February 4, 2026
Insert coin for pixel drama
Building a 24-bit arcade CRT display adapter from scratch
Retro magic meets laptop life as commenters bicker over flat CRTs, old chips, and open‑source woes
TLDR: A maker built a laptop-to-arcade screen adapter with richer color for a weird old resolution, keeping the original CRT alive. Commenters split between nostalgia and “flat CRTs are cooler,” tossed in a Z80 vs modern chip debate, and wrestled with the pain of open-source projects few can replicate.
An indie hardware hacker just built a 24‑bit “magic box” to make a laptop talk to an old arcade screen, and the comments lit up like a neon sign. The project keeps the original tube display (a CRT) in a community arcade cabinet and pushes sharper color than a Raspberry Pi setup, even at a weird arcade‑era resolution. Translation for non‑tech folks: they made a laptop show perfect old‑school pixels on a vintage TV screen, no graphics card needed.
The crowd split fast. One camp cheered the “save the CRT” vibe—nostalgia, glow, scanlines, the whole vibe. Another camp came in hot with the hot take: “flat CRTs are cooler” link. Then someone dropped a time‑warp question—could this tiny $1 Raspberry Pi microchip outrun a 1980s Z80?—and suddenly it was ‘80s vs 2020s in the comments.
Meanwhile, a quiet thread hit a nerve: an open‑source builder admitted it’s sad when complex hardware gets shared but nobody reproduces it. The room went soft for a moment… until a seasoned reviewer rolled up with tough love: add static‑shock protection, tighten the board, do it right. The vibe? Equal parts arcade romance, retro chip debate, and DIY therapy session—with a side of homework for the next circuit rev at the Recurse Center.
Key Points
- •Project builds a USB-connected adapter to drive an arcade CRT with full 24-bit color at non-standard resolutions.
- •The CRT connects via JAMMA; a VGA-to-JAMMA converter is used, requiring accurate VGA RGB and sync signals.
- •Off-the-shelf adapters generally cannot output below 640×480, so custom hardware is needed for 320×240 to 336×262.
- •Raspberry Pi’s vga666 board provided only 18-bit color, causing visible banding; the goal is 24-bit output.
- •Attempt 1 uses RP2040’s PIO to bit-bang precise VGA timings, coordinating HSYNC/VSYNC and pixel output.