The tone of the post (as well as the VB article it references) implies that there is or will be a shortage of arcade CRTs, which is the point of it being a story. The headline itself says ‘supply dries up’, and the tone of both pieces is implying that finding and using true CRTs for classic arcade games is somehow going to be problematic, which is simply not the case. It’s clickbait.
Wells-Gardner, the last primary manufacturer of arcade CRT’s stopped production years ago. So there is no new information there. And it hasn’t affected the classic arcade community, as we have been using and rebuilding original monitors for years, because they are cheap and prevalent. The supplier referenced in the VB article (Dream Arcades) is simply a cheap repro game builder and retailer, not a CRT manufacturer, so the number of new CRTs they have on their shelves is irrelevant. There are many other sources for new old stock (NOS) monitors, many, many sources for used ones, and many, many, many sources for used parts with which to build and/or repair and refurbish old monitors.
The VB article that BB linked to, and the piece following it, are simply a marketing piece that is trying to push modern display tech, and was likely sponsored by Qualcomm. The first piece starts out by trying to create a problem (dwindling CRT supply), then the second proposes a solution (VR tech). But the premise of the first piece is flawed because the author was lazy, and is factually untrue. (“We’re looking at a situation where playing Donkey Kong in the way that its creator intended is reserved only for the most dedicated collector. It will be prohibitively expensive to recreate that experience.”, he says). That’s very poorly disguised FUD.
It isn’t prohibitively expensive. A rebuilt arcade monitor can be had for $150-200, which is significantly less than what they used to cost new, and it will be a very long time before the millions of existing CRTs are used up by a community of a few thousand collectors (unless each of those collectors somehow suddenly needs thousands of monitors each).
