For arcade machines they wouldn’t work without major reworking of all the electronics and even then it probably wouldn’t work right. Unlike TVs that take in either composite, RF modulated, Y-C (S-Video), or Y-Pr-Pb (Component) video all using NTSC, PAL, or SECAM encoding, almost all color arcade games use an analog RGB signal, similar to VGA but may use different voltage levels, at widely varying resolutions and sync rates.
Most of the old B&W arcade games used TVs out of convenience and for them this wasn’t a big deal, as you can get a really sharp image out of one of those TVs with very little work. This was also nice because these very early games were built upon TTL logic chips and had no microprocessors, so it could just blast out a bit pattern at the right timings to make the image on the screen. The earliest color games also used TVs, again TTL logic games; but these games like Color Gotcha were also very simple, and TVs produced an acceptable image. When we start going into the realm of microprocessor-based games, we start to see most everything using RGB monitors instead of TVs. The RGB monitors produced a much better image, a more stable image, and much better colors. Early games were around 320x200 in resolution. Now, I stress “around” as there were no standards to what game manufacturers used; every game was different in exactly what resolution and set of refresh rates it used, but these early games were all based around 15kHz monitors. With a high-quality TV you may be able to rework the control circuitry to work with RGB signals instead of NTSC signals, but that’s going to be a job for each different TV you use as they are all different inside.
As tech advanced in the mid 80s resolutions started to go up on arcade games, and 25kHz hsync games started appearing, now called ‘medium resolution’. Then, in the late 80s and early 90s we started seeing high resolution games based around 640x480 (32kHz hsync) and higher. Neither of these would be able to be displayed on a TV tube without entirely new circuitry and new deflection coils-- that is if the electron gun can handle the higher bandwidth and the shadow mask is fine enough to support cleanly showing these resolutions.
With TVs you also get into quality issues. TVs were always built to a price, while arcade monitors were built to a specification. There will be quality issues abound with TVs that you wouldn’t have to deal with in an arcade monitor.
While it’d be neat to use all those old TVs to revive old games, it’s really not a feasible thing to do.
