Quick question for any gurus out there. Would the item on this link work for coverting a game from a CRT to an LCD easily?

http://cgi.ebay.com/Arcade-RGBS-CGA-EGA-YU...id=p3286.c0.m14

When I look at LCDs that Happs sells for $500 I cringe - I would rather find a way to convert over to LCD by purchasing an LCD monitor and mounting that and tying it through a converter on older games. Would this work?

Yes and No. Mostly no.

Strictly speaking yes, it will allow you to input 15/24/31k and display it on a LCD.

Generally speaking, going from CRT to LCD is going to result in a large loss of quality for a number of reasons:

1. Aspect ratio. Pre 2000 CRTs(4:3) are not the same aspect Ratio as LCDs, not only that, but among LCDs if you buy a computer monitor the standard is 16:10, and in TVs is 16:9. This means stretching the picture to fill the screen(making it look weird), or if your board/monitor support it, using the correct(4:3) aspect ratio, and then having the black bars on both sides.

You could custom make a new bezel...but that would look just as weird, cause you'd need the width for the full monitor, so you'd have a huge bezel for a tiny monitor, giving it the optical illusion of looking smaller.

2. If you limit an LCD to 4:3, you need a significantly larger LCD than CRT. You need around a 34inch LCD to get the equivalent 4:3 size to a 25inch CRT.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspect_ratio_%28image%29

To generalize I'm saying it's possible, but there's no way to make it visually pleasing, it will always look bad.

3. You lose many of the things that make old CRT games themselves, like scan-lines, flicker, etc.

4. Something important to remember when dealing with LCDs in Arcade machines, is that (most, if not all) Arcade machines use *commercial grade panels*. Better refresh rates and response times, better color performance, and most importantly the option to *remove post-processing*(incredibly important for games).

If you go pick up a random LCD-TV or even low-mid end computer monitors, compared to the commercial grade ones, you're going to notice more ghosting, duller colors, and the input timing is going to seem just alittle off(input lag). And if you notice it, your players are going to notice it too.

Not what you wanted to hear I'm sure

:D

But yes, what you linked will allow you to do what you want. But doing what you want is kind of a bad idea. Generally CRT games should stay on CRTs, going to LCD is a down-grade.

While I generally agree about the CRT to LCD comparisons, LCDs have certainly made a lot of quality strides in recent times. The monitors I have for my PC network now are really nice with gaming, the only thing they lack is the deeper blacks. Granted there is that issue of size that you mention and some games look too sharp on the newer LCDs but I am getting tired of CRT problems since they seem to be a pain in the butt to fix at times.

Thanks for the advice though. I probably won't be seriously considering such an upgrade for a while as I don't have the funds to undertake such a venture at the moment but it is good to know what options are on the table.

BTW- I am going to soon be upgrading one of my Tokyo Drift cabinets to an LCD as it's CRT crapped out completely. Seeing these converters made me think about the idea and in the case of TD I don't need one since that has a DVI cable running from the PC to the I/O board. I am not sure if it will run the monitor directly but I will try it out.

So the thing is size. In measuring it, it appears that a 24.6" monitor will fit nicely and take up about the same space as the CRT that is in there right now. I wouldn't mind a 25.5" or a 26" in there but those run for almost about $100 more than 24" monitors. With a refresh rate of 2ms, ghosting will not be a problem.

I think I will be blogging about the upgrade, if anyone cares. I'll show what I did, step-by-step. If this is successful then I will be upgrading The Act next. That was supposed to be an LCD anyways and the CRT has been behaving badly quite a bit. It looks like it might work with the same size of monitor as TD will take.

I just want to re-state that crt to LCD conversions make me cry :( no matter how good they get, they can't emulate a crt because the display functions are entirely different, in the same way vector games on raster monitors looks bad.

That said, are we talking square LCDs or Widescreen? by your measurements I'm assuming widescreen.

As I pointed out before, if you replace a square monitor with a widescreen LCD, you are doing one of two things, either *significantly reducing* screen real-estate or *stretching* the picture, which just looks plain bad.

Here's a size comparison calculator to show you what I mean: http://www.cavecreations.com/tv2.cgi

You're going from a 27inch CRT to a 24 inch LCD. the 4:3 ratio inside of a 24 inch LCD is only *19* inches.

So you're effectively replacing a 27inch monitor with a 19 inch one.

I understand cost is an issue, but there's simply no way to not make this look ghetto.

A proper sized LCD would cost you more than a CRT. Because in order to get 27 inch of 4:3 with an LCD, you'd need 33 inches, and just a 30 inch costs 1000$+, it also wouldn't even fit.

The problem here is that no one even makes square LCDs in that size, you have to use widescreen. Honestly a 27inch WG crt for $350 or so is your best option.

Don't worry man, I understand where you're coming from on the issue. I still love CRTs in certain areas, a brand new CRT looks phenomenal.

I am primarily looking at updating just the modern games really although I understand that Drift didn't use widescreen. It's much easier to update games that already use PC hardware but I promise that I won't update everything ;) At the moment I am really just looking at Tokyo Drift, The Act and perhaps Gauntlet Legends.

I did do the conversion for one of my TD cabinets yesterday, I purchased a 24" LCD with a 2ms response time from Costco for $200 and installed it in the cabinet. If I could have purchased a 26" monitor it would have been nice but that wasn't available so I settled for the 24". Horizontally the image is very close to the same but you do notice the difference vertically. I cut a black mat board for it and put it over the monitor so you don't notice that it's a PC monitor and personally I am happy with the job that I did with it, I'll post pics tomorrow. The one drawback is that the image sits further back and with the monitor running a native resolution of 1920x1080 you can notice how low-rez the game is if you have the eye for it. But the color really pops out now and there are no ghosting problems with the image.

In terms of earnings, in the 24 hours I have had the LCD installed, the game has made $19.60. By comparison, the one with the CRT has only made $9.50 over a period of 48 hours. I'll have to see how they both do this weekend but so far people seem attracted to the LCD.

As a fellow operator my main concern isn't so much the LCD CRT conversion but as I mentioned the large reduction in screen real estate.

If they still made square LCDs this would be much less of an issue.

Yeah that reduction is a pain to deal with, along with fitting the things into the cabinet.

Newegg.com does have a number of 4:3 monitors but they seem to be rather expensive.

Well yeah, at this point square LCDs is a legacy market, so there's only a tiny amount of models, and they never got bigger than 22 or so.

Looks pretty good. Going to make a bezel for it? See you got more machines up and running, new place is looking great.

DVI? Really? In our cabs it's a DE-15 connector giving an analog RGBHV signal (aka VGA) running from the PC directly to the monitor. Although the cards do have DVI ports, I have to wonder what the game software would think of that. Just replacing the card with the exact same unit but a slightly different BIOS revision made the machine refuse to boot until I reimaged the entire linked group (and blowing away everyone's player tracking data, owwwwww! Why oh WHY didn't RT include a backup function?)