1 day Ago By Tim Biggs
Growing up in the early ’90s, I could feel in my bones whenever someone turned on the household TV. Didn’t matter if it was on mute, if I was at the other side of the house, or even if I was asleep; the high-pitched 15kHz whine of a cathode-ray tube TV — as much a feeling as a sound — was impossible to ignore. And that’s not the only drawback to the technology that was for decades the centrepiece of home entertainment.
Box TVs driven by CRTs are enormous and heavy, despite most of them having a smaller watchable screen than any modern set. They can be permanently damaged by impacts, age or exposure to magnets. They contain incredibly high voltages and can become instruments of death if they go wrong (or if they fall on you).
Old games are designed to be displayed on old screens, and some developers even checked their work closely on consumer CRTs so they could take full advantage of the texture and blur. CRTs were almost entirely phased out during the 2000s in favour of lighter, bigger, cheaper LCDs. TVs that had been prized family possessions were carried out of lounge rooms and abandoned.
But even though they’re ugly, take up too much space and need sturdy furniture to hold them — and even despite that annoying whine — I’ve always held on to at least one, dragging them across states from rental to rental. So, why do I bother? CRTs are magical and mysterious instruments. While modern digital displays work by assigning colour information to millions of tiny pixels, a CRT contains an electron gun, firing beams that are reflected and directed to draw horizontal lines from left to right and top to bottom — covering the whole frame dozens of times each second — resulting in their characteristic glowy, flickery, virtually-unable-to-be-photographed appearance.
The Sega Master System would ideally be played with a much older CRT, but with the help of a good scaler it still looks far better here than on an LCD. Credit: Tim Biggs I keep them because I love old video games and consoles, and remember what they’re supposed to look and feel like. Plugging a machine from before the HDMI era directly into a modern TV will generally give poor results, and the most common ways of getting classic games onto a flat screen can make them unrecognisable and unplayable.
Good luck timing your hits in Punch Out with even a few frames of latency, or falling in love with any classic characters when their portrait looks like they’re made of Lego. The decline of CRTs means we’re losing a vital part of the interactive art and media produced in the ’80s and ’90s. We’ve accepted that the way old games work on digital displays — chunky square pixels, awkward delay — is just how it was.
But the analogue displays were faster, and game designers often used the blur, curvature and texture of the CRT to convey an artful depth that’s missing on modern screens. Dracula as seen in 1997’s Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Compare the original CRT version, on the right, with what is seen when it is displayed as plain square pixels on a digital TV (left).
Credit: x.com/crtpixels I don’t begrudge people playing and loving classic games on modern OLEDs or LCDs. I do it, and some games still look great, just different.
But I know that on the right display those pixelated faces and backgrounds can be as vivid as a photo or hand-drawn animation cell. I know the headache-inducing checkerboard patterns of lamp or waterfall effects were intended to be semi-transparent and can look great on the right CRT. And I know that Donkey Kong Country can look like a CGI film from 2014 despite being released in 1994, whereas a digital display can make it look more like a mishmash of thousands of randomly coloured blocks.
I’ve had a number of CRTs, but there’s no ideal model because analogue technology is inherently imprecise, and they all have their own character. Ideally, I’d have a woodgrain cabinet with a hazy RF input for my oldest systems, a small black plastic Sony for the ’90s, and a big broadcast monitor or high-end 2000s consumer set. But without the budget and floor plan of a small museum, I have to make compromises to suit my space.
The Hyundai CRT I currently favour is from the early 2000s and would have sat in a graphic design office rather than in a loungeroom, so it lacks a certain authenticity. But with a little tweaking it works great with my classic consoles, and makes those from the mid-90s onwards look phenomenal. The downside is that aesthetically a CRT office monitor is ridiculous in the present day, without even the kitschy cache of an old-school TV.
My family has always embraced each other’s hobbies when it comes to placing our stuff around the house, but my suggestion that the beige box could go to a shared living area last time we moved was immediately vetoed, which is fair. It has pride of place in the office. One final point in favour of a PC CRT? It runs at around 30kHz, with a whine so high-pitched that it’s inaudible to humans, so the kids can’t immediately tell when I’m playing it.
Tim Biggs is a staff writer covering consumer technology, gadgets and video games. Get news and reviews on technology, gadgets and gaming in our Technology newsletter every Friday. Sign up here.
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