equal

There are many digital recordings which have no pitch correction or other tonal manipulation applied. In those cases, all things are still equal for the purposes of the statement above.

As a separate matter, I agree auto-tune and other manipulation can be inappropriately or excessively applied, however over manipulation isn't unique to digital, it occurred in the analog era too – such as dynamic range compression and multi-band dynamic equalization. Those tools existed in tube-based, purely analog form long before digital recording became the norm and caused similar complaints when they were misapplied. There were even analog pitch correctors although they weren't nearly as flexible or precise as today's digital versions.

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