Whenever I see stuff like this, the ITX Llama [1], Pixel x86, etc. I think it's finally the time to build my ultimate love-letter to old school DOS and retro computing but always stop short because of the monitor issue.
I feel like a lot of my nostalgia likely stems from the bright super low latency phosphor displays of a proper CRT. No amount of WebGL shaders/filters [2] ever quite seem to capture the original experience IMHO.
I'm the same as you. In my case, the monitor I grew up with was a monochrome screen with a slight sepia hue - I have never been able to find a similar CRT on eBay or elsewhere.
What completes the experience is the sounds, lights and loading times. When I push the power button, I want to hear all the familiar clicks and whirls followed by the loud BIOS POST beep, immediately followed by the sound of the floppy drive coming to life. I do NOT want a flash media drive, I want a slow, mechanical HDD where things actually takes times to load, and you get to hear the familiar disk spinning and access sounds. And the lights, don't forget those little LEDs which accompanied the sounds, like a conductor conducting an orchestra.
And you know what I miss the most? It's the modem. I miss the dialup sounds. I miss being able to tell what speed I'd be getting connected at based on the sounds. I miss the BBSes and telnet servers of the era. And IRC. And the early web, free of bloated modern Javascript. And apps - real apps coded in ASM/C/C++ that prioritised efficiency and produced tiny binaries that ran without needing a million dependencies. And operating systems that fit an entire GUI desktop in 1.44MB...
High-res high-refresh-rate OLEDs with modern shaders are getting close. Now somebody needs to make one that has a convex shape like an old CRT.
I wish we'd reach a point where modern technology allows us to make new CRTs relatively easily. I don't even necessarily care about the image quality, the screens and TVs I used in my youth were never particularly good. But it doesn't seem that this will become feasible in the next few decades.
CRTs were only ever made sense to manufacture on a really big scale, so that costs could be reduced. Early tubes which weren't manufactured on such a scale were accordingly stupid expensive.
I doubt anyone is going to spin up another factory to satisfy the potential demand, since the demand isn't that great to begin with (OLED satisfies most use-cases that CRTs do), and very few people are going to pay $5000+ for a new CRT, and I doubt they're going to be any cheaper than that.
Faster screen refresh rate improves the pixel switching latency (frame to frame). How do modern OLED screens in Game Mode compare to old CRTs for input latency (cable to screen)?
According to the above, the 2017 iPad pro with Apple Pencil replicated the Apple II's 30ms touch-to-pixel latency, four decades later! (Current M4/M5 models are supposedly 5-10ms, so perhaps a good emulator platform...)
CRTs wear out with use, so they're only getting rarer by the day. The electronics can mostly be fixed, but the tubes can't. You can extent their lives a bit, but you're only delaying the inevitable. When it's gone (too low brightness, burn-in, bad focus), there's nothing that can be done about it to get it back to the way it was when it was new.
There was some repair available. At very least, the neck could be cut off, and the electron gun bits replaced with new.
According to the Vintage Television Museum near Columbus, Ohio, the last company in the US to be able to do this closed in 2010, and the last one remaining in Europe closed in France in 2013. (I myself don't know if there are any in some other corner of the world.)
The museum did succeed in getting a bunch of the repair equipment from the shop in France, and one person involved was even trained there, but it's been a very long process.
Currently, the equipment seems to be in Maryland in the care of a person named Nick Williams. The last update I can find from him[2] is a few years old, and expressed concern about the war that had recently begun in Ukraine affecting the supply of electron guns.
tl;dr, it may still be possible to repair some aspects of some CRTs, and doing so is apparently not a completely-lost art -- yet.
No. Repairing phosphors require complete removal of phosphor layers and re-application using basic multi step deposition for RGB strips, on the inner surface of the tube. That's not a shop repair.
Interesting. I still have a bunch showing on my local Facebook Marketplace, but who knows what shape they’re in plus it probably varies a lot from city to city.
I can well imagine that it’s gotten expensive finding a quality one (eg trinitron) of reasonable size.
They are truly dying out. Wish I'd kept my color c64 monitor -- it would probably be worth a lot now (or at least would be awesome to use for retro purposes).
Right but you still have the latency of frame buffers inside the emulator, plus more again when that’s converted out to analog, especially if an HDMI connector is still in the mix— ideally you’d do this on original hardware or at least a PC with a graphics card that has native s-video or VGA outputs.
You only need one pixel worth of RAM to display HDMI input into a CRT. You don't need to buffer the whole thing, at all. Especially if you were driving the tube with your own driving circuit.
That said, yeah, in the special case of an HDMI-driven CRT that was specifically designed with ultra low latency in mind, you could buffer way less than a frame— though I imagine you'd probably want to buffer at least a line at a time just for sanity with the timing of driving the electron gun. And obviously this would depend on the HDMI picture resolution exactly matching that of the CRT.
HDMI is RGB plus clock in 4 differential pairs. Fundamentally you just need 3 shift registers with reset tied to clock. Out comes the signal and you wire that to RGB electron guns through an E24 resistors assortment pack.
LLMs probably don't know enough about them to be useful in this discussion. Classic Google Search would be better. Yours fixating on pixels shows that.
I think the difference here is more that I'm talking about the practical reality of today's display interfaces (both sides have a full frame in memory, typical overall latency is 5-50ms), whereas you're discussing what could be theoretically possible with dedicated emulation hardware that streams out an unbuffered HDMI signal and an HDMI-supporting CRT that operates similar to a modern VRR gaming display.
> "[...] but always stop short because of the monitor issue."
I always stop because of the case and target audience issue. I have no interest in a tower or a pizza box, but I wouldn't be able to resist a well-designed retro industrial workstation-specced x86 machine in a metal wedge-style computer case à la Amiga 600.
There's filters on retroarch for emulating or trying to recreate the appearance of a CRT. I have not personally tried them, but the screenshots are noticeable
I feel like a lot of my nostalgia likely stems from the bright super low latency phosphor displays of a proper CRT. No amount of WebGL shaders/filters [2] ever quite seem to capture the original experience IMHO.
[1] https://smallformfactor.net/news/retro-sff-itx-llama-is-a-br...
[2] https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term