Fourteen Inches of Humming Glass

My downstairs neighbor moved out at the end of October and left a small television on the landing with a note taped to it that said WORKS. It was a fourteen-inch CRT, the kind that used to sit on top of fridges and in the corners of hotel rooms. I carried it up two flights of stairs, which is how I learned that fourteen inches of glass weighs about as much as a big sack of potatoes and is much harder to hold.

It now lives on the kitchen table, which is the only surface in my apartment deep enough for it.

The thunk and the whine

Switching it on is a small ceremony. There is a deep thunk as the degaussing coil fires, a crackle of static across the glass that makes the hair on my forearm stand up, and then the picture blooms out from the middle. After a few minutes the case warms up and the kitchen smells faintly of warm dust, which I’m told is normal and choose to believe.

And there is the whine. A CRT paints its picture one line at a time, and the circuit that sweeps the beam across the screen runs a little under sixteen thousand times a second for the kind of signal old consoles produce. Some of that vibration leaks into the room as a thin, high tone. As a kid I could tell from the hallway whether the television in the living room was on. These days I can’t hear it at all. My younger cousin visited last weekend, walked into the kitchen and winced. Age takes the top notes first.

What scanlines actually are

People talk about scanlines as if they were a filter you add on top of old games. On this television they are simply what happens. A normal broadcast picture is interlaced: one pass draws the odd lines, the next pass draws the even lines in between, and your eye blends the two. Most sixteen-bit consoles skip that trick. They draw every frame on the same set of roughly 240 lines, so the gaps between those lines stay dark. That is what people mean by “240p”, and those dark gaps are the scanlines.

Look closely and a pixel isn’t a square at all. It’s a soft horizontal smear of light with a dark stripe beneath it. Step back and your eye fills in the rest.

Painted for the glass

This matters because the artists of that era drew for this kind of screen, not for the crisp monitor you are probably reading this on. A checkerboard of two colors — dithering — looks like a checkerboard on a modern display. Through a composite cable on a CRT it melts into a third color the palette never had. Waterfalls turn transparent. Skies get gradients. Shadows soften.

My television only has a composite input, the yellow plug, which is the blurriest of the common options. RF through the antenna socket is worse. S-Video is sharper. RGB, which in Europe usually meant a SCART cable, is the sharpest of all and was what the purists wanted. I expected to be annoyed by composite. Instead I keep noticing how many games look better with a little bleed, as if the blur were the last layer of the painting.

I don’t want to be precious about it. Sharp pixels on a modern screen are beautiful in their own way, and a good scanline shader gets surprisingly close to the real thing. It’s more like hearing a song on an old car radio and then on good headphones: same song, different instrument, and some songs were mixed for the car.

Rules for living with a CRT

A few things I’ve learned in a month:

• Play at night. The curved glass reflects every window and lamp in the room.
• Give it a deep table and a wall behind it. The back sticks out further than you think.
• Keep magnets and speakers away from the screen unless you want rainbow stains in the corners. That particular monster has an entry in the Bestiary.
• Never open the back. The tube can hold a dangerous charge long after it has been unplugged. Repairs inside a CRT are for people who know exactly how to discharge one, and I am not one of them.

Somewhere to sit

The strangest change has been in how I play. A monitor on a desk is a workstation; this is a place. I make tea, pull a chair up to the kitchen table, and the little screen glows in the dark like a fireplace. I’ve been playing shorter sessions and enjoying them more.

The note that said WORKS is still taped to the top. It turned out to be the most accurate review I read all year.