Martinson, a lean, tall man with graying hair confirms Esquivel's point about the failing CRTs, but there's still an untapped supply of screens. Periodically, someone will find a warehouse full of old arcade games. While it doesn't happen everyday, it's not entirely uncommon. In most cases, according to Martinson, a portion of the machines will be too far gone to save, but the parts can live on in other games.
However CRTs won't last forever even with newly found caches of them. Martinson says, "CRTs eventually get old and wear out and there is some cannibalism, where you take a good monitor out of a game with a poor cabinet and put it in a nice cabinet."
LCDs are also a potential replacement but for most arcade enthusiasts something just does not look right. To maintain the true arcade experience, Martinson says they will use CRTs as long as they're available but people will eventually get used to LCDs. The real problem is that even though LCDs give you a more accurate color display, the pixels don't blur in the same way a cathode ray does which makes larger pixels look worse.
"Making a new arcade machine is certainly something that's been getting easier to do."
Although CRTs will be going away someday, Chaney says that, surprisingly, the older machines are easier to keep going than the more modern ones. In his experience, newer PC based games, like Come on Baby, have a lot of reliability issues that need to be babysat to find exactly the right video card or a fresh copy of the data off of a hard drive.
Martinson attributes the older arcades' longevity to being designed by engineers who used to develop for aerospace and the military. The engineers building the arcades in the later space age of the 80s understood reliability was a huge factor and these lessons in electronics were passed down to arcade machines. At the same time, Atari and other cabinet developers would often reuse existing hardware that would have easy to fix and well understood problems; whereas newer machines would often use one-off custom hardware that was irreplaceable.
Restoring an arcade's original electronics isn't as hard as you might imagine — assuming you can assemble the parts. But even if the part eventually runs out, someone in the arcade community will often figure out how to create a copy. At the same time, everything else that goes into making an aesthetically original cabinet can simply be reproduced from the side art, the buttons and even the cabinet's entire marquee.
"Making a new arcade machine is certainly something that's been getting easier to do," Chaney remarks. "It's not so much the technical part of the electronics — those have been relatively durable on a lot of games like Robotron — it's the cabinet fabrication."
"CNC routers [shaping machines that carve wood using a computer controlled dremel] have become relatively accessible lately with places like TechShop," he says. "So it's getting easier and easier for people with the passion to actually build an arcade cabinet."
