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Comment by techtalsky | Hacker News Reader

It's really wonderful to start to see this wave of Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and other super inexpensive but plenty powerful enough for a range of applications type devices.

More and more are popping up on Reddit and HN every day and it looks to be ushering a little hobbyist "golden age". I can't wait to see where it takes us.

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It's not that wonderful; because the Arduino and Raspberry Pi are so popular they keep getting used for projects which they're really not the best choice for like this one. Pretty much any old PC would've been able to drive the original arcade monitors, but because the Pi can't they wound up having to rip them out and replace them with TVs that are probably of worse quality, losing some of the original feel of the machine in the process. (Even if the Pi had a VGA out it still wouldn't work because the Pi has a closed source graphics driver that doesn't allow you to set non-standard modes.)

Sadly driving stuff off old PCs isn't nearly as fashionable as the Raspberry Pi.

An old PC consumes about 90W of power, a Raspberry Pi consumes 2.5W. That's a 36x difference. And you would still need something to interface the PC with the rest of the electronics, just as you need something to interface the Raspberry Pi's video output with these "non-standard" CRTs.

As for the quality of TVs... these were showing video from the cars transmitted over RF, hardly high-quality. And you overestimate the quality of CRTs in arcade machines... Most of the arcades on display had not-so-good CRTs (either by design or because of years of burn-in).

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