I’d love concave buttons that’d fit in my madcatz stick. Especially American parts. I’d finally use an american flag artwork
A lens to make an LCD monitor have curvature like a CRT is a great suggestion, Tonepoet. I’m surprised no-one has done this already. I’ve also been impressed by some of the simulated scanline / upscaler boxes I’ve seen out there, and if this effect could be somehow combined with an LCD arcade monitor, along with some kind of lens as you suggested, it would be pretty darned close to an actual CRT.
It’d be close but since LCDs have a native resolution and CRTs don’t the picture won’t be exactly the same, but acceptable.
I know there’s filters out there that emulate the CRT curvature, which you can see here. It actually looks quite nice.
The latest version of MAME introduced HLSL shaders in the latest build. It’s quite amazing how well you can emulate the quirks of a CRT with them. I managed to replicate the dot crawl of the empty health bar in SFA2.
I’d also like to throw my hat in the ring for low-profile Happ buttons and sticks that are compatible with Sanwa/Seimitsu mounting brackets. It’s the lowest hanging fruit for them to tackle, so they can dip their toe into this brave new world with minimal financial risk.
Nice link pzlate, although the statement that CRTs don’t have a native resolution isn’t entirely per se, the signal did. Additionally C.R.T.s do have a minimal visual element that has a determinate factor on their resolution called dot-pitch. Since the minimal visual elements of today’s LCDs are smaller than those of the CRT displays that would’ve been used for arcade equipment or home television, I’m sure that any noticeable remaining differences could be sufficiently masked as well. Also noteworthy is the fact that there are different types of dot pitch used, suggesting the precise difference in the anatomy of a C.R.T. pixel and an L.C.D. pixel might not matter too much in recreating a sufficiently authentic experience. That is, unless you want to do game cabinet specific emulation.
While a digital solution for emulating CRT curvature may be possible, I think the lens idea is a fairly simpler solution which would present an overall more authentic than a filter because of the principal upon which a CRT operates. Explained simply a small electron gun on the back of the unit projects the image onto glass in the front. Similarly light would traverse from the LCD to the magnifier. The L.C.D. would replace the electron gun and the magnifier, whatever it’s made out of, would replace the original glass. The main thing to keep in mind is that unlike the electron gun, the L.C.D. would produce close to a full sized image, so there should be less space between the two. Just enough to warp the image properly, hopefully mounted in such a way that the curve is overlaying the whole screen.
You may also get a nice transparent glossy coat, that probably couldn’t be emulated otherwise, complete with a rounded glare. Besides that that fewer digital filters means less processing simplifiying the upscaling process and eliminating an element which may ultimately require buffering which would introduce lag.
I’m not. These issues crop up because the generalized marketplace is advancing to meet the needs of the high fidelity market who see the television as a window into an alternate reality and this introduces a form of distortion.
Preservation of this sort of distortion would only matter to people who view the medium not only as a window into an alternate reality but also as a sort of canvas to be worked with. While I might be laughed at if I try directly to compare Super Mario Bros. to the Mona Lisa or Citizen Kane for some years to come, Artists the world over pick different materials to achieve the different effects they desired to portray in their art be it a sketch artist’s preference for matte paper for its textural qualities or the painter’s preference for watercolors for their abstractly vivid qualities.
The people who would most typically care in the home theater market, vintage film enthusiasts probably see the movement to flatscreen televisions as an improvement in this regard because the vast majority of movies were made using flat fim for viewing on a projected image on the flat silver screen. The only people who would use C.R.T.s as a canvas are people working specifically with broadcast productions and while it’s possible they may’ve used special camera lenses to compensate. I’m not quite sure if they did or didn’t as they don’t have nearly the episodic budget to be quite as picky about their visual qualities as the movies so it’s something that might not get much thought. Also if there wasn’t a standard curvature the user experience might not be very consistent besides meaning some may’ve had a flatter image than others.
With digital animation is quite another story. I think Pioneer’s sales pitch for their A/V receivers: “There’s only one way to get closer to an artist’s true intent–and that’s to get as close as possible to exactly what the artist created.” Applying that to video games, digital animation would’ve been created on C.R.T.s for C.R.T.s so in the absence of an actual C.R.T. the the only way to see something that even resembles what a digital C.R.T. artistry is meant to be like is to emulate one as closely as is possible. In the absence of such a thing, a piece of our intergenerational culture will be forever lost. Switching to raw unregulated L.C.D.s would have an overall effect similar to spearing off Mona Lisa’s smile… It’s a technically incomplete work of art.
In short the overall market for this is really, rather quite small in the grand scheme of things. However it just S[uz]o-Happens that I think this is the relative market Suzo-Happ caters to most, so I think if these ideas are to gain any steam at all, it’ll be most likely to happen with them. I’m really hoping they’re the sort that would take this principal to heart as passionately as I do. I doubt any of the other big names in gaming will do anything much about it because while they recognize there’s value to be had in the past, their approach to it is rather passive by securing software licenses. Their innovations are largely forward thinking and reaching out to the general audience on the whole, rather than making regular customers out of niche groups of diehard fans.
If you’re asking why none of the other creative folk here at Techtalk thought it up first, well, any one of us is just as likely to come up with an idea as any other. I’m also not currently a specialist of any sort so my mind wanders to unconventional places but that’s another topic altogether. I mostly just wanted to provide some insight on why I want what I’d requested in the post just before and why it probably hasn’t already been capitalized upon by a competitor with this response… It’s a philosophical take on market research.
My 2 requests:** low profile parts** (joystick and buttons; buttons can be easily half the depth), and quiet switches (though am not sure if they make the switches themselves). Most switches are actually 2 switches (normally open and normally closed), so they click twice per action (one for each direction). Arcades and most applications only need to activate in 1 direction, eliminating the ‘normally closed’ switch will reduce the clicks by half. Having it click-less would be ideal though. More and more people are playing games past our teens (way past), so it’s awkward trying to play the games late night with our significant other trying to sleep in the same room.
Happ buys their switches from third party manufacturers, though they do make a clickless joystick: The Happ P360 mentioned above. Since it uses optical sensor technologies instead of switches, it doubles the cost of other joysticks and it sounds like the pivot’s a little messed up.
Additionally, switches that require lower gram force to actuate also make quieter clicks, so modifying your buttons and joystick with 20g Zippy microswitches might allow you to do it on the cheap. This video from paradise arcade uses a Seimitsu and Zippy brand joystick for demonstration purposes. Since Happ joysticks also use levered switches, perhaps it’s possible to use the same microswitches in a Happ joystick. Not 100% sure though. Zippy also make appears to make 20 gram pushbutton microswitches that would fit in a Happ button, while a Normal HAPP button would use 75 grams of actuation force. Using these in the standard production line would change the feel of the buttons significantly though. Might be better to just swap your own if Happ ever does make the low profile parts we’ve requested.
Came back primarily to say it looks like people make magnifying glasses as reading aids that may do the job this afterall, at least for smaller screens. I’m not sure though since some of them appear to be frensal lenses which look a bit flat. Do those have the same effect on the image? Hmm…
Ya, I’ve modded the Happ microswitch on mine with the paper trick, I covered the ‘normally closed’ so it doesn’t make any more clicking noise. But still would be a good selling point for us at least if it only makes 1 click vs 2, and less parts to produce. But as I figured, they don’t make the switches.
Actually at this point the price on it has gone up significantly recently. It currently costs ~6x as much as most other Happ sticks and ~2-3 times a Sanwa or Seimitsu stick. I’m actually a little curious why it’s gone up so much.
The P360 also suffers from wear at the pivot point in the stick. It starts grinding after a while and gets unplayably rough. You can use axle grease to mitigate the effect, but it’s no cure.