Anyway... I'm seriously thinking about taking a 9" LCD panel with a composite input and wiring up a composite converter circuit to the internal video connector on the board. I would dismount the CRT tube
and put the LCD in in its place. Of course, I'll preserve the removed parts for posterity... but does this offend your sense of vintage stuff? Personally, it seems practical to me since I'd like to do some things with the PET... and the CRT is a potential major source of problems in addition to an energy hog/heat source.
THoughts?
Doesn’t offend my sense of vintage at all. I use several different types of modern replacement parts (screens, drive emulators, accelerators etc that are newly manufactured) for my daily drivers and test machines. Personally I love the mix of old and new parts on vintage stuff. I like having my original machines. I’m especially partial to real floppies. I primarily use my modern drive emulators to get disk images to real floppies. That being said, some machines that I play with regularly I prefer to have certain parts be modern replacements that are not going to require lots of attention and repairs/replacement. Putting an lcd into a crt case has been done successfully for a few specific Apple monitors by a couple people and they turned out great and I’ve a longevity (and provide a lighter lid for transport!!) that the old CRTs just can’t offer. I prefer using ones that are physically damaged and cannot be fixed (broken tubes) Tony