AAA TV wanted to do retrogaming: vintage TV but without digital terrestrial. Indeed, without a flat screen and liquid crystal panel: instead, a good old “cathode ray tube” is better. One of those “big beasts” in all dimensions: height, width and above all depth, to house the kinescope mechanism. The so-called “Braun tube” by the German physicist Karl Ferdinand Braun, which the Anglo-Saxons call “cathode-ray tube” (in short Crt), that is a technology that we thought forgotten and that instead has just returned to fashion thanks to fans of old video games.
Compared to today’s 4K HDR flat screen digital devices, the old TVs had poor resolution, albeit analog, low refresh rate and optical distortions on the sides due to the concave shape of the screen. Yet, it is precisely the analog refresh and above all that slight optical aberration, as the experts call it, that curvature of the field that makes CRT televisions unique. And precious, at least in the eyes of fans. Because they are the original “output peripheral” of old video games, both in the now disappeared arcades of bars and in the living rooms, where the Commodore 64, the Atari Vcs or the NintendoES were attached to play four and eight bit.
Thus, the old TVs that we have thrown away in the last fifteen to twenty years have suddenly become sought after and precious: on eBay there are old Sony Trinitron, the Mercedes of cathode ray tubes, for three hundred euros. And other brands travel around 200 euros, up to peaks of more than 500 for the rare 32-inch Crt 16: 9 format with stereo surround sound.
The return to analogue and cathode is thanks to retrogaming and to a generation of twenty-thirty-year-olds who had just glimpsed them and who now would like to find them in all their analogue splendor. Like photographs on film or vinyl records, that is ellepis or albums, as they used to say. In recent years the passion for the original video games of the eighties and nineties had already started again. They are the low-tech but high-quality alternatives, according to fans, to the ugly steroid games that you can buy or download today for Playstation 5 or Xbox One. The old games, on the other hand, have made history, from fighting games like Tekken to driving games like the first Sega Rally, passing through hundreds and hundreds of titles that have disappeared today. There is the skill in the gameplay, of course, but there is also the effect of nostalgia.
Some of these old video games have been “saved” and are preserved in virtual format by the Internet Archive, others are downloaded more or less legally from the Internet and played on the PC (or tablets) with emulators. But the best, say the fans, are those that can still be found in the markets or on eBay still original formats, that is typically the memory cartridges as large as a pack of cigarettes to be inserted on the faceplate of vintage consoles.
It is an analog pleasure comparable to that of the vinyl record, the passion of music fans and hipsters. However, while music lovers and audio experts are still debating the quality of vinyl, cd, lossless music and that “spatialized” by Apple, on the old consoles used with old CRT televisions to make old video games no one argues.
It is the taste of distant winters and summers, when television had fewer programs, the web and social networks did not exist (and even less smartphones) and the children spent entire Sundays attached to the console, sitting on the carpet in the living room, under the television at home. . Another fun, analogue and even a little cathodic.
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