They’re really simple electronics, but there are likely a lot of little trade secrets that made them better. At the end of the day, it’s a cathode ray tube with a couple of electromagnets to divert a pulsing electron beam to hit different parts of the phosphor-coated end of the tube. The signal fed to the magnets is analog, and the beam sweeps the screen line-by-line every frame. (Or every other line for interpolated signals.)
It’s really not that dangerous. There’s a big capacitor called the flyback capacitor which can store a deadly amount of energy. You disconnect the power (obviously) and then discharge that cap and everything else is relatively safe. To discharge a capacitor, bridge the leads with an electricians screwdriver. If you don’t like sparks, hold a resistor with pliers between the two leads. (It will go slower but also get hot AF.)
Retro games look better on them and there’s no emulator that has ever pulled off a sufficiently convincing simulation for me. They also render dark colors better than most high end TVs. If you play a lot of old games, it would be neat to have a small one. The big ones, however, weigh a metric ton and are at least as deep as they are wide, and they’re extremely front-heavy. Those aren’t worth it unless you plan to build an entire arcade cabinet around it.
Yeah Gauss a unit of measurement for magnetic flux density. It’s not just there to make a BOING noise and briefly mess up the picture.
There are 4 pairs of 2 wires, for 8 overall. They are all used, but the pairs are redundant. From what I understand, when you send a positive pulse on, say, the solid blue wire, you also send a negative pulse on the stripy blue and white wire. The twisted pairs should counteract any interference, but if it doesn’t, the arrival of the bumps with opposite polarity should foolproof things a little.
Oh yeah it’s called differential signalling.
OK so I just learned, like, last week that there are two standards. Why are there two standards? WTF?
(The context is I was turning an Ethernet cable into an EtherCAT cable, which is a stupid industrial standard where you only wire up pins 1, 2, 3, and 6, and then charge the end user 200 times more for the cable.)
Interesting thanks for the explanation!