[Sunspark]

Yes, the same thing with telephone calls over copper. No latency. You could both talk at the same time, more immersive.

I also remember vector displays first-hand.. those were pretty awesome. You're never going to get a vector graphics experience ever on an LCD because LCDs are rasterized pixels not a drawn line.

No one will ever make a limited run of CRTs or vector monitors ever again, but I wish they would. People would buy them.

[badsectoracula]

I can't find the link now but there is a company making still brand new CRTs and the owner has considered making some for gamers, however i doubt this will be a thing since - at least for now - CRTs are easy to find for very cheap and a limited run would be very expensive. Exception being the high end trinitrons and similar, but i doubt said company is making CRTs of that caliber (i think they're making TV-like stuff) anyway.

Perhaps in 20 years if they're still around things will be different though. After all CRTs do wear out from use.

[mark-r]

I have an old Vectrex video game that I got as they were closing them out. Amazing machines because they had the monitor built in, you didn't have to connect them to a TV. Because the monitor was built in they could drive it any way they wanted, so it was vector all the way - no rasters.

[JohnBooty]

That's a great example. Nobody will ever really experience that again!

   No one will ever make a limited run of 
   CRTs or vector monitors ever again, but 
   I wish they would. People would buy them. 

The prices people are paying for high-quality CRTs today are proof of that. I was lucky enough to get a sweet Sony PVM before the prices really went through the roof.

But yeah, they'll never be manufactured again. It would be such an absolutely massive undertaking.

   I also remember vector displays first-hand.. those 
   were pretty awesome. You're never going to get a 
   vector graphics experience ever on an LCD because 
   LCDs are rasterized pixels not a drawn line.

Yeah and there's also the temporal aspect -- the "smearing" of ultrabright vector dots, like your bullets in Asteroids.

I've seen folks be totally blown away when seeing something like an Asteroids cabinet in person for the first time.

[LocalH]

Resolution is rapidly reaching the point where it won’t be the limiting factor in properly simulating a vector display, at least in a “good enough” fashion. Similar to how resolution and refresh rate improvements are making it feasible to simulate a raster CRT.

[JohnBooty]

At this point, one of the primary limiting factors is the reality that the majority of folks using and implementing emulation technology probably have never seen a vector display in the flesh.

Conceptually, emulating a vector display is easy. They are unique but not thaaaat magical.

1. You have a certain amount of bloom

2. You have decay time function

3. You need, perhaps, a surprising amount of dynamic range? If you've seen something like an Asteroids cab in person, the bullets are super bright (with correspondingly larger decay times) relative to everything else

But, how people are interested in implementing that kind of thing and have access to a real vector display in order to study it? I suppose sufficiently good recordings of vector displays might suffice so maybe it's not that dire.