Did your parents think your console would ruin their TV?

[+FujiSkunk]

LCD can suffer from screen burn. I have a ZTE smartphone that is 4/5 years old, and the original interface had a white upper bar. And when you turn the screen you can clearly see the place wheer the bar is.

 

LCD's, early models in particular, can in fact suffer from a form of burn-in, but it's usually not the permanent burn-in that CRT's suffer from. Since it's generally not a permanent "burn", they gave it a different name: image persistence. Obviously some LCD screens are better at shaking off image persistence than others.

 

How?

 

Early dedicated consoles didn't color cycle, so playing or leaving the machine on for any good length of time was pretty much guaranteed to leave ghosts on those old TV's.

[0078265317]

I never had this issue.

[Noah98]

I got stuck using the small black and white tv in my parent's bedroom for the longest time. I remember playing Asteroids on my 2600 and being bummed out by the lack of color. I saved my allowance forever ($3 a week for tons of chores) and finally bought my own color tv. My parents had the nerve to put it in their room and not mine!

[MaximRecoil]

Early dedicated consoles didn't color cycle, so playing or leaving the machine on for any good length of time was pretty much guaranteed to leave ghosts on those old TV's.

 

You would have to leave it on for a long time, i.e., the equivalent of all day, every day, for months on end; over a year straight for screen burn to become particularly noticeable; years for it to become severe. You'd have to really, really like Pong.

[Iwantgames:)]

My parents didn't think the game console would break the TV, they thought us kids would break the TV, console, computer, ect. Lol I remember they made us all read the manuals which I hated I just wanted to play games

[7800fan]

I do remember false rumor back in the day. Somehow some people thought that Odyssey system would only work on Magnavox TV and might cause problem on other TVs.

[Keatah]

 

LCD's, early models in particular, can in fact suffer from a form of burn-in, but it's usually not the permanent burn-in that CRT's suffer from. Since it's generally not a permanent "burn", they gave it a different name: image persistence. Obviously some LCD screens are better at shaking off image persistence than others.

 

That's right. An LCD has moving parts for the pixels (crystals that twist in a fluid suspension). You can undo some or all of that image persistence by cycling colors and getting those crystals moving back and forth. A simple power-point presentation or full-screen slideshow that goes through grey levels, black, white, cyan, magenta, yellow, red, green, blue, is a great way to do that.

[Gentlegamer]

The first game system I played as a child was Atari VCS, which was my father's. He knew it didn't cause problems.

[Keatah]

An aside, I have trouble imagining Keatah as a child. I imagine him just appearing as a full grown adult talking about the wonders of emulation.

 

Pretty much that.

 

My fascination with emulators goes way back to the time when I was into "electronics projects" and had 10 classic systems going. A time when the KIM-1 and RCA COSMAC Vip were in full swing. A time when those spring-connector electronic project kits from RadioShack and Lafayette electronics were popular. Two of the deluxe sets opened up like a briefcase even! So therefore I always wanted to have a secret agent all-in-one suitcase machine capable playing all the home and arcade games. Nearly 30 years would elapse before this became a practical reality with all the refinements and elegance I expected.

 

As kids we often wrote stories about what such a machine would be like on the inside. It was nothing at all like a modern PC packed with emulators. It included some far fetched alien technology and ideas years ahead of their time. It was weird and strange and different. But it was fun!

 

In any case (NPI) I wanted to get a head start on it so me and my buddies mashed and circuit-bent together some well worn & near dead consoles into a makeshift Ultravision tabletop cabinet. It worked, but it was a physical kludge to end all kludges. It threatened to overheat or stop working from intermittent tied and taped together connections or half-assed soldering.

 

Press the fast-forward button to get you into the mid-1990's. I discovered Microsoft Arcade, Activision Action Packs, Digital Eclipse & Bally/Midway 6-in-one arcade emulation package, and various other emulation experiments. Dave Spicer's Arcade, Mike Cuddy's Gyruss music player, and soon enough MAME exploded on the scene. Gyruss, Discs Of Tron,Tempest, Zaxxon, Assault, I'Robot, and Tac/Scan were completed and I was in heaven. Various classic consoles like the VCS, Intellivision, Colecovision, and Bally Astrocade came online. The C64 and Atari 400/800 got coverage soon enough too. I was on my way.

 

All I had to do was get a contemporary laptop and pack it full of emulators. Now I had my small Ultravision! Kinda crept up on me. And it was far easier than I envisioned. All I had to do was manage the file system. Done and done.

[Ransom]

I do remember false rumor back in the day. Somehow some people thought that Odyssey system would only work on Magnavox TV and might cause problem on other TVs.

 

I remember that, too. My mom thought that was true, but my dad didn't believe it. Who knows, maybe that's why I was given a Telstar Arcade as a birthday present one year. They gave me a VCS the next year, though, so it all worked out.

[SeaGtGruff]

You would have to leave it on for a long time, i.e., the equivalent of all day, every day, for months on end; over a year straight for screen burn to become particularly noticeable; years for it to become severe. You'd have to really, really like Pong.

 

I don't know how long it's supposed to take for permanent screen burn to occur on a CRT TV. Have there been actual laboratory studies? Does the brand and model of TV make a difference, or are all CRT TVs built to exactly the same standards and specs? Keep in mind, we're talking about TVs from about 40-to-50 years ago (I'm not certain when the Pong game came out for the home market, but the TV set could have been bought several years before that). Also, the screen burn might not have been permanent-- it may have just been a persistence of image that eventually faded away. But when you're playing Pong for an hour or two, then you switch over to a TV station to watch a show and you can still see a ghost image of the Pong game screen, it tends to upset the people who wanted to watch the show, even if the ghost image eventually disappears after a while. I'm pretty sure there was a reason Atari instituted color-cycling in their games, and I seriously doubt it was because people had been leaving the Pong game on their TV screen nonstop for a year or two.

Edited October 20, 2015 by SeaGtGruff

[krslam]

I've got a 10-or-so year old Toshiba that has a faint permanent burn from my wife playing Dr Mario on our N64. Didn't take more than a couple weeks of her playing it for the burn to happen.

[MaximRecoil]

 

I don't know how long it's supposed to take for permanent screen burn to occur on a CRT TV. Have there been actual laboratory studies? Does the brand and model of TV make a difference, or are all CRT TVs built to exactly the same standards and specs? Keep in mind, we're talking about TVs from about 40-to-50 years ago (I'm not certain when the Pong game came out for the home market, but the TV set could have been bought several years before that). Also, the screen burn might not have been permanent-- it may have just been a persistence of image that eventually faded away. But when you're playing Pong for an hour or two, then you switch over to a TV station to watch a show and you can still see a ghost image of the Pong game screen, it tends to upset the people who wanted to watch the show, even if the ghost image eventually disappears after a while. I'm pretty sure there was a reason Atari instituted color-cycling in their games, and I seriously doubt it was because people had been leaving the Pong game on their TV screen nonstop for a year or two.

 

I'm going by the typical time frame of an arcade machine, i.e., after a couple/few months you start to see screen burn; it becomes really noticeable after a year or so, and after a couple/few years it becomes severe, like this:

 

 

And it doesn't have to be non-stop; the effects are cumulative, so leaving it on the same game for 12 hours straight is the same as leaving it on for 1 hour a day for 12 days. It happens because the phosphors coating the screen wear away with usage. This wear is happening all the time, but with random motion/colors such as with typical TV shows and movies, the wear is more or less even, so no distinct images are burned into the screen.

 

It can be different for different TVs; different settings can make a difference for example. The brighter/more intense the image is, the faster the burn will happen. Also, some TVs may have a thinner coating of RGB phosphors than others. Also, traditional Pong uses white graphics, which lights up all three colors of phosphors at once (in a color TV; in a B&W TV, white lights up the only color of phosphor to the full intensity that the settings will allow), which is the quickest route to burn-in.

 

More modern CRTs, especially PC CRT monitors, may have some form of screen burn reduction technology built in.

 

Atari's color-cycling only comes into play when the console is left on and not being played, so that seems to be what they were worried about. Did any other console manufacturer do this with their games? Not everything Atari did was particularly necessary, such as using 3/8" thick solid plastic in the bottom half of the heavy sixer case, or 1/8" thick wall cast aluminum enclosure for an RF shield.

Edited October 20, 2015 by MaximRecoil

[+FujiSkunk]

I would imagine arcade monitors were built of sturdier stuff than consumer-grade televisions, especially televisions from the '70s and eariler.

[MaximRecoil]

I would imagine arcade monitors were built of sturdier stuff than consumer-grade televisions, especially televisions from the '70s and eariler.

 

No, the "picture tubes" (CRTs) are the same. Ordinary TVs from the '70s and '80s are a good source for replacement arcade monitor tubes in fact; you just need to find one with the same part number (or a compatible part number, or a compatible neck board pinout and yoke impedance). For example, Nintendo arcade monitors such as the Sanyo EZV-20 and the 20-Z2AW used a 510UTB22 tube, which is also commonly found in Sanyo TVs from the '80s, as well as in some other brands. I don't know of any standard resolution arcade monitor that didn't use an off-the-shelf CRT which was also found in various TVs of the day. The workhorse of the industry, i.e., the Electrohome G07 (used in Pac-Man, Missile Command, and many other classics), used a 19VJTP22 tube, which can be found in various TVs of the day, such as from Panasonic and Mitsubishi. Many of the Wells-Gardner K-series monitors used that tube as well, which were also very common in the classic arcade machines.

 

The only difference between a standard resolution (~15 kHz) arcade monitor and a standard resolution TV is the chassis, i.e., an arcade monitor has direct RGB input and the TV doesn't. The TV also has a TV tuner, audio amplifier, and speakers, while the arcade monitor doesn't (Nintendo/Sanyo arcade monitors included an audio amplifier, but no speakers or TV tuner).

Edited October 20, 2015 by MaximRecoil

[SeaGtGruff]

Atari's color-cycling only comes into play when the console is left on and not being played, so that seems to be what they were worried about. Did any other console manufacturer do this with their games?

 

The reason it comes into play only while the game isn't being actively played is so it doesn't interfere with playing the game. I've also heard people say that it's because the graphics are changing (moving) while the game is being played-- although that doesn't sound very convincing to me, since a lot of games have background/playfield graphics that don't move. In any case, the color cycling kicks in pretty quickly-- in a matter of only a few minutes-- if the game is left inactive. And color cycling was included in the very first Atari 2600 games, and was specifically mentioned in Atari's game design guidelines; it was even built into the OS of the Atari 8-bit computers so that it happened automatically and didn't have to be coded and managed by the programmer. So Atari obviously felt that it was important.

 

As far as whether other companies used color cycling-- I don't know, since we only ever had Atari consoles. But my guess is that the reason Atari felt it was important is because they'd gotten complaints from people who'd bought their Pong system and had experienced an issue with it. Whether the problem was actually that bad or was overblown by hysterical fear mongers, I don't know. And if it was that bad, I don't know what the reasons were. Maybe the signal was too intense-- i.e., in terms of the amount of contrast between the white objects and the black background. Or maybe TV manufacturers were building crappier TVs back then, and once a lot of people started to use video game consoles and home computers with their TV sets the TV manufacturers realized that they needed to start building better TVs.

 

Anyway, I was probably wrong to say that Pong "ruined" our TV, because I don't remember whether we actually had to get a new TV because of Pong-- after all, it was 40 years ago, so my memory of those days is a bit hazy now-- but I do remember that the issue of screen burn was discussed in our house, and that my parents got rid of Pong because of that issue.

[SeaGtGruff]

I would imagine arcade monitors were built of sturdier stuff than consumer-grade televisions, especially televisions from the '70s and eariler.

 

No, the "picture tubes" (CRTs) are the same. Ordinary TVs from the '70s and '80s are a good source for replacement arcade monitor tubes in fact;

 

Yes, but what about ordinary TVs from the '60s and early '70s? If earlier TVs were more susceptible to screen burn and image persistence, and this became apparent once a large number of households started connecting the earliest video game units to their TV sets, then we would hope that by the mid-to-late '70s and the '80s that TV manufacturers would have taken steps to minimize the potential for that problem to occur. And it might be possible that some of the people who apparently had issues with Pong were still using black-and-white TVs. I don't remember what year we finally got a color TV, but I do remember that I'd been whining for one for a long time. I remember that a lot of shows were filmed and broadcast in black-and-white during my childhood, and color broadcasts weren't the norm until the second half of the '60s-- e.g., the first season of Lost in Space (1965-1966) was in black-and-white, and that wasn't too unusual at the time.

[MaximRecoil]

 

 

Yes, but what about ordinary TVs from the '60s and early '70s? If earlier TVs were more susceptible to screen burn and image persistence, and this became apparent once a large number of households started connecting the earliest video game units to their TV sets, then we would hope that by the mid-to-late '70s and the '80s that TV manufacturers would have taken steps to minimize the potential for that problem to occur. And it might be possible that some of the people who apparently had issues with Pong were still using black-and-white TVs. I don't remember what year we finally got a color TV, but I do remember that I'd been whining for one for a long time. I remember that a lot of shows were filmed and broadcast in black-and-white during my childhood, and color broadcasts weren't the norm until the second half of the '60s-- e.g., the first season of Lost in Space (1965-1966) was in black-and-white, and that wasn't too unusual at the time.

 

According to Wikipedia:

 

Modern CRT displays are less susceptible than older CRTs prior to the 1960s because they have a layer of aluminum behind the phosphor which offers some protection. The aluminum layer was provided to reflect more light from the phosphor towards the viewer. As a bonus, the aluminum layer also prevented ion burn of the phosphor and the ion trap, common to older monochrome televisions, was no longer required.

[Atariboy]

Black & white tv sets from everything that I'm aware of were still the norm in the early 1970's.

 

While it would've been unusual for a larger living room set to not be color by the dawn of the 1980's, it was still common for b&w sets to be found in many homes. And smaller tv's continued to be produced without color into the 1980's.

 

The tv set I played 2600 games on as a kid wasn't even produced until 1984 for instance and was still a b&w set. I suspect 1980 and the b&w/color divide wasn't much different than today with CRT's and flatscreen HDTV's like LCD's. CRT's as one's main tv are becoming pretty uncommon, but many CRT's still can be found elsewhere in our homes for secondary purposes and are far from being rare.

Edited October 20, 2015 by Atariboy

[CatPix]

The only difference between a standard resolution (~15 kHz) arcade monitor and a standard resolution TV is the chassis, i.e., an arcade monitor has direct RGB input and the TV doesn't. The TV also has a TV tuner, audio amplifier, and speakers, while the arcade monitor doesn't (Nintendo/Sanyo arcade monitors included an audio amplifier, but no speakers or TV tuner).

 

TVs can include direct RGB input. It's a standard feature on most European TV since the 80's, through SCART.

On older all analog TVs, using the SCART TV input even disable some controls on the TV, most likely the color setting, and sometime the luminosity setting. (as color would control the amount of bandwith coming to the color decoder, and luminosity act on the black and white signal, not the tube itself).

 

This make arcade replacement and creation easy, just pick up any TV found in the bin that works, and get a way to have a 15 khtz RGB signal from your machine.

 

You're right on everything else tho

[GameGirl420]

My parents were also into gaming themselves somewhat,so nope never had that issue.

 

 

The only thing they thought my videogame playing would ruin would be my ability to do homework for school.

[Keatah]

More modern CRTs, especially PC CRT monitors, may have some form of screen burn reduction technology built in.

 

Exactly how would something like that work? And which monitors support it?

[0078265317]

 

 

 

 

 

That actually look pretty cool. So does it still work?

[MaximRecoil]

 

TVs can include direct RGB input. It's a standard feature on most European TV since the 80's, through SCART.

On older all analog TVs, using the SCART TV input even disable some controls on the TV, most likely the color setting, and sometime the luminosity setting. (as color would control the amount of bandwith coming to the color decoder, and luminosity act on the black and white signal, not the tube itself).

 

This make arcade replacement and creation easy, just pick up any TV found in the bin that works, and get a way to have a 15 khtz RGB signal from your machine.

 

You're right on everything else tho

 

Yes, I know; I'm talking about U.S. TVs. We weren't nearly as lucky here. Even composite inputs weren't common on our TVs until the '90s. In the '80s and earlier, most TVs here only had RF input. As for RGB input, I've never heard of any ordinary consumer-grade TV in the U.S. having it. The best we got was component (YPbPr), starting with high-end "progressive scan" (480p / ~31 kHz) TVs in the late '90s and eventually ending up on some lower-end ~15 kHz TVs by the mid '00s (like the 32" RCA I bought new in 2005 for $250 and still use).

 

As for using European SCART RGB CRT TVs as arcade monitors, in some cases it works fine as-is, but in other cases there is a mismatch (voltage, I believe) between what the TV expects and what the arcade board outputs, so you have to compensate for that in order to get a good picture. I don't have any experience with using a European TV with an arcade motherboard, because I'm from the U.S., but I've read various accounts over the years from Europeans who have done it. All of my arcade machines have actual arcade monitors.

 

 

Exactly how would something like that work? And which monitors support it?

 

One method is the reflective aluminum layer I referred to in a previous post. As for other methods, I don't know, but CRT PC monitors from the 2000s seem especially resistant to screen burn. For example, I bought the CRT monitor I am using now (22" Mitsubishi Diamondtron), used, in 2006, and it has been on pretty much all day, every day since. You would think that after 9 years of heavy usage it would have the light gray Windows taskbar severely burned into it, since that is a static image that's always showing, whether I have an application open or it is just sitting here idling on the desktop, but I can't even see a hint of screen burn anywhere on this monitor.

 

That actually look pretty cool. So does it still work?

 

Most likely, but I don't know; it isn't mine. Screen burn doesn't have any effect on whether or not the monitor works, and if the screen burn matches the game currently running on it, you don't always even notice it (except during scenes which don't match). The only arcade monitors I own that have screen burn are from Punch-Out, and they aren't as severe as that Pac-Man monitor:

 

 

I swapped those picture tubes out for some burn-free ones a few years ago though. Also, I think one of my parts monitors may have Donkey Kong screen burn, come to think of it.

Edited October 21, 2015 by MaximRecoil

[thadsilverfox]

I've got a 10-or-so year old Toshiba that has a faint permanent burn from my wife playing Dr Mario on our N64. Didn't take more than a couple weeks of her playing it for the burn to happen.

What type of TV?