So since we're all Retro game fans, a lot of us have old-style crt tvs. But they have two majors issues, they're bloody massive and often very weird shapes. I'm curious if anyone has ever taken something like a Sony Trinitron, pulled out the guts and screen then fabricated a more suitable case for it. Is there a good reason not to do this? Is it dangerous at all? Just an odd thought I had that might be worth exploring, what's your take on it?
Why use a CRT when a decent upscaler and proper cables make these systems look awesome on HDTVs. The XRGB mini is expensive but pretty good from what I've heard. I use a $60 generic SCART to HDMI converter for retro systems. Some upscalers have built-in scanline generators so really the only thing you NEED a CRT for is light gun games. For that matter, just use a VGA CRT PC monitor and an RGBS to VGA converter/upscaler and use RGB SCART cables on the systems that support it.
A light gun has a light sensor in it with a very narrow field of view. When you point it at a CRT, it senses a "flash" of light when the electron beam lights up the phosphors within this view and sends a signal to the console. Since the entire process from the video generation inside the console to the control of the electron beam of the CRT is synchronized and has very little lag, the video chip in the console just needs to check which pixel (specifically the X and Y coordinates) it is currently generating to figure out where the light gun is pointed. In practice the field-of-view is bigger than a single pixel, but that can be compensated for in various ways, for example by using only the bottom-rightmost pixel. If you add an upscaler, you lose this synchronisation at least in the horizontal direction and depending on the scaler also in the vertical direction. To keep the example simple, let's assume that the light gun still sees just a single pixel and the upscaler outputs two lines for each line it receives, e.g. 15kHz to 31kHz conversion with linedoubling. Let's say the console outputs 10 pixels on a line, shown here as letters A to J: ABCDEFGHIJ The linedoubler would take that and output it twice (ignoring all the blanking areas around it for simplicity), shown as a to j because the pixels are now faster : abcdefghijabcdefghij To illustrate how the console would interpret a signal from the light gun, it's useful to put both of these on top of each other to see the difference in timing. The pixels of the original console are now spaced out a bit because the linedoubler outputs twice as many pixels in the same time as the console: A B C D E F G H I J abcdefghijabcdefghij ------------^ The marker on the third row is an example where the light gun might "hit." Although you have aimed at pixel c on the monitor, the console thinks the hit is at G because that is the pixel it currently outputs. With a real light gun which has a sensor that triggers on more than a single pixel the situation becomes even more complex - the light gun would see pixels around c on both of the lines that are generated by the linedoubler and the console would see simultaneous "hits" on pixels B and G.
Yeah, you guys have hit the crux of why I'm looking at making a tv more viable in terms of space, I want one for lightgun games.
B&O has some CRTs that they made somewhat flat. They have them in a lot of sizes. Check the MX4000 for instance: link. Not sure if they have any somewhat flat widescreens. These TVs still weigh a lot.
Yeah, Bang & Olufsen tvs weigh an ungodly amount, I've had to carry them before. Great machines though. It looks like I'm going to scrap the idea of grabbing a CRT screen, I've found a product by Ultimarc; http://www.ultimarc.com/aimtrak.html, it's a lightgun which uses sensor bars and has some retro console support. They've got retro-fit kits so you can put the guts into older PS1/2 etc. lightguns, seems like that's the way to go.
