Well it's time for a nine years later update! (Wow! Almost to the day of the original post!)

The TV I originally used inside finally gave out. Rest in peace, friend. Manufacture date on the back says August 1998. I suppose 20 years of life for any appliance is considered duty served with honor.

Finding suitable CRTs these days is much harder now! Most thrift stores have forsworn them (for obvious reasons). Flatscreens aren't made for consumers in 4:3 ratio above tiny 19/20 inches, so finding a replacement screen isn't the easiest thing in the world if you're trying to fit into an already existing build.

I got lucky and a neighbor posted in our community facebook group that she was dumping 4 old TVs on her porch, first come first served. I didn't see the post until about 8 hours later and flew over - of course they were all still there!

So I was able to pick up a Daewoo CRT TV for free. Manufacture date 2003. It's a little bit smaller of a screen, but still a pretty good size (About 23 inches). Since it's smaller the existing bezel did not cover enough. I took a trip to Michaels and picked up a piece of black foam board and cut it to fit. I'm very pleased with how it turned out.

Glad to be back up and running again. And I'm glad to see that homebuild arcades have increased in popularity over the years! I've seen lots of nifty builds that people have done on the internet.

That's awesome Quadstriker.

How are you sending a signal from your PC to that consumer CRT?

I run crt_emudriver and groovymame on my PC to arcade and PVM CRTs but that's through RGB.

S-Video cable. Quality is good enough for these type of games.

One day I'm going to do something like this. I also want to build a virtual pinball machine. Just don't feel like spending the money. Raspberry Pi/regular PC will have to do for now.

Just wanted to bump this awesome thread and let everyone know that I suck and still haven't done it.

Two years I think is long enough for an update!

Had quite a scare with the machine this week. Somehow all the settings of the frontend GameEX got wiped. Was it an automatic windows update that messed it up? Was it an update to GameEX itself that made it screwy? I have no idea, but I was faced with hours and hours of reconfiguring. Holy **** this sucks.

Instead, after a couple hours of tinkering seeing if I could somehow figure out what happened and revert it, I fortunately had a windows restore point from a month ago that I was able to load into. I was thrilled it worked! Everything back to how it was in November. I promptly disconnected the Wifi to the computer and will keep it strictly offline. No forced windows updates. No GameEX updates. Nothing. No more surprises for me, thanks. That of course means I can't twitch stream from it anymore, but I'm honestly okay with that. I wasn't doing it too often anyways. I'm just glad to keep it running without hours of reconfiguration.

clonezilla