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Television Games

The Quest To Save the World's Largest CRT TV From Destruction (arstechnica.com) 60

A rare Sony KX-45ED1 television, considered the world's largest CRT TV, has been preserved from destruction in Japan, marking a significant moment for gaming history preservation. The 440-pound display was salvaged from an Osaka restaurant days before its scheduled demolition, following a two-week international rescue operation.

Gaming enthusiast Shank Mods, aided by local contacts and industrial shipping experts, secured the functioning 45-inch unit, which originally sold for $40,000 in the late 1980s. The TV, valued by retro gaming enthusiasts for its authentic, lag-free display capabilities, could potentially become a public exhibit pending future funding.

The Quest To Save the World's Largest CRT TV From Destruction

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  • "Authentic" display capability? What the heck does that even mean?

    Marketers and salesmen really love to overuse that adjective.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by davidwr ( 791652 )

      I'm assuming "authentic" means "as intended by the game designer."

    • In this case, of it's for retro games... CRT was the only tech in town.

      But for real retro feel, you have to use an adapter to connect RCA cables to rabbit ears.

      • it's about input latency. LCDs by design do digital image processing on every frame which adds a delay between when you press a button or move a joystick and when you see the result on screen.

        For casual gamers you won't notice but if you're doing speed runs, practicing intricate fighting game combos or trying to do 1cc score attacks in bullet hell shmups even an extra 1-2ms of lag can kill it.

        Modern "run ahead" emulation can all but eliminate that lag with powerful enough CPUs but not every console
        • Indeed, and the delay can be no better than 1.5 frames (average) of latency.

          Demo/Intro coders would follow the rasterizer all the way down the screen, changing the palette every single scanline immediately before the next scanline was sent to the crt

          Any tv that also does upscaling and whatever, you can add another frame of latency minimum but its going to be more like 4 frames more because thats how temporal ai upscaling bullshit works

          ..and dont get me started on sound canceling headphones and their w
          • by dgatwood ( 11270 )

            Indeed, and the delay can be no better than 1.5 frames (average) of latency.

            Why? I mean yes, I know that a lot of existing hardware does this because it captures an entire frame and scales it, but in principle, there's no reason you couldn't do a scaler that has only a little over one field of latency (1/60th of a second) — just enough to start capturing the intervening scan lines — or, for that matter, disable scaling entirely, do dumb pixel doubling, and scan the LCD lines in a different order, resulting in zero added latency.

            And even without a true native interlaced

        • it's about input latency. LCDs by design do digital image processing on every frame which adds a delay between when you press a button or move a joystick and when you see the result on screen.

          Overall latency is what actually matters. With a 60hz console running on a CRT there is still the 16ms scanout to actually update phosphors with the full frame.

          Native refresh of a modern panel is 240hz (4ms scanout) or more... even if you presume several ms of input latency this is still half of the overall latency of the CRT.

    • by Luckyo ( 1726890 ) on Monday December 23, 2024 @04:16PM (#65035349)

      It means it doesn't use significant post processing on incoming video signal like LCD and LED based displays do before displaying the image.

      • by gweihir ( 88907 )

        And that is just not true. CRTs do "post-processing", it is just all analog and crappy.

        • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

          Analog "post processing" is nothing like "post processing" being referred to. This is why lag on CRTs is measured in single digit nanoseconds. On LCD based screens, it's usually in tens of milliseconds. I.e. hundreds to thousands of times worse. They're not even in the same ballpark. Heck, not in the same game.

          • Lol not, lag on a CRT isn't "measured in nanoseconds." CRTs have an input rate of maybe (at the high end) 200hz. That means every pixel is updated every 5 ms at the very fastest, which is (roughly) the actual input lag of an ideal monitor (the exact minimum number depends on how you define "lag"). Modern LCD displays can get up to 500+ hz with less than 2 ms of lag, which is faster than CRTs. Of course if you're talking only about *processing* lag, sure, CRTs are faster, because they don't *do* any processi
          • What's the scan rate? 1/50 or 1/60 HZ? The update time for each field is easily over 10ms.
            • by gweihir ( 88907 )

              May also be interlaced. Then it is 2x that.

            • Lag and scan rate are two different things. The latter is how long it takes the current frame to be displayed, where as lag is how long it takes the *correct* frame to be displayed. Any lag at all by its nature will result in a frame delay of at least scan rate + 1 for fully synchronous frames.

              But frames don't need to be vertically synchronised, you don't need to wait to the end of the frame to start displaying the next one.

          • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

            What? Lag on a typical CRT is 12-17 milliseconds. More like 35 ms for an actual TV. The phosphors themselves had a response time of several milliseconds.

        • your user id and your blathering bullshit dont match
          • by gweihir ( 88907 )

            That is because I am not "blathering bullshit". What is actually happening is that you are without insight.

    • by RobinH ( 124750 )
      I will say that up until about 2009 we still had a relatively large (not this large, obviously) CRT TV in our living room, and we played a lot of rock band on the Wii back then. When we got a new LCD TV and mounted it up on the wall, the lag really threw me off when playing. I re-calibrated it a few times, and it's supposed to compensate for the lag, but it was never as responsive, and I credit that with us playing a lot less rock band and eventually giving up on it.
    • What marketer or salesman is in the article?

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      It is just bullshit. As many people are clueless and unable to fact-check, they get impressed by such nonsense.

      • 5 minutes on google and you think you're an expert. Dunning kruger, you don't even know what you don't know (and you don't know that you don't know it).
    • Must come with an NFT, certificate of authenticity.

    • by dgatwood ( 11270 )

      "Authentic" display capability? What the heck does that even mean?

      Blurry. Blurry with barrel distortion.

      • Ageing CRTs do lose their sharpness - I took my Trinitron to an electronics recycler when it became too fuzzy.

        Apparently they can be re-calibrated by tweaking the internals but Googling that suggests "There are parts inside of a CRT monitor that can kill or seriously injure you, even if the monitor has been unplugged for months".

        Eeek!

        • by dgatwood ( 11270 )

          Ageing CRTs do lose their sharpness - I took my Trinitron to an electronics recycler when it became too fuzzy.

          Apparently they can be re-calibrated by tweaking the internals but Googling that suggests "There are parts inside of a CRT monitor that can kill or seriously injure you, even if the monitor has been unplugged for months".

          Eeek!

          The tube itself is basically a giant capacitor. I once got knocked halfway across the room by a 12-inch black-and-white, and learned a healthy respect for electricity — just another one of the many reasons I can't stand CRTs.

    • It means, for starters, black is black, and not just a really dark grey.

  • by at10u8 ( 179705 ) on Monday December 23, 2024 @03:48PM (#65035287)
    I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. The colors and intensities which were possible to display on CRTs are not possible with LCDs. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
    • by davidwr ( 791652 )

      Maybe not LCDs, but eventually there will be a feasible/affordable display with a color/intensity gamut that's close enough to a high-end 1990s consumer-grade TV that 99.999% of the human population won't be able to tell the difference when viewing something originally broadcast in the analog formats of the day (NTSC, PAL, etc.).

      In many ways, today's digital displays with a modern digital TV broadcast are far superior in color gamut. The one thing a digital TV broadcast and, for that matter, a truly-digita

      • Maybe not LCDs,

        Let me stop you there. The OP's joke is either ignorant, outdate, or purposefully incorrect to try and get the funny side out. The original sRGB gamut was modelled on the capabilities of CRTs of the day. We've been making LCDs which exceed the colour gamuts of CRTs for 25 years now, and these days you can get a DCI-P3 gamut display for a couple of hundred dollars which leaves even wide gamut high end CRTs of back in the day in the dust in colour performance terms.

        The only area LCD doesn't outperform CRTs in

      • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        Maybe not LCDs, but eventually there will be a feasible/affordable display with a color/intensity gamut that's close enough to a high-end 1990s consumer-grade TV that 99.999% of the human population won't be able to tell the difference when viewing something originally broadcast in the analog formats of the day (NTSC, PAL, etc.).

        The NTSC gamut has been met and exceeded for over a decade now by common LCD displays. Even your phone likely has a better gamut. The iPhone 4S was 99% NTSC gamut, the only reason i

    • Yeah, I remember those greenish flesh-tones from the 1970s. Can't say I miss some of those colors!

      • Among about a dozen other picture adjustments, our first color TV had a helpful "Tint" knob. It allowed you to select any skin tone you preferred from the available choices of purple, green, or purplish-green.

        It also featured "instant on" technology. It achieved this by keeping about 150W of vacuum tube heaters turned on 24x7.

    • It sounded more "informative" to me. Very high end CRTs could do a lot more than NTCS/PAL resolution. Some could do over 1000 horizontal lines. As far as color goes, some professional/Hollywood-studio-grade monitors had extremely good color reproduction, particularly when calibrated correctly.

      Same goes for intensities.

      That said, I don't think it's feasible to get deep black next to bright white at an arbitrary location on a CRT monitor.

      Oh and as for "pure resolution" a vector CRT is the screen analog of

      • It's a riff of the Tears in the Rain monologue from Blade Runner (Rutger Hauer...RIP). It's a thinker...but funny.

      • What do you mean some?

        The first gen of lcd monitors (those 5:4 ones) were lower resolution (1280x1024) than the previous generation of crts (1600x1200)
    • I do miss illegal NTSC colors.
  • They would be lag-free too.

    • by Luckyo ( 1726890 ) on Monday December 23, 2024 @04:22PM (#65035369)

      First of all, no. LCDs inherently require some post processing to display the output, which means that there's no way for them to be "lag free" i.e. have nanosecond grade lag. They're pretty much stuck in a few millisecond range at best. OLEDs are better but still not a match for CRT.

      Also CRT displays don't have fixed resolutions the way LCD and LED based displays do. They're analogue.

      I used to overclock all my CRT displays back in the day for higher refresh rates for example, and most could push them very high. Though many would give off annoying coil whine when they were close to the limit, not to mention heating issues. Ability to display resolutions was also usually more than the spec, and since they didn't have a native resolution they would display all resolutions equally accurately.

      • In some respects, such as the processing time of LCDs, you're right. But no, CRTs couldn't display "any" resolution because they were analog. The colors were analog, yes. But driving the screens at higher-than-supported resulted in blurry pictures. There certainly was a limit to their resolution, and that limit was pretty small compared to today's 8K monitors.

        • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

          Any resolution, no. But they could generally do "resolution x at n hz, resolution y at m hz, resolution z at o hz" where resolutions would go up and refresh rates go down. Essentially the problem was that speed of scanning was about the same, so you could choose to do less sweeps for lower resolution but more times per second, or more sweeps for higher resolution but less times per second.

          This obviously had an upper limit, but that was usually pretty high. Especially for screens at the end of CRT cycle. Big

      • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

        Lol. Are you a vinyl enthusiast too?

        Unless you were sitting in front of your CRT with the mask and phosphor layers somehow removed and shining the electron beam into your eyeball, yes they absolutely have a native resolution. You just don't notice so much because you get automatic "antialiasing" courtesy of the bleed between phosphors.

      • Bullshit. Fuck off. I've personally measured half a dozen LCDs that have no perceptible lag (1ms). I challenge you to perceive 10ms latency. Also, CRTs very much do have a resolution because of the shadow mask. Stop spreading misinformation. Educate yourself. Stop parroting fucking youtubers.

        One thing is true, CRTs do have a LOOK that's extremely difficult to replicate on a LCD, which many game designers accounted for. While CRTs have a very fast on-time, the fade-out time is fucking horrific, which is anot

      • by pz ( 113803 )

        Also CRT displays don't have fixed resolutions the way LCD and LED based displays do. They're analogue.

        That's not-quite-right in a way that's misleading. CRTs have fixed refresh rates, sometimes for the more advanced multisync displays, they are forgiving, and you can drive them at rates that are close enough that the circuitry will sync up for a surprisingly liberal interpretation of, "close enough."

        But then in color CRTs, there is the shadow mask, and that most definitely sets a pixel pitch. Look closely enough on a tube that has one of the venerable Sony Trinitron tubes in it, and it looks rather like a

  • Early 2000s, I had a 32" Aiwa widescreen CRT TV. Thing weighed as much as a big block Chevy engine block (220 lbs). It was a freakin' beast and I left it behind when we moved cross country.

    I hope some retro gamer has lucked into it.

  • Apparently, these people have no clue how a CRT works.

    • yes, lag free

      unless you are claiming that there is lag literally between scanlines, because the process was: video card reads a byte of memory, produces and pixel sends pixel out to a crt that is completely in sync with that sending, altering its electron guns based on the live signal and not any imaginary buffer of ignorance
      • by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Ah, so for fake values of "lag free". Sure.

      • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

        Think about what you just said. Sure, if you wrote a byte to memory at just the right time, then it might end up on the screen pretty fast. Might, if you can actually write a byte that close to it being read, and the video memory isn't double buffered and etc.

        Even then, who cares how long it takes a carefully timed pixel to get to the screen? If you missed your write then you've got to wait a whole scan to get another try.

  • by Train0987 ( 1059246 ) on Monday December 23, 2024 @05:54PM (#65035563)

    Imagine the burn-in after displaying the restaurant menu on-screen for 40 years.

I owe the public nothing. -- J.P. Morgan

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