Which direction do/did the scanlines go in vertical CRT Arcade cabs?

[John Stamos Mullet]

Like the thread title says?

 

I have a couple of Arcade 1ups I've converted to multi cabs, with LCD displays (sacrilege, I know) and set them up as using vertical scanlines, going with the conventional wisdom that they were just horizontal CRTs turned 90 degrees for vertical orientation.

 

But then the other day I was watching some video online, I think it was one about Billy Mitchell, and he was playing what looked to be a Donkey Kong cab with a CRT, and the scanlines were clearly horizontal, in a vertical cab, which looked weird to me.

 

Most internet searches on this claim that I was right in my original thinking, that they are just horizontal CRTs turned on the side, but that video threw me. Was he using a CRT cab that had emulation rather than an original PCB, and someone set up the scanlines filter wrong?

[TampaBay]

Interesting.  I play games in my local retro arcade with original cabinets and I don't recall off the top of my head ever seeing vertical scanlines, but to be fair, I haven't looked super closely.

 

It took me a while to find some clear video on the web (most of it is blurry) but I scoured around for some video of Pac-Man and Galaga, and in those videos (links below) they both had horizontal scanlines.  That may not be conclusive evidence, but based on my personal gameplay at the retro arcade and those two videos, I'd venture to guess the scanlines are generally horizontal.

 

 

 

[TampaBay]

On the other hand, as you mentioned, plenty of seemingly knowledgeable people on the web say that what I described above is "impossible" so who knows. 

 

If I go to my retro arcade before we get a definitive answer, I'll be sure to take a close look.

[John Stamos Mullet]

5 hours ago, TampaBay said:

Interesting.  I play games in my local retro arcade with original cabinets and I don't recall off the top of my head ever seeing vertical scanlines, but to be fair, I haven't looked super closely.

 

It took me a while to find some clear video on the web (most of it is blurry) but I scoured around for some video of Pac-Man and Galaga, and in those videos (links below) they both had horizontal scanlines.  That may not be conclusive evidence, but based on my personal gameplay at the retro arcade and those two videos, I'd venture to guess the scanlines are generally horizontal.

 

 

 

That Pac-Man video defintely doesn't look like it's running on original hardware. That's way too fast for the first board (cherries) on a standard Pac-Man cab.

Edited August 7 by John Stamos Mullet

[Steven Pendleton]

I actually have an arcade cabinet, and it is indeed just a (really nice and really heavy) regular CRT that you can spin 90 degrees if you don't mind either getting a victim friend to assist, a workout, or fucking up your back.

[John Stamos Mullet]

10 hours ago, Steven Pendleton said:

I actually have an arcade cabinet, and it is indeed just a (really nice and really heavy) regular CRT that you can spin 90 degrees if you don't mind either getting a victim friend to assist, a workout, or fucking up your back.

Thank you for confirming. It's what I thought as well, but just wanted confirmation.

[TampaBay]

I'm going to head down to the retro arcade this week anyway, so I'll look at a wide variety of vertical screens for final confirmation.  My opinion is that one cabinet may be representative of how that cabinet was put together, but not necessarily how all of them were done.  I'll try to get photos that aren't blurry or overly bright like they are on YouTube.  It certainly may be the case that they're all vertical but at least I'll be able to check a bunch of cabinets.  I took this video a few weeks ago from the place, and it looks like I'll have at least a few cabinets to look at:

 

 

Edited August 11 by TampaBay

[TampaBay]

@Shaggy the Atarian might also be able to shed some light on this, as he owns an arcade and has some retro games in it.  Please let us know if you have any expertise to share!  😀 🕹️

 

For what it's worth, one of my Arcade1Up's has the game Toobin' on it, and when scanlines are turned on, those scanlines are vertical.

[Shaggy the Atarian]

Interesting question, while I've taken close-ups, I hadn't given it thought.

 

Here are three games and it looks like the physical scanlines are all set vertically (i.e., the RGB phosphors are running vertical). That said, you still get this horizontal black line effect from on certain games(the older the more prominent), which is probably what causes the confusion:

 

Pac-Man (vertical monitor)

 

Pitfall II (horizontal monitor)

 

Hydra (horizontal, but higher rez? It appears to use a staggered scanline effect)

 

 

 

[TampaBay]

I went to the arcade today and took photos, and I tend to agree with @Shaggy the Atarian.  My overall assessment is that the pixels for the vertical games I photographed are more in a kind of "brick" pattern rather than either horizontal or vertical scanlines, like the kind of scanlines you see in emulation.  In "real life" I didn't detect the kind of scanlines you see on emulators at all.  All the vertical games had this brick pattern you see below.  These are some photos from Pac-Man, Q*bert, Tron, Centipede, Galaga, Burger Time, etc.  If I was setting up an emulator for vertically oriented games and I had to pick from only horizontal scanlines or vertical scanlines because this "brick" pattern wasn't an option, I'd probably pick horizontal as it's more representative of what the eye sees when playing the games.

 

 

Q*bert

 

 

Burger Time

 

 

 

Tron

 

 

Centipede

 

 

 

Pac-Man

 

 

 

Galaga

 

 

 

Various:

 

 

 

[John Stamos Mullet]

So  - funny story, but I got confirmation of my answer in a most unlikely place...

 

a few nights ago, I was bored and looking for older 80's movies to watch that I had never seen or hadn't seen in a long time. As I was looking through the Google results, I found "Joyticks"  from 1983. It's a mostly terrible teen sex comedy that is set in and revolves around a Video Arcade. It's not a good movie, by any stretch of the imagination, but... it has copious close up shots of old school CRT Arcade cabinets in action. More specifically, it has shots of these games ON FILM, which has a 24fps frame rate, which allows the video to show it's scanlines pretty prominently, and indeed the scanlines are visible, and more importantly, they are decidedly vertical, in every game they showed. so they really are just a normal CRT tube turned on it's side.