Most of you will never get to experience that feeling of going from dial-up to broadband.
The whole world changed for this dude
Not sure if they are being sarcastic. But even i had a Roku box plugged into a CRT tv (via RCA cables) as recently as 10 years ago. It was an old CRT I kept in my bedroom. Good times.
Now you can get the same propaganda we do fed straight to you! Congratulations, you’ll get a far right government in 5-20 years.
No joke though crts are crazy hard to find now. It used to be that thrift stores were full of them, they were left out on curbs to be taken to the dump if they weren’t rehomed first. They were famously worthless (you know to most people) and people couldn’t give them away, so they threw them away.
…But now they’re all thrown away. If you actually try to buy one it’ll shock you how much a tv goes for now that would’ve been $20 at the goodwill a decade ago.
The same thing happened with 90’s beige desktop PC’s. Awhile ago I wanted to build a sleeper PC out of one of these and thought that I could snap something up for $30 or something. Nope. Check out eBay, the beige towers that didn’t get trashed were gutted and listed at triple-digit figures as “retro cases”.
With crts or beige PC’s, your best bet at this point is to get lucky and find one in the attic of someone who forgot about it and doesn’t realize that their prices skyrocketed
I remember being in college and my roommate and I bought a massive, like 200 lb 50 inch CRT TV from the thrift shop a few blocks away for $30. Neither of us had a car so we spent the next two hours limping that thing back to the dorm on foot. Installed it in the living room and played PS3 on it for two years.
This was barely more than ten years ago. Nowadays I want to get a CRT for retro gaming. You’re spending $200 for trash or up to $500 for something decent.
I had a similar experience. A friend and I bought one of those CRT’s that had a giant wood enclosure with its own speaker and was designed to sit on the ground … Only to, on completing the purchase and exiting the closing shop, discover it would not fit in my car.
Fortunately, an older guy happened to be exiting the store at the same time … And more importantly, getting into his large and empty pick-up. We stopped him and basically begged him to transport the TV for us, which eventually he hesitantly did. (We lived nearby the store but not close enough that carrying the TV was realistic.) I rode in the truck with him and the TV because it seemed logical to ride with my new purchase and to give him directions. My friend drove my car home because he didn’t want to ride with a stranger.
This was long enough ago that there weren’t any kind of ride hiring apps. At that point I’d never ridden in a taxi or anything so I don’t know if you could have requested one large enough to transport a giant TV. If the guy hadn’t been there or had been unwilling to help us, I guess we would have had to hide the TV in the bushes or something and come back for it later.
Like you, I kept that TV for a long time. I think I mainly played Xbox and GameCube on it, though.
I don’t understand why no company wants to get back in the CRT business; they would make an absolute killing off the retro gaming market (and nerds like me). I, for one, would love a modern widescreen 4K 240Hz Trinitron CRT with an analog RGB input and HDMI 2.2. Every game from past to present would look amazing on such a TV. Just don’t fuck it up and introduce input lag like early HD CRTs did.
Same goes for cassette decks. Modern cassette players all use the same crappy Chinese design for the mechanism. Mono audio and no Dolby noise reduction. Yuck. Somebody needs to make a modern design that was as good as 80s and 90s cassette players were.
I’m gonna guess that the scale you’d need to make a profit would be way over what you could actually sell unfortunately. CRTs are very different to modern manufacturing processes, you’d need a dedicated factory for a fair bit of the process.
That being said, cassette decks I could absolutely see working. The tech is barebones af, and the rest of it can probably be put together with existing audio hardware.
You might enjoy this story of someone working very hard to find and acquire a CRT:
Yeah, lots of people want them for retro gaming now, and they’re all gone.
At least it’s not a “smart” TV blasting out horrendous ads when you turn it on
Roku
Yeah only does that once you launch the streaming stick ;)
