CRT ART Books is a new imprint dedicated to publishing retro-gaming books that feature authentic photos taken from CRT TVs & monitors.
CRT SCR$ Project - The Book Edition is our first release. It's a photo book intended as an easily accessible snapshot of the CRT SCR$ Project - a preservation initiative aimed at collecting high-resolution photos of live displays of CRT TVs and monitors.
The project itself is hosted on archive.org, where all the photos included in this book are available for free. The book itself is meant as a tangible reward for those wanting to support the project, while also serving as a comprehensive overview of the CRT era. It should be of interest to all fans of retro gaming and computing, not only the CRT tech fanatics, since it showcases how games and software really looked back in the day.
The book comes in two volumes - Consoles & Microcomputers. It contains:
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more than 460 pages featuring hundreds of high resolution photos (with or without TV bezels, close-ups, darkroom shots, and miscellaneous photos)
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10 CRT TVs and monitors
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over 25 consoles and microcomputers (only original hardware used)
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hundreds of games ranging from well known hits to obscure underdogs
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comparison sections showcasing differences between different inputs and CRT tech (e.g. RF vs composite vs S-Video vs RGB, or slot mask vs aperture grille)
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PDF bookmarks for every page
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tags for easy searching
Upon purchase, you will receive a zip archive (~1GB) containing both volumes.
The photo collection and the book will be updated in the future with new material. The new editions of the book will always be free to those who have purchased it previously.
Below are some sample pages and spreads from the book. Please note that due to the web compression, the actual images in the book are of much better quality and are highly zoomable - often allowing zooming in to the scanline and phosphor level.
COMPUTERS
COMING SOON
Stay tuned for more releases from CRT ART Books. Some of the titles in production right now are:
The Year In Gaming: 1987 - Amiga
First in the series of books showcasing visual history of most important releases for a platform from a given year
Background Blues
The foreground architecture gets all the fame, but what about those distant pixels? They want to be loved too, and have stories to tell... This is a closer, sometimes poetic and sometimes surreal, look at the unsung heroes of pixel art.
Games Of Note
Every retro gaming platform has AAA titles, the likes of Manic Miner or Castlevania. They are well known and have been covered extensively, so this new book series is about the underdogs. Here, the true hidden gems rub shoulders with some rough diamonds (and even few plain pebbles with redeeming qualities thrown into mix).