My MK2 machine had bad burn-in, and red went out in it, so I watched Mike's Amateur Arcade Monitor Repairs videos on K7000 tube swaps and found a guy selling a 25-inch Magnavox consumer CRT new in the box and swapped the tube. Now I have an MK2 arcade with a beautiful picture.
they range from minimally effective and make the picture look better at the cost of lifespan...or in most cases is straight up snake oil. always has been that way .
I have a few CRTs and really enjoy playing 8 bit & 16 bit game systems on them. I even have a brand new sealed 14” RCA TrueFlat CRT with component inputs that I bought from retail many many years ago!
Great machine! Great work and good luck on the rest of the restoration. I still haven't gotten my Mistercade up and running on my 4-slot MVS. Porkshop Express gave me some good advice about some dip settings I must have set wrong last time I had it running, since the vertical hold was all over the place. I just haven't got back to it because I don't have an extra DE-10 Nano.
Awesome to see you sharing this great restoration video of you updating your CRT monitor on your MVS Big Red Steve. I shared your video up on The Official NEO-GEO Thread for others to take notice and be amazed on what you done to it bro. Well done and keep up the great work for sure. 8^) Anthony...
The problem with CRTs in arcade cabinets is that eventually, there aren't going to be CRTs left to put into arcade cabinets. Almost nobody makes them anymore, if at all, and all the ones out there presently will eventually die. I feel like someone needs to figure out how to get a modern display to serve as an effective substitute, because at the moment, you can pretty distinctly tell when a machine isn't using a CRT.
Closest we've gotten to replicating a CRT, at least when it comes to its motion clarity, is the "CRT Beam Simulation GPU Shader" on OLED panels, which are already pretty good and work great with scanline shaders.
@@KekoBass If motion clarity was the only issue, you would only need a micro LED display, as a micro LED display has switching times far beyond what a human eye could ever comprehend (they are so fast that they could perfectly mimic the refresh behavior of a CRT screen), they have true black (where there is black, there is no light, so it's even blacker than a CRT screen, which still has some afterglow), they have no burn-in and last much longer than any TFT or OLED screen on the market, and their energy efficiency is near optimal (it's physically almost impossible to achieve comparable picture quality with less power). The problem is: they cost a fortune to produce, unless you want them in watch size. But it's not just about the clarity of the movements. There are two other main problems. One is the digital versus analog signal, since digital consists of dedicated pixels while analog never had pixels. Analog is only a single line of color and brightness changes of theoretically unlimited resolution, whose actual screen resolution is only given by two factors: a dot matrix in front of the phosphor layer of the cathode ray tube (which does not produce clear but smeared pixels) and the fact that the line is broken by resetting the output from far right to far left and lowering the beam at a fixed time interval to produce a new scan line. And while a shader can emulate scanlines, each of those emulated scanlines still consists of individual pixels, and that just doesn't look right. Any attempt to emulate the behavior in the line just looks like blurry mud to me. The other is that a CRT monitor, no matter how good it is, will produce artifacts on every scan line, and these are desirable because game developers have designed their graphics to look good with these artifacts, and they look much worse when these artifacts are missing. Any attempt to emulate these artifacts currently fails because there are different types of artifacts, and although there are filters for each of these artifacts and each of these filters gives quite good results, they fail when you try to combine them. So far there is no filter that can emulate all of them at the same time. These shaders that try to emulate CRTs seem to do a pretty good job, but only if you don't see the subject next to a real CRT, because then you can still clearly see the difference. I think with micro-LEDs and very complex shaders it would probably be possible to imitate a CRT display perfectly, but the computing power of the GPUs would be enormous and someone would first have to write the perfect shader for that.
Estou utilizando tubos de antigas tv crt para substituir, aqui no Brasil ainda acha muita Tv crt baratas para substituir. Gostei do conteúdo do canal. Abraço amigo.
Awesome work, Steve! Now if the red on that tube ever goes out completely, you have the option of swapping the tube with a consumer set. You'll just have to measure the resistance on the yoke connectors horizontal and vertical lines.
This is probably a stretch but I'd love to learn more about CRT repair if you have more videos going over this kind of stuff. I currently have nearly half a dozen Big Buck cabinets that all have bad monitors and I'd love to be able to get them up and running. One of the main issues I have (beside the display being totally black) is strange purple spots that show up when you have an all white screen up. Guns will track fine in areas where the monitor is properly displaying white but in the purple areas tracking falls off. If you want to see what I'm talking about I can take a video and show what I mean. To my knowledge the game will not work without a CRT because of the way the older light guns work, I do know they make newer ones that work with newer displays but I have yet to do much research on them since I feel repairing the CRT may be more cost effective. Any who great video and any help would definitely be appreciated😁
I love CRTs still, and would agree to a point... but honestly a good low lag LCD with proper conversion and a CRT filter just the job just fine for most people.
The B&K 467 is a capable tester. Been there done that got the t shirt chasing around video amp issues, especially with bad crts with intermittent internal shorts zapping the video amplifier transistors and bad pots. Good luck finding good or nos crts these days
Got my first Mister myself recently (Mister Pi). Man, it's soooo crazy how far everything has come on that with the cores! I have so much hardware already too, I'm almost pained at how good the Mister is compared to my OG hardware lol. Hope you figure out what's going on with the rejuvenator.
That's a Wells Gardner k7000, funny same monitor in my neo geo and same rejuvinator, I have had to tube swap a few of those old tubes on some of those.
I want a crt again, but I'm atm focusing on preserving the image quality with technology moving forward. I have an ossc and will likely nab a retrotink 4k, but I'll be up to fate I I I'm to be lucky enough to find a good tube for cheap someplace.
Unfortunately I think the red gun in that tube is just about done. Poor greyscale tracking and blooming when drive is turned up makes sense for a weak cathode. CRT tester isn't using the right socket adapter. Right number of pins, and the heater supply is in the right place, but something else like the G1/G2 is wrong if all the short lights are flickering and you're getting no emissions readings. Try another adapter or just jumper from the tester plug to the pins, you know what they are because it's marked on the neckboard.
The Neo-Geo MiSTer core is one of the handful of 1:1 hardware replica cores on the platform, that is a 1:1 transistor level replication of the real hardware, the other is the Nuked Mega-Drive core, which is a 1:1 replica of the model one SMD, and the other is the GB & GBC, and lastly but not least afaik the NES core too, I'm not sure how close the SNES is to a 1:1 replica, but I know it isn't as yet a perfect 1:1 cycle accurate hardware replacement FPGA core like the ones I mentioned before, the other close one is the Amiga 500 core, it's about 95% cycle accurate afaik, hopefully MiSTer 2.0 will bring more perfect transistor level 1:1 replica cores, starting with the SNES & Amiga cores (that is if the SNES isn't already 1:1 by then on current MiSTer), PCE, NGPC & GBA would be cool to have 1:1 cores too, for N64 & PS1, I imagine it will take a lot of FPGA LE's, I doubt even the Analogue 3D N64 core will be a 1:1 core, and Saturn will take even more, though it's actually amazing how close to 1:1 the MiSTer Saturn core is getting, my guess is that due to the multi chip parallel nature of the Saturn, the FPGA core has to be pretty much cycle accurate to function properly, though surely has to employ some workarounds outside real hardware to get games running smoothly on the DE10 Nano, some games have to use dual RAM for instance, which is basically a brute force workaround, but eventually we will have perfect 1:1 transistor level replicas of all major systems, canny wait for a 1:1 Sharp X6800K FPGA core (or full hardware replica system, with a replica keyboard, mouse, speakers and monitor made with a 4:3 OLED panel).
Im a little confused steve. Didn't you do a video on this exact crt where you drove far away to pick this up for your arcade cabinet? You said its not the best. Why did you go to that trouble if its not a good one?
if you asked me 5 years ago id agree. hard truth is this. there are now arcade specific drop in lcd replacements that for pre 90s games are gonna be comparable and furthermore they dont make crts anymore and they are all gonna slowly die out. And before you attack me i promise a have a bigger love of crts than 90% of collectors and have a room dedicated in my house to my largest sony wega widcreen 1080i crt .
th-cam.com/video/BBgRmFOugrs/w-d-xo.html the video are in spanish but you can use subtitles translated to the english and make this using S-Video, component out, or RGB. this try to convert a CRT to smart TV its really, finally HDMI OUT using a CRT.
@@Synthematix Those things are great for kids, but anyone who is used to playing on a CRT with perfect motion-resolution and zero latency with real hardware or FPGA, they just don't do the job mate, even my top-end gaming rig and 480Hz OLED doesn't come close to FPGA and a CRT, it's just not the same thing at all, if your standards are at that level, that's fine, but it's a little strange you're taking the time to comment on a video that is clearly for people that care about this stuff, a powerkiddy handheld is just a kids toy and has nothing on the real thing, great for playing a bit of Tetris while taking a dump, though I much prefer my Analogue Pocket for that, as it uses an FPGA and has much higher game play quality (low latency), only soft-emulator I recommend is RGB-Pi, which uses DynaRes, which is much closer to real hardware & FPGA gameplay quality (latency/video-timings/etc), I've actually built my self a custom RGB-Pi handheld with a 120Hz AMOLED display, which has 120Hz BFI set as default, it's great for DC/PS2/OGXB/GC/etc at 240p (integer scaled to the AMOLED native res).
@@Wobble2007 FPGA is still emulation, They attempt to reproduce the logic on the FPGA, but it categorically does not reproduce the implementation at transistor level, or even logic gate level. To give flexibility, an FPGA simply can’t work the same way as a dedicated ASIC or CPU.
@@Synthematix There are lots of examples of 1:1 transistor level replica FPGA cores, the MiSTer has a few itself, 1:1 FPGA cores can be used a direct hardware drop-in replacements for CPU's, I/O chips, audio ASIC's, DAC's, DSP's, and they have been used for that plenty of times, even used in arcade cabs to replace IC's and co processors, the N64 Ultra HDMI & RGB Ultra uses a full 1:1 transistor FPGA replication of the N64 GPU, FPGA's can be converted to ASICs, they are used as GPU's, CPU's, SoC's, IC's and so on.
My MK2 machine had bad burn-in, and red went out in it, so I watched Mike's Amateur Arcade Monitor Repairs videos on K7000 tube swaps and found a guy selling a 25-inch Magnavox consumer CRT new in the box and swapped the tube. Now I have an MK2 arcade with a beautiful picture.
awesome. hope to see more arcade refreshes in the future.
Me too!
I have those EXACT wheels on one of my arcade cabinets. They are rock solid. I've gone through many and those red ones are amazing. Good choice!
Very interesting to see the rejuvenating device, even though it's not working. Would love to see an actual tube restoring process in the future!
they range from minimally effective and make the picture look better at the cost of lifespan...or in most cases is straight up snake oil. always has been that way .
Great work putting some wheels on there, they really are a must when it comes to arcade machines. Even the smallest JAMMA cabs can be a pain to move.
Great content, great video! Its nice to see the progress you've made setting up your new place.
Just what i needed today! Some good ol Retro Tech content baby!
Hope you are doing well Steve! Can't believe its the end of the year already dude!
I have a few CRTs and really enjoy playing 8 bit & 16 bit game systems on them. I even have a brand new sealed 14” RCA TrueFlat CRT with component inputs that I bought from retail many many years ago!
Can’t wait to see this thing completed and an update on that crt tester!
Great machine! Great work and good luck on the rest of the restoration. I still haven't gotten my Mistercade up and running on my 4-slot MVS. Porkshop Express gave me some good advice about some dip settings I must have set wrong last time I had it running, since the vertical hold was all over the place. I just haven't got back to it because I don't have an extra DE-10 Nano.
Great video Steve! Keep em coming!
awesome experience, thanks for share.
Looks gorgeous Steve. Hey maybe that tester needs a recap too!
What I really dream about is some nice "crt arcade conversion" idea.
In the end I'd like to stick a pc or commodore monitor in a cab :D
Well done so far.
Awesome to see you sharing this great restoration video of you updating your CRT monitor on your MVS Big Red Steve. I shared your video up on The Official NEO-GEO Thread for others to take notice and be amazed on what you done to it bro. Well done and keep up the great work for sure. 8^)
Anthony...
@Charlie-Cat. Wow, thank you Anthony! I appreciate it.
The problem with CRTs in arcade cabinets is that eventually, there aren't going to be CRTs left to put into arcade cabinets. Almost nobody makes them anymore, if at all, and all the ones out there presently will eventually die. I feel like someone needs to figure out how to get a modern display to serve as an effective substitute, because at the moment, you can pretty distinctly tell when a machine isn't using a CRT.
Closest we've gotten to replicating a CRT, at least when it comes to its motion clarity, is the "CRT Beam Simulation GPU Shader" on OLED panels, which are already pretty good and work great with scanline shaders.
@@KekoBass If motion clarity was the only issue, you would only need a micro LED display, as a micro LED display has switching times far beyond what a human eye could ever comprehend (they are so fast that they could perfectly mimic the refresh behavior of a CRT screen), they have true black (where there is black, there is no light, so it's even blacker than a CRT screen, which still has some afterglow), they have no burn-in and last much longer than any TFT or OLED screen on the market, and their energy efficiency is near optimal (it's physically almost impossible to achieve comparable picture quality with less power). The problem is: they cost a fortune to produce, unless you want them in watch size.
But it's not just about the clarity of the movements. There are two other main problems.
One is the digital versus analog signal, since digital consists of dedicated pixels while analog never had pixels. Analog is only a single line of color and brightness changes of theoretically unlimited resolution, whose actual screen resolution is only given by two factors: a dot matrix in front of the phosphor layer of the cathode ray tube (which does not produce clear but smeared pixels) and the fact that the line is broken by resetting the output from far right to far left and lowering the beam at a fixed time interval to produce a new scan line. And while a shader can emulate scanlines, each of those emulated scanlines still consists of individual pixels, and that just doesn't look right. Any attempt to emulate the behavior in the line just looks like blurry mud to me.
The other is that a CRT monitor, no matter how good it is, will produce artifacts on every scan line, and these are desirable because game developers have designed their graphics to look good with these artifacts, and they look much worse when these artifacts are missing. Any attempt to emulate these artifacts currently fails because there are different types of artifacts, and although there are filters for each of these artifacts and each of these filters gives quite good results, they fail when you try to combine them. So far there is no filter that can emulate all of them at the same time.
These shaders that try to emulate CRTs seem to do a pretty good job, but only if you don't see the subject next to a real CRT, because then you can still clearly see the difference. I think with micro-LEDs and very complex shaders it would probably be possible to imitate a CRT display perfectly, but the computing power of the GPUs would be enormous and someone would first have to write the perfect shader for that.
Great video, Steve. Have a happy new year.
@@johnjimenez2392 thanks John! Happy New Year
Im adding wheels to mine, after watching this. I love my NeoGeo 1994 machine
Estou utilizando tubos de antigas tv crt para substituir, aqui no Brasil ainda acha muita Tv crt baratas para substituir. Gostei do conteúdo do canal. Abraço amigo.
Awesome work, Steve! Now if the red on that tube ever goes out completely, you have the option of swapping the tube with a consumer set. You'll just have to measure the resistance on the yoke connectors horizontal and vertical lines.
Is a dream of mine to own a full-size arcade cabinet with a crt in it. Will get around to building it eventually fingers crossed 🤞
I just put my neogeo in my basement with original, recapped CRT. It's gorgeous!
This is probably a stretch but I'd love to learn more about CRT repair if you have more videos going over this kind of stuff. I currently have nearly half a dozen Big Buck cabinets that all have bad monitors and I'd love to be able to get them up and running. One of the main issues I have (beside the display being totally black) is strange purple spots that show up when you have an all white screen up. Guns will track fine in areas where the monitor is properly displaying white but in the purple areas tracking falls off. If you want to see what I'm talking about I can take a video and show what I mean. To my knowledge the game will not work without a CRT because of the way the older light guns work, I do know they make newer ones that work with newer displays but I have yet to do much research on them since I feel repairing the CRT may be more cost effective.
Any who great video and any help would definitely be appreciated😁
This is super cool!
I love CRTs still, and would agree to a point...
but honestly a good low lag LCD with proper conversion and a CRT filter just the job just fine for most people.
The B&K 467 is a capable tester. Been there done that got the t shirt chasing around video amp issues, especially with bad crts with intermittent internal shorts zapping the video amplifier transistors and bad pots. Good luck finding good or nos crts these days
Got my first Mister myself recently (Mister Pi). Man, it's soooo crazy how far everything has come on that with the cores! I have so much hardware already too, I'm almost pained at how good the Mister is compared to my OG hardware lol. Hope you figure out what's going on with the rejuvenator.
My name is Mike and I approve this video.
That's a Wells Gardner k7000, funny same monitor in my neo geo and same rejuvinator, I have had to tube swap a few of those old tubes on some of those.
I have had to cap my rejuvinator it was a mess in mine
I did a tube swap with a Sanyo 25” tv and it was perfect.
Nada como un CRT 💪😎🍻
I want a crt again, but I'm atm focusing on preserving the image quality with technology moving forward. I have an ossc and will likely nab a retrotink 4k, but I'll be up to fate I I I'm to be lucky enough to find a good tube for cheap someplace.
Unfortunately I think the red gun in that tube is just about done. Poor greyscale tracking and blooming when drive is turned up makes sense for a weak cathode. CRT tester isn't using the right socket adapter. Right number of pins, and the heater supply is in the right place, but something else like the G1/G2 is wrong if all the short lights are flickering and you're getting no emissions readings. Try another adapter or just jumper from the tester plug to the pins, you know what they are because it's marked on the neckboard.
The Neo-Geo MiSTer core is one of the handful of 1:1 hardware replica cores on the platform, that is a 1:1 transistor level replication of the real hardware, the other is the Nuked Mega-Drive core, which is a 1:1 replica of the model one SMD, and the other is the GB & GBC, and lastly but not least afaik the NES core too, I'm not sure how close the SNES is to a 1:1 replica, but I know it isn't as yet a perfect 1:1 cycle accurate hardware replacement FPGA core like the ones I mentioned before, the other close one is the Amiga 500 core, it's about 95% cycle accurate afaik, hopefully MiSTer 2.0 will bring more perfect transistor level 1:1 replica cores, starting with the SNES & Amiga cores (that is if the SNES isn't already 1:1 by then on current MiSTer), PCE, NGPC & GBA would be cool to have 1:1 cores too, for N64 & PS1, I imagine it will take a lot of FPGA LE's, I doubt even the Analogue 3D N64 core will be a 1:1 core, and Saturn will take even more, though it's actually amazing how close to 1:1 the MiSTer Saturn core is getting, my guess is that due to the multi chip parallel nature of the Saturn, the FPGA core has to be pretty much cycle accurate to function properly, though surely has to employ some workarounds outside real hardware to get games running smoothly on the DE10 Nano, some games have to use dual RAM for instance, which is basically a brute force workaround, but eventually we will have perfect 1:1 transistor level replicas of all major systems, canny wait for a 1:1 Sharp X6800K FPGA core (or full hardware replica system, with a replica keyboard, mouse, speakers and monitor made with a 4:3 OLED panel).
Might be faster to use like a 1 inch or 2 inch hole saw. To remove those old feet mounts. Don't have to try and pull them out that way
Im a little confused steve. Didn't you do a video on this exact crt where you drove far away to pick this up for your arcade cabinet? You said its not the best. Why did you go to that trouble if its not a good one?
What are your thoughts on CRT Rejuvenators?
I want my crt serviced so bad, any connections in San Diego?
Does this CRT have a shadow mask or a slot mask?
if you asked me 5 years ago id agree. hard truth is this. there are now arcade specific drop in lcd replacements that for pre 90s games are gonna be comparable and furthermore they dont make crts anymore and they are all gonna slowly die out. And before you attack me i promise a have a bigger love of crts than 90% of collectors and have a room dedicated in my house to my largest sony wega widcreen 1080i crt .
th-cam.com/video/BBgRmFOugrs/w-d-xo.html
the video are in spanish but you can use subtitles translated to the english and make this using S-Video, component out, or RGB.
this try to convert a CRT to smart TV its really, finally HDMI OUT using a CRT.
Ffs not more pointless cap changing, eeeeh jason JJ cruz
you dont need any of that stuff, just connect a powkiddy rgb30 to the rgb
What kind of crack are you smoking?
@@RetroTechUSA A powkiddy rgb30 will play any game from 1970 to 2005 from any console, just plug it into the monitors rgb input job done
@@Synthematix Those things are great for kids, but anyone who is used to playing on a CRT with perfect motion-resolution and zero latency with real hardware or FPGA, they just don't do the job mate, even my top-end gaming rig and 480Hz OLED doesn't come close to FPGA and a CRT, it's just not the same thing at all, if your standards are at that level, that's fine, but it's a little strange you're taking the time to comment on a video that is clearly for people that care about this stuff, a powerkiddy handheld is just a kids toy and has nothing on the real thing, great for playing a bit of Tetris while taking a dump, though I much prefer my Analogue Pocket for that, as it uses an FPGA and has much higher game play quality (low latency), only soft-emulator I recommend is RGB-Pi, which uses DynaRes, which is much closer to real hardware & FPGA gameplay quality (latency/video-timings/etc), I've actually built my self a custom RGB-Pi handheld with a 120Hz AMOLED display, which has 120Hz BFI set as default, it's great for DC/PS2/OGXB/GC/etc at 240p (integer scaled to the AMOLED native res).
@@Wobble2007 FPGA is still emulation,
They attempt to reproduce the logic on the FPGA, but it categorically does not reproduce the implementation at transistor level, or even logic gate level. To give flexibility, an FPGA simply can’t work the same way as a dedicated ASIC or CPU.
@@Synthematix There are lots of examples of 1:1 transistor level replica FPGA cores, the MiSTer has a few itself, 1:1 FPGA cores can be used a direct hardware drop-in replacements for CPU's, I/O chips, audio ASIC's, DAC's, DSP's, and they have been used for that plenty of times, even used in arcade cabs to replace IC's and co processors, the N64 Ultra HDMI & RGB Ultra uses a full 1:1 transistor FPGA replication of the N64 GPU, FPGA's can be converted to ASICs, they are used as GPU's, CPU's, SoC's, IC's and so on.