vunderba
7 hours ago
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.
[1] https://smallformfactor.net/news/retro-sff-itx-llama-is-a-br...
spankibalt
5 hours ago
> "[...] 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.
InsideOutSanta
7 hours ago
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.
Telaneo
6 hours ago
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.
numpad0
3 hours ago
> I wish we'd reach a point where modern technology allows us to make new CRTs relatively easily.
I have 100% confidence that we are at this point, at least for monochrome tubes. Only color tubes would be more complicated.
mikepurvis
6 hours ago
Can’t you still just use a real CRT? Or is it then just back to the latency question?
numpad0
3 hours ago
Who's spreading that CRT latency thing? Latencies for CRTs are in nanoseconds.
mikepurvis
2 hours ago
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.
numpad0
2 hours ago
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.
Telaneo
5 hours ago
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.
actionfromafar
5 hours ago
That's almost true, but just almost. Behold: https://colorvac.de/service/
trollbridge
5 hours ago
Every small city used to have a repair shop that could fix them.
bawolff
4 hours ago
Were there really companies repairing the phospher wearing out?
Repairing the tvs, sure, but i find it hard to believe there were repair shops for the issue parent was mentioning.
numpad0
2 hours ago
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.
treve
6 hours ago
For me they are weirdly hard to obtain. Don't show up in second hand shops. Ebay shipping is prohibitively expensive.
mikepurvis
2 hours ago
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.
mark-r
2 hours ago
They don't show up in second hand shops because their value is essentially negative. If it doesn't sell, you have to pay to dispose it.
reverius42
5 hours ago
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).
gman83
7 hours ago
This is a fun project - https://github.com/mausimus/ShaderGlass
AtlasBarfed
7 hours ago
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