My Most Recent CRT Pickup
A few days ago I was on another one of my Yahoo Auction prowls looking for random Japanese computers and gaming stuff to get me in trouble with my wife. This is a common theme with myself. I happen to Run across something that caught my eye. The subject is an NEC PC-TV353. This is a cool little 15” CRT monitor that supposedly was marketed in Japan for use as both a Computer monitor and a Standard TV set.
What makes this CRT unique is that it can do both 15khz and 24khz analog video signals. While in the US there isn’t too much of a use case for this beyond maybe an arcade board that you may own in your collection that ran off a 24hkz monitor. However, for the stuff in my collection it solves an original hardware dilemma I have. I own both a PC-98 and an FM Towns II PC tower. Both of these systems can do 24khz and 31khz respectively and I have a 31khz CRT that I run my PC-98 off of. It’s an NEC Diamondtron 17” from the early thousands and it’s the little brother to the pretty highly regarded 21” Mitsubishi Daimondtron that everyone gushes over. For my FM Towns I’m running it off of an old Micomsoft device that downscales transcodes the RGBHV signal from the Towns to S-Video and I have that running into my Sony PVM-1390.
The PC-TV353 I think will primarily drive my FM Towns II. The reason being that, that computer has instance of horizontal scan changes (24-31khz) for some games and this will give me a flawless way to handle that. Mostly being that the Towns can happily sit at 24khz for good compatibility. It also opens the door because I’ve been eyeballing a Sharp X68000 computer for my collection. the X68K is notorious for needing either a scaler or CRT that can switch between 15khz and 24khz at any given time. I do own an OSSC Pro and a Retrotink 4K Pro but, both of these solutions are designed for modern displays and although they do a very respectable job with making retro systems playable on modern displays, I still personally prefer the phosphorus glow of a tube.
Before I decided I was going to pull the trigger I did my research on the CRT Database that Andy King and some other folks work on an maintain. It’s honestly a great resource for anyone looking to get into CRTs or who is a CRT enthusiast. The PC-TV series is pretty well documented there and I actually found out this set uses a remote. I promptly dove back into Yahoo Auctions Japan and found the only remote I could find for this set and liberated it to live on it’s life with my PC-TV. The remote I found will need some cleaning up and maybe some means to clean up the yellowing that’s started to appear on most electronics from this era.
well that’s all I have for now. I’ll dive into this a bit deeper when I get my set in.
-Jake
