Haha, I know. I wasn't actually suggesting someone go buy one of these right away. Just remember that LCDs/plasmas were what, $20,000 when they first came out? Give it a couple years.

CRTs ain't gonna be around for ever, and slowly but surely the problems with hdtv tech are being addressed. Once we have OLED TVs with Gsync, CRTs won't have any advantage any more. Plus, you can never get perfect geometry with a line based display. And then there are the obvious size/weight issues of CRTs. Technology is moving on.

That isn't really an issue once you reach a point in your life that you are less nomadic.

I suspect we have at least a couple more decades of convenient access to surplus CRTs where the newer-manufacture sets work just fine.  It is pretty robust technology.

Try using your SMS gun or glasses on that TV then

I think HDMI doesn't support the timecode resulution that displayport does, so very hard to get audio and video in a tight sync. Displayport actually kicks HDMI's ass in almost all stats.

The quality control on newer manufacture sets was completely horrible. I have never seen a Sony Trinitron made after 2000 that did not have glaring purity, convergence, and/or geometry problems that couldn't be fixed. All major manufacturers had the same problem with circa 2000-2005 sets. I think they were cutting on quality control to get the first plasmas/lcds out.

Although, I am in Texas, so I was most likely looking at TVs made in Mexico where quality control may have been worse.

If I was going to get a CRT again it would be a mid to late 90s model. Screw flatscreen and trinitron, they're overrated.

What I want to know is how people don't notice the terrible geometry issues on their CRTs in this age of pixel perfect displays. I'm always pointing these out to people who have CRTs and they claim they never noticed before.

Are any light gun games good, honestly? I personally don't enjoy any of them. Maybe Duck Hunt for a little while.

Assuming the delay is adjustable, the SMS 3D Glasses just *might* work, assuming the pixels onscreen can change over instantly...

I love me some light gun games. The nes gun should work on a low-latency display, it doesn't need the scanlines like other systems do.

I'm pretty sure the response time is 1ms.

Don't your run into an issue of the light-gun not being able to detect the image due to the difference in brightness?

I have heard that some hdtvs will work with the light zapper, but I've never seen it with my own eyes.

While we're on the subject:









The guy in the second video claims 4 ms response time is all that's required.

Expand the video description.

The second video is a CRT HDTV, so it should have similar brightness/radiation properties to a standard CRT.

It is not an LCD.




The first video isn't even a real zapper and console, so I'm not sure why you linked it.

I don't think that would apply to newer LCDs that are a shitton better than early ones when it comes to light levels, but don't quote me on that. I tried checking my LCD projection tv just now, but it's tossing a lamp error, and it's a new lamp too.

Well, excuse me. I thought it was a cool mod, and this thread- at one point- was about emulation. 

No need to take offense.

I interpretted your post as linking to evidence that a zapper could work on a non-CRT display.

Clearly I misunderstood your intent.

Wasn't there a thread on NA about zappers working on some LCDs? I can't find it now, maybe I'm thinking of another forum. 

I know it comes up from time to time, but I feel like I recall some pretty definitive explanations from Bunnyboy saying that it only works on CRTs due to multiple factors, not just refresh time and scan-structure.

Some of the ones on the PS1 and PS2 are very good. Elemental Gearbolt immediately comes to mind.

Older LCDs didn't show black, just a gray, and I think it needs to see the black to contract aginst the white on the next frame. 

There was more to it, than that.

It had to do with the specific properties of the white on the screen.

I was trying to see if the light gun worked on my TV, it's an LCD projection, but the damned bulb blew out. Was a new bulb too.

Then for a moment I thought, "Oh, I'll just route the video to the CRT and test off that". Then I remembered how stupid that was.

If it's on your Sony, it doesn't work. Neither does the super scope, menacer, or the lethal enforcer guns.

Do we know for sure what qualities are required to make the light zapper work, besides quick response time?

Zapper has a filter to only detect light at ~15KHz (60 fps * 240p). LCD (60/120/240Hz) or plasma (600Hz) is ignored. This is much easier to show with a ROB where a fixed delay makes no difference because there is no feedback.

Brightness, black level, response time, and input lag do not matter if the scanline rate is wrong.

Is that filter a piece of hardware that can be replaced easily?