Home Arcade with CRT: The Odyssey of Cables and Converters

CRT, Raspberry, or FPGA: The Home Arcade Puzzle

What does it take to build a home arcade machine that looks the part? The answer is daunting: a CRT television, a faithful emulation source, video converters, specific wiring, and a lot of patience. And once it's built, many confess the same thing: it's hardly ever used.

The stated goal is "a real one, the kind that burns your eyes." In other words: a 1990s CRT monitor, with its 1997 Pentium 3 – literally, the year '97 – waiting in the wings, two SCART connectors at the back, and nostalgia as the sole technical justification.

Raspberry, MisterFPGA, or Old PC: Three Paths, None Simple

The first decision is which hardware to use for emulation. The Raspberry Pi seems the easiest option: pre-configured image, flash to microSD, connect, and go. Specific CRT-ready images are available.

At the other end, MisterFPGA is marketed as more faithful to the original experience. It was more expensive for years, though Chinese-made FPGA clones have narrowed the price gap. The Raspberry wins in ease of setup; the FPGA wins in authenticity. To each their own.

The third route is to salvage an old computer. A dual-core, a 5850 graphics card with special CRT drivers, Windows 7, and a front-end like CoinOps are enough to get it running. One forum user recounts building exactly that on a second-hand 25-inch Thomson CRT TV.

The Inferno is in the Video Chain

Here begins the real ordeal. From the PC or Raspberry to the CRT television, the signal must be downscaled to RGB via SCART. Professional converters exist – Arcade Express, Pi2Scart, RGB-Pi – as well as cheap cables that degrade quality along the way.

Frequency matters, a lot: 15 kHz versus 31 kHz. This is not a minor detail. The CRT needs to operate at its native resolution, or the result will be jarring from the first scroll.

There's also the detail of the front glass panel on original arcade cabinets, which some veterans claim influenced the final visual perception. And guns made from console controllers fall short when using an old computer.

Play the Game or Own a Pretty Cabinet?

Some summarize it bluntly: if you really want to play, you don't need the cabinet. A decent arcade stick with short-throw Sanwa or long-throw IL joysticks, Seimitsu or Industrias Lorenzo buttons, a modern low-latency monitor, and well-adjusted CRT filters are enough. With that, you can finish the arcade games you couldn't back then due to lack of money, skill, or because the machine never appeared.

The other option, the physical cabinet, stems from a different impulse. The experience summary nails it: Building it. Configuring it. And then… almost nothing.

And then there's the economy of nostalgia: a 1 TB hard drive full of configured ROMs with cover art. The trap isn't the price. It's the use.

The biggest hurdle is neither technical nor economic. It's that the project ends long before the desire does. The perfect arcade machine exists. It's turned off.