Recreating sci-fi terminals using VHS | Hacker News Reader

Recreating sci-fi terminals using VHS

blog.ldodds.com

225 pointszoenolan49 comments

I used to use cool retro term just for the vibes

https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term

Never used it but the pics look a lot more authentic than the article!

I guess they solve different purposes but I think the aesthetic is timelessly attention grabbing!

It's pretty awesome and I've tried to use it as my main terminal many times. Unfortunately for my teenager memories, the modern terminal fonts are just more efficient for me these days.

I wish the font could be reduced - it's too large and not adjustable. Otherwise, i love it.

It can

I loved CRT back when I had the privilege of using macOS as my daily driver. Now, I'm stuck with Windows, and since CRT relies on a huge mess of Qt bullshit, it doesn't build for Windows.

Thanks! Using it now. Awesome!!

I dig this!

Also, it was discussed thoroughly 7 months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30734137 (282 points, 71 comments)

If you're using macOS, try Cathode. It looks very similar and I love it. I have mine set up to use the same font as old IBM PCs, with green text and a CRT-like background. When I start the app it goes "ding!" in that beautiful PC-speaker way and the screen shakes like a CRT turning on. Add a bit of CRT haze (it's very customisable) and my terminal takes me back to my DOS and 90s Linux days.

Do I need this for my terminal? No.

Do I enjoy it? Absolutely yes :)

(Sadly it seems not to be under active development any more, but try this link: https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/36568/cathode I'm not affiliated with Cathode, btw, other than that years ago I sent the author an email saying how much I liked it.)

Cool little use of VHS! I particularly enjoyed the Jurassic Park one. Made me realize I could always have my terminal like that, I don’t have to use black at 25% transparency like I have without question for years. So thanks for that.

And for those who missed it, and were perhaps a bit confused about VHS, here’s its recent release announcement on HN (12 days ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33357956

"VHS" as the name of a software project seems like it'll be doomed to obscurity, because it's effectively impossible to find in a search engine unless you include other very specific keywords.

Should have called it Betamax.

One my biggest pet peeves is people reusing existing names like this for random software libraries. If you're thinking about it please just don't, it's not cute and it makes things worse for everyone. I love real VHS tapes and still have a collection, so of course I checked out the post... naturally it has nothing to do with an actual VHS whatsoever. Libraries with well established preexisting names like Zine, Hegel, etc. bug me to no end.

Now many natural search terms will be polluted by each other eg "VHS not recording".

You mean like

vhs terminal

does not seem very specific to me.

“vhs charmbracelet”

“vhs commandline”

“vhs script”

“vhs golang”

we’ll figure out how to find it.

you stop thinking about SEO. take a break. SEO rots your mind.

I don't care about seo, I care about naming things accurately... Or at least uniquely. If I search for gimp or inkscape I can at least find it easily.

I miss Cathode. It was a Mac application that allowed to mimic bad CRTs (cathode ray tubes). Effects included jitter, scan lines, and flicker. https://youtu.be/Q7uXxiRhpbE

Wow that’s nice. Wonder what happened to this app

the xscreensaver apple2 hack does this if invoked with -text. beware, without -fast it also simulates the apple ]['s slow text output, and it always simulates the apple ]['s lack of lowercase

    /usr/lib/xscreensaver/apple2 -program bash -text -fast

https://asciinema.org/

If you want to record and playback actual terminal activity instead of writing a script that’s somewhat more likely to become out of date.

i think you’ve got it backwards.

recordings go out of date. vhs forces you to keep the script up to date, if you rerun it periodically. asciinema always plays, even after it is wrong.

also, for some reason which is completely lost to me, most people seem to link asciinema recordings to the asciinema website, meaning you can’t watch them offline. Hard deal-breaker for me.

vhs forces nothing. Seems to me direct interaction with the tool that changed is far less trouble than editing a script in an attempt to match the I/O involved with a command.

i forgot to mention that i was thinking of the vhs tool being used in a ci/cd pipeline, where it can be automated.

a broken vhs script will be obvious to any viewer of the resulting movie.

asciinema doesn’t let you do this, to my knowledge; you have to manually update the movie if you want to update the movie.

editing the script which generates the movie is reproduceable and defining another thing in code, which can be checked in and reviewed.

manual steps can take a hike; i’m getting things done via automation, here. computers work for me, not the other way around.

From the beep man page, a one-liner for " a cheesy 1970's style beep-as-you-type-each-letter effect"

cat file | beep -c -f 400 -D 50 -l 10

We got a little terminal effect on our homepage (CSS with 3d transformation). It'll be too small on mobile.

https://www.languagereactor.com/

I mean to get around to hooking it up to a real-time healthcheck of our backend servers. Could do something more interactive but lack time.

I actually needed some scrolling terminal text for an animation project I completed recently. It is more difficult than you might think: getting the glow and grain right, getting the typewriter effect (one character after another) etc. Wish I knew of VHS then.

Nice font footwork (half the battle sometimes) and subsequently great demos for VHS.

Well these are just delightful. Will likely wind up using one or two of them somewhere. Thanks for sharing.

Bravo. These pass the “sniff test” and that’s impressive

I literally just finished rewatching WarGames! Synchronicity!

I hadn't noticed the "Sometimes people make mistak" line on the console before until I put the script together.

So great, thanks for sharing !

cw: ranting, old man shakes fist at cloud

First, "Datassette" has nothing to do with tape-based storage for the C64, and now "VHS" has nothing to do with tape-based storage for video.

This is a nice project with cool results, but we're not out of names for things. Is nothing sacred?

I was kind of hoping we were using analysis of VHS movie frames to accurately reconstruct those movie terminal interfaces. But it's still interesting work.

It seems too obvious to state but...

No, nothing is sacred. Burn your idols.

Similarly, nowadays tar is only very rarely used to archive to tapes.

Actually it is not really that similar because I think this VHS command is pretty recent and was never used to record to actual VHS, but it is still a funny contrast.

It took me far too long to understand what you were saying. I actually thought he was recording and playing back his terminal via an actual VHS and thought ... jeesh these kids really pine for the 80's!

Nope ... more overlaying different words in different contexts. We need a commune for old neckbeards that want out of this crazyness.

I feel like the blog post is at fault for not introducing VHS, more so than the tool itself for calling itself that.

Of course, for something as ubiquitously known as VHS it needs no introduction...except it's not actually talking about the magnetic storage format, it's a "tool" named VHS[0].

All of that aside, it seems like a poor alternative to asciinema[1]

[0] https://github.com/charmbracelet/vhs

[1] https://asciinema.org/

It does seem like a poor alternative, but people love gifs, for some reason.

I have half a mind to make something like this repo just to set someone up for a "beware the Greeks bearing gifs" pun.

we're not out of names for things

In addition to people repurposing existing words, I've noticed a lot of older words becoming common again.

- "Gaslighting" is from the 1920's.

- "Baller" is from at least the late 1940's.

- "Fly" is from the 1880's.

At least recycling words is better than someone inventing new words to make up for having a poor vocabulary.

Ex: Tastemaker → Trendsetter → Influencer

"Crypto" is from the 1990s, but now has a completely different meaning.

Same here. I was intrigued that someone had hacked a recorder to do something scifi and discovered it was a script.

Still have a VHS machine, doubt it works though.

I'm sad it had nothing to do with actual VHS cartridges. Had expected some kind of retro hack project.

As a software project I was expecting it to be something like, a NTSC VHS tape emulation tool to do something like run a "modern" video through ffmpeg and output something that looks like a 240p recorded VHS tape.

Just encode it to 320x240 MPEG1 video with MP2 audio.

doesn't quite achieve the same soft blurry effect as analog video recorded at 4-hour-speed onto a long VHS tape back in the day.

I still have some Asterix pirate VHS movies here. On the blurryness, you are right, but the video quality it's close. Maybe someone could split the movies intro images (ffmpeg), apply a random dithering/blur to every image with imagemagick and rebuild the video again with ffmpeg.

That's cool.

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