I see plenty of comments here about how LCDs will have to be the replacement, but there's a big issue about LCDs as replacements for CRTs (bar specialty ones being made):
The fact that most of the 80s arcade monitors were 4:3 ratio.
Sure - you can get 4:3 ratio LCD monitors today - but they are becoming harder to find. Furthermore, good luck finding them in a larger size than about 17 inches (19 inches, maybe). They never made them larger, from what I remember. The larger LCD screens were all widescreen (16:9?) - and still are. Even most of the smaller LCDs are wide format.
And you can't just stick a wide format LCD into an arcade cabinet and add "borders" - because there likely isn't room. So at best, you'll get an LCD stuck in, with a matte board around it, and the display smaller than the original. It'll look like crap, to be honest - and that's before the look of the display on LCD vs CRT...
More likely you'll have a 16:9 projector with black borders projecting unto flat black side walls, resulting in a full size back projected image.
The CRT people like grainy low res distortion so projecting onto the back of a purposefully bent and distorted piece of plastic should appear extremely similar to a CRT.
Of course this turns the problem of a CRT with finite filament life into a problem of a projector with a finite bulb life but presumably it would be easy to swap out the entire projector.
With considerable plywood hacking you MIGHT pull off attractive forward projection onto a screen for some games (not many of course) Or if you allow really ugly plywood hacking you can just place a projector screen in place of the CRT, ceiling mount the projector, and call it good.
>The fact that most of the 80s arcade monitors were 4:3 ratio.
A friend of mine rebuilt an arcade cabinet recently and his solution was to just rotate the display 90 degrees and offset it a bit to get it to fit. It might not be a valid solution for mini-cabinets since they were pretty tightly packed but according to him it was a pretty easy fit in this one.
The bigger problems were LCD processing latency and scaling. Most TVs that would fit were cheaper models (I guess it's getting harder to find sub 50" mid-range TVs) so they have a decent bit of processing latency even in "gaming" mode. But I don't think there's really a solution to the scaling problem without much higher resolution LCD panels because non-integer scaling is always going to have some shimmer when scrolling.
The fact that most of the 80s arcade monitors were 4:3 ratio.
Sure - you can get 4:3 ratio LCD monitors today - but they are becoming harder to find. Furthermore, good luck finding them in a larger size than about 17 inches (19 inches, maybe). They never made them larger, from what I remember. The larger LCD screens were all widescreen (16:9?) - and still are. Even most of the smaller LCDs are wide format.
And you can't just stick a wide format LCD into an arcade cabinet and add "borders" - because there likely isn't room. So at best, you'll get an LCD stuck in, with a matte board around it, and the display smaller than the original. It'll look like crap, to be honest - and that's before the look of the display on LCD vs CRT...