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Comment by anthk | Hacker News Reader

I'd love a fork from the one of XScreensaver, which shared a bit of code with XanalogTV I'd guess for the CRT effects fading in and out. Please, no GL shaders. XanalogTV did it fine without any video acceleration. I'd love to have TTF support, DEC graphics and colour fonts. (VT340 at least?).

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A full terminal emulator including firmware and 8080 emulation but with small trivial GL shaders that can be disabled exists here: https://github.com/larsbrinkhoff/terminal-simulator

> Please, no GL shaders.

Why not? On anything made in the last 20 years it's going to be faster to render and simpler to implement.

You could do it in software if your processor didn't have anything better to do.

xanalogTV and the like run CRT effects even under an Athlon 2000 back in the day. WIthout something bound to GL => 3.3 you can run a terminal emulator anywhere, even under legacy systems with no OpenGL support at all.

On the emulator from Lars in the below comment, that's a good approach; but for the physical CRT effects, as I said, XanalogTV did a great job.

But kudos for allowing a GL-less option for legacy systems.

> xanalogTV and the like run CRT effects even under an Athlon 2000 back in the day

Because it wasn't doing much else.

> even under legacy systems with no OpenGL support at all

If it's as legacy as all that, it probably doesn't have graphics that are particularly enjoyable to use. Are you trying to run it on a Sun IPX or something?

Considering that MAME's shaders run fine on a 2011-era laptop with the positively primitive Intel iGPU of the Sandy Bridge era, I can only assume they're intending to run this on something extremely ancient that would end up being less power efficient for the task.

Even a Raspberry Pi can handle this stuff at low power consumption today.

> I can only assume they're intending to run this on something extremely ancient that would end up being less power efficient for the task.

I don't think I've owned anything PC-like that didn't have hardware OpenGL acceleration since the late 90s.

CRT simulation didn't run well on Intel iGPUs for a very long time. While they could run the effects, they couldn't run them fast enough. There was longstanding advice in the emulation scene to not bother using shaders unless you had a dGPU; that only changed around Sandy Bridge, where the performance became sufficient.

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