Classic Video Games have a bit of a problem

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Nobody is making the old-school Cathode Ray Tubes any more - from VentureBeat:

Donkey Kong’s failing liver: What the death of the CRT display technology means for classic arcade machines
The arcade is dead. You already knew that, but that industry’s coffin is about to get another nail. The cathode-ray-tube technology that powered the monitors for nearly every classic arcade game in the twentieth century is defunct. Sony, Samsung, and others have left it behind for skinnier and more lucrative LCDs and plasmas, and the CRTs that are left are about to sell out.

The current stock of new 29-inch CRT monitors is dwindling. Online arcade cabinet and parts supplier Dream Arcades has fewer than 30 of those large displays sitting on its shelves. When it sells out of the current inventory, it will never get another shipment in that size again.

“We’ve secured enough [of the other sizes] to get us all the way through next year,” says Michael Ware, founder of Dream Arcades. “After that, that’s it.”

The future of arcade-cabinet restoration is looking bleak.

It is not that these games will disappear, they will just not have the same "look":

To be clear, it’s not that games like Donkey Kong or Pac-Man will suddenly become unplayable. The games can run on newer LCD screens, but they may not look as the developers intended.

This just makes the value of these old consoles that much higher. Although... Someone could take a curved OLED display and put it behind a 1/2" thick piece of lead glass and come really close to the appearance of a real CRT. Kickstarter anyone?

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This page contains a single entry by DaveH published on March 6, 2017 10:08 PM.

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