Dosbian: Boot to DOSBox on Raspberry Pi
cmaiolino.wordpress.com
cmaiolino.wordpress.com
I feel like a lot of my nostalgia likely stems from the bright super low latency phosphor displays of a proper CRT. No amount of WebGL shaders/filters [2] ever quite seem to capture the original experience IMHO.
[1] https://smallformfactor.net/news/retro-sff-itx-llama-is-a-br...
I wish we'd reach a point where modern technology allows us to make new CRTs relatively easily. I don't even necessarily care about the image quality, the screens and TVs I used in my youth were never particularly good. But it doesn't seem that this will become feasible in the next few decades.
I can well imagine that it’s gotten expensive finding a quality one (eg trinitron) of reasonable size.
Repairing the tvs, sure, but i find it hard to believe there were repair shops for the issue parent was mentioning.
According to the Vintage Television Museum near Columbus, Ohio, the last company in the US to be able to do this closed in 2010, and the last one remaining in Europe closed in France in 2013. (I myself don't know if there are any in some other corner of the world.)
The museum did succeed in getting a bunch of the repair equipment from the shop in France, and one person involved was even trained there, but it's been a very long process.
Currently, the equipment seems to be in Maryland in the care of a person named Nick Williams. The last update I can find from him[2] is a few years old, and expressed concern about the war that had recently begun in Ukraine affecting the supply of electron guns.
tl;dr, it may still be possible to repair some aspects of some CRTs, and doing so is apparently not a completely-lost art -- yet.
[1] https://www.earlytelevision.org/crt_project.html
[2] https://www.earlytelevision.org/nick_report_5-1-2022.html
That said, yeah, in the special case of an HDMI-driven CRT that was specifically designed with ultra low latency in mind, you could buffer way less than a frame— though I imagine you'd probably want to buffer at least a line at a time just for sanity with the timing of driving the electron gun. And obviously this would depend on the HDMI picture resolution exactly matching that of the CRT.
LLMs probably don't know enough about them to be useful in this discussion. Classic Google Search would be better. Yours fixating on pixels shows that.
I doubt anyone is going to spin up another factory to satisfy the potential demand, since the demand isn't that great to begin with (OLED satisfies most use-cases that CRTs do), and very few people are going to pay $5000+ for a new CRT, and I doubt they're going to be any cheaper than that.
I have 100% confidence that we are at this point, at least for monochrome tubes. Only color tubes would be more complicated.
Regarding latency, you should be able to do pretty well with a modern 120Hz or 240Hz display.
According to the above, the 2017 iPad pro with Apple Pencil replicated the Apple II's 30ms touch-to-pixel latency, four decades later! (Current M4/M5 models are supposedly 5-10ms, so perhaps a good emulator platform...)
Congratulations, Apple - seriously.
I always stop because of the case and target audience issue. I have no interest in a tower or a pizza box, but I wouldn't be able to resist a well-designed retro industrial workstation-specced x86 machine in a metal wedge-style computer case à la Amiga 600.
What completes the experience is the sounds, lights and loading times. When I push the power button, I want to hear all the familiar clicks and whirls followed by the loud BIOS POST beep, immediately followed by the sound of the floppy drive coming to life. I do NOT want a flash media drive, I want a slow, mechanical HDD where things actually takes times to load, and you get to hear the familiar disk spinning and access sounds. And the lights, don't forget those little LEDs which accompanied the sounds, like a conductor conducting an orchestra.
And you know what I miss the most? It's the modem. I miss the dialup sounds. I miss being able to tell what speed I'd be getting connected at based on the sounds. I miss the BBSes and telnet servers of the era. And IRC. And the early web, free of bloated modern Javascript. And apps - real apps coded in ASM/C/C++ that prioritised efficiency and produced tiny binaries that ran without needing a million dependencies. And operating systems that fit an entire GUI desktop in 1.44MB...
I am amazed this doesn't run on literally any Pi since forever, it seems to be limited to Pi 3 and up. I have an old Pi 1B+ that I still use to host all of my websites.
Of all the things, why Facebook?
Discord is a distracting fidgety visually overloaded place.
since web crawlers can't join non-public group chats, nothing there gets indexed and chats don't show up in web searches. This is opposed to bulletin boards like phpbb or even google groups and listservs where all the messages are submitted to a public repo. This is a choice by discord to give users a feeling of being in a private space, but it's kind of like being in a signal chat, the illusion only holds as long as you know and trust everyone in the group to not just screenshot all of it, so in that sense I appreciate Bluesky's choice to be public first. Somehow no one has rebuilt phpbb on atproto tho, seems like a minor rejiggering of the feeds-of-tweets interface. old forums didn't have threading anyway.
Anyway, it annoys me how there's all these open source projects that ostensibly believe in the mission of open source software, but they're all on proprietary third party hosted discrods when self hosting zulip or element is right there, in this sense facebook is better because