Is there any way to know what I can and cannot touch inside before I do the discharge? And if I need to mess with it after I have it in the cabinet and have turned it on, can I touch the inputs, etc in the back without worrying about shock?
Once it has been unplugged and the tube has been discharged, you should be able to touch absolutely any part of it safely. The only exception is maybe if there's some huge capacitors that still are still holding a charge, but it's not very likely.
While it's on is another story. Anything plastic, rubber, or glass is safe. The big flat black area on the back of the tube is safe. Any of the empty space on the circuit boards, usually brown, green, or blue areas, is safe. The disc magnets on the neck and the little magnets that may be scattered around the back of the tube are safe. What's not safe is any kind of exposed conductor that may be carrying voltage. This includes components on the circuit boards, the silver/grey colored solder joints on the boards, any exposed copper traces, and ESPECIALLY any exposed copper wire, like the windings of deflection yoke coil.
Knowing what you can and can't touch is important of you want to make geometry or convergence adjustments at the neck, which requires you to have your hands in there while it's on (I you don't disturb this stuff while moving the tube, you can leave this alone). If you're unsure of anything check it with a multimeter. Set it to measure voltage, connect the black probe to chassis ground, and touch the red probe to whatever's in question. If it reads zero volts, it's probably safe.
Is there some sort of guide I can take a look at to building a safe frame for this type of tube, or how to get that started?
Maybe, search around. Nothing I can think of right now. I'm planning to just secure the four mounting ears to some wooden brackets in my cabs. Let me know what you find or come up with.
I picture myself with a 100lb piece of fragile glass on the floor and no idea how to get that into a cabinet without breaking it.
Just don't pick it up by the neck (the skinny part in the back). That is the only part of the tube that is fragile, the rest is very sturdy. Many tubes are an inch thick of glass is most places. The tube shouldn't be 100lbs. I can carry around my 27" sets on my own, tube, chassis, case and all.
I guess the height will be up to me
Here's some advice for every aspect of this hobby. Never take anything straight from paper plans to the final copy. Make physical mock-ups to test everything. Stack up some boards, crates, whatever, and set the TV on it. Mock up your control panel with some scrap wood or cardboard. It doesn't matter what it looks like. The point is just that you can play it for a while and try lots of different things. Play with the height of the screen, angle, distance from the control panel, control panel angle and height, button layouts, etc. It's the only way to figure out what will be the most comfortable. Nothing's worse than building a nice looking cab and then finding out that it's not as comfortable to play as you imagined it would be.
and I will just make a painted plexiglass cover/bezel for it to hide the empty space. I wonder if there is some tutorial or series of steps someone has documented about this?
Search about using tinted glass. There are some good threads about it. As for a bezel, the nice thing about a flat face tube is that you can just mask off the viewing area of a flat piece of glass/plexi, and spray paint the inside black.
So do scanlines appear on all CRT tvs, or only when fed a 240p source? I am using s-video (480i, then, I suppose) right now on a trinitron which does not have component in, and the games look blurry, I would say, but not really stacked in scanline rows like I see with rCadeGaming's examples. I'm just wondering if they should be there or not (even if not in native res)
When a video technician hears the term "scanlines," he thinks we mean each line of video being scanned on the CRT, which is technically much more correct, but when we say "scanlines" in the gaming community we are generally referring to the black spaces in between each line of video. I stick to that popular definition here.
There are a lot of things that determine how distinct the scanlines are. A big factor is the dot pitch of the screen. This is defined by the design of the aperture grille or shadow mask, and determines how sharply defined individual pixels will be.
The black spaces in between each line of video are just areas that weren't lit up by the electron beams. So, the finer the dot pitch, the finer each line will be, and the more black space will there will be in between them. The thickness of each line will the be about the same whether you're using 240p or 480i, but with 480i you're packing twice as many lines into the same space, so there's going to be a lot less black space in between them if any.
So, yes, it's normal not to see any scanlines in 480i. It depends on the dot pitch though. Some CRT's have a fine enough pitch that faint scan lines can still be seen in 480i, and then of course on that same CRT the scanlines in 240p will be very bold. On the other hand, older CRT's can have such a coarse dot pitch that scanlines aren't even visible in 240p (by the design of the era, dot pitch won't change due to aging).
The brightness/contrast/color saturation also affects how thick each line of video will appear, and therefore how much black space is left in between lines. You'll notice in gameplay that scanlines are thinnest with a bright white screen. I wouldn't recommend setting your brightness/contrast/color settings with scanline size in mind though. The set should be calibrated properly, and then the scanlines are what they are. You just have to pick a model with the scanline thickness you prefer.
EDIT: Focus and convergence also have a big effect on the visibility of scanlines. Both may be adjustable, but the latter is much more of an endeavor.
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Aaaaaanyway. That's not the TV you're going to use right? Going through all the work of using a CRT isn't worth it if you're not reaping the benefits. S-video out from a PC is not a viable option for authentic arcade picture.
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Topic: Newbie TV walkthrough, please! (Read 113510 times)
