Cool-retro-term: A terminal emulator which mimics the old cathode display | Hacker News Reader

Cool-retro-term: A terminal emulator which mimics the old cathode display

github.com

246 pointstasoeur85 comments

Reminds of "Cathode" app for OSX:

http://www.secretgeometry.com/apps/cathode/

it seems they have an iOS version now too that lets you SSH to your servers. Also I believe the demo version would appear as tho the cathode screen was about to fail and get worse and worse.

Cool-retro-term and this are awesome! It's like Instagram for the terminal!

I wanted that program badly, there never was a linux port, never got a chance to give them money, now I don't need it.

Almost bought a mac just for that app :p

I'd still buy it if it were available on linux, it's still prettier than this, even though this is very very good.

> Also I believe the demo version would appear as tho the cathode screen was about to fail and get worse and worse.

Correct, which actually makes me prefer the demo to the "final" product, it's really fun to see the display "degrade" over time. And the various sounds are awesome (to annoy colleagues).

Plus Cathode provides configurable line speeds.

Great, except not authentic. They forget that image on the screen, affects the image on the screen. So basically same dim image looks different than same bright image. Geometry often also changed when brightnes was changed. It's complex thing to receate authentic CRT.

Also many emulations fail with phosphor decay in very obvious ways. So it's not being done in a correctly at all. This cathode project is good, but many of these are clearly done by people, who haven't ever used the authentic thing and do not know what it should be like.

I remember that I laughed when people were talking about 25 ms TFT being slow. From good green / amber display you could still read text after 5 seconds since powering it off. ;)

I had one of these, lovely. http://sales.hansotten.nl/uploads/msx/monitoren/IMG_6798.JPG And this beauty is pretty modern one, because it's color display. With many older CRTs you had to use 40 chars per line, because image was so fuzzy that 80x25 would have been unreadable.

About noise, I have seen some extremely cheap and old VGA adapters generate so much noise and timing jitter into signal, that it looks like old TV even with modern dispalys. I got really baffed by it when I first encountered it.

Ooooh, a MSX. I guess you are not from the USA, then :)

That Philips monitor, that's a blast from the past! My parents bought me one of those back in 1984 for my BBC micro. Then I had it hooked up as a second monitor on my Opus 286 PC that I bought when I started college in 1985 (1MB RAM, 12Mhz 286, 37.5MB RLL 3.5" disk) for C debugging. I was a bit fancy back then and had two video cards in my PC. The C compiler I used (pretty sure it was the Microsoft C V5 one) knew how to talk to a second video card.

I kept the Philips around for years and years then donated it somewhere along the way with a couple of CGA and EGA monitors I'd collected over the years.

Just a wee nitpick, that particular Philips monitor wasn't "colour" as such, it had amber phosphor instead of green or white. That said it was a really nice display, very crisp and sharp and a bargain at around 99 quid in the day.

Getting back on topic, the best displays (in their day) I ever used were the Data General Dasher 2 and D200's. Sadly the later Dashers (the model 20's with the cream and brown cases) shipped with crappier CRT's that would wobble when sat next to any switched mode power supply.

In a modern world where we backlight semiconductors to produce high dpi screens, it almost feels weird to think we used to fire electron guns towards our eyes. I was always partial to the amber screen.

Has anyone recently played with an old Asteroids cabinet? The screen is a black and white CRT. When you fire a missile, the screen effect is insanely bright. I'd forgotten just how intense that was.

I can't wait until someone pieces together an art piece that makes use of all the crazy analog video effects that we used to take for granted, but now look like alien technology.

Asteroids was a vector game, interesting technology:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroids_%28video_game%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_monitor

Better resolution and frames per second than modern games :)

Like a plotter, effectively infinite resolution (not really infinite because of the phosphor elements being finite, but still).

The limitation shifted elsewhere of course, and that's in the complexity of the scene, specifically the number of objects.

Still, interesting tech and can even be adapted to control a laser unit that renders on say a big building or even the clouds (the real ones).

Playing Asteroids on a building would be kind of neat. Has anybody tried that?

Yup. There were some laser enthusiasts that connected their projection systems to MAME and created Laser MAME.

Laser galvo speed is a big factor in making it work effectively but there have been some great demos, like John Knoll (from ILM) playing Atari Star Wars on a theatre screen:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4REBVgm4Nc

not really infinite because of the phosphor elements being finite

There are other limitations, such as beam deflection imprecision and precision/speed of the A/D converter and the size of the electron beam in relation to it's brightness. Tighten the beam focus to get more precision, but it will be way dimmer and harder for a player to see. Make the beam stronger to compensate and you'll burn a hole in the phosphor. Your costs also go up with the fancier parts and beefier power supply.

The Atari system settled on 1024 points of resolution on each axis (but clipped to 1024x768 for the 4:3 monitors used at the time). Still a lot more resolution than the low-res arcade monitors of the day, which were roughly CGA-class (around 320x240).

Back in '97, I built myself a vector graphics card for a computer which plugged into an oscilloscope for a university project. Good fun. Of course, to persuade the university to let me do it, I described it as a "programmable dual synchronised waveform generator", but it was always intended to display images.

Jed Margolin (ex-Atari) has the definitive history of the Atari vector games and how the hardware works:

http://www.jmargolin.com/xy/xymon.htm

http://www.jmargolin.com/vgens/vgens.htm

Asteroids was a humble 6502 running at 1.5 MHz with a PROM-driven pseudo-CPU acting as the vector generator.

Vector CRTs are all kinds of neat technology. I own a Tempest arcade cabinet, which is a color vector CRT, and it's such a huge difference from using regular raster CRTs.

It is. It was only 2 colors, but it was high resolution, especially compared to other screens at the time. There's one in my Vectrex sitting near my desk.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vectrex

Another use of vector graphics is in older aircraft displays, where the writing and lines would be rendered that way, sometimes with raster scanning for the artificial horizon.

It's interesting that xterm still provides an emulation for the old Tektronix vector terminals. I'm not aware of any software currently in use, besides PAW and gnuplot, which is still using Tektronix.

> When you fire a missile, the screen effect is insanely bright.

There was a rumour that people who played on a Vectrex (a vector display home console) would experience eye damage after protracted sessions.

Without any reasonable understanding of what amount of light results in eye damage, I find this plausible. My reaction to seeing Asteroids for the first time in many years was to try and draw comparisons to other things. I ruled out welding light as being far too bright, but the comparison did suggest itself.

A bit of anecdata: I spent a lot of hours on a Vectrex and didn't get any eye damage :-)

My memory is a little fuzzy. I remember a game at the St. Louis arcade museum that was b/w vector and very bright when I went there about 20 years ago. It could have been Space Wars, though.

Way back in the 90's my CRT monitor went out. Money was tight so I had to wait a couple of weeks before I could replace it. I went to a local computer repair shop (as in, actual repair, like replacing blown capacitors on mainboards and such) to see what I could get for cheap, as a stopgap. The guy had an old monochrome CRT he had repaired--the kind with green pixels--probably 6-7 years old at the time. He sold it to me for like 8 bucks. I figured I could at least use bitchx and links on it until I could get a new monitor. After a few hours in front of it, I started feeling really itchy, and the screen had enough static charge to raise the hairs on my forearm if I moved near it. Pretty sure it was shooting cancer directly into my face. Good times!

> Pretty sure it was shooting cancer directly into my face.

I always assumed the metallic aftertaste I got after long coding sessions was unrelated.

Check out the video art people have been making with old Vectrex game consoles and modular synthesizers. http://www.muffwiggler.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=69637

I played with an old Asteroids Deluxe machine just last weekend! They have one at Barcade in Manhatten on West 24th.

The vector display sits face up in the bottom of the cabinet, and the game is reflected on a one-way mirror set up in front of a backdrop. Those super-bright vector graphics are even more impressive when they look like they're floating!

See also “Phosphor”¹, a screen saver part of XScreenSaver², but also usable as a terminal:

    /usr/lib/xscreensaver/phosphor -scale 2 -delay 0 $SHELL

① http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6ZWTrl7pV0

② http://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/

Working command:

    /usr/lib/xscreensaver/phosphor -scale 2 -delay 0 -program $SHELL

Also xscreensaver-data-extra,

  /usr/lib/xscreensaver/apple2 -text -fast -program $SHELL

I'd love to know if the authors of this thing were unaware of the 15-year-old phosphor hack, or if they were inspired by it.

As an old cathode display user, I'd really like to have a terminal emulator which mimics the modern LCD display.

In my X-ray crystallography/structural biology lab we still use CRTs from over a decade old Silicon Graphics systems. They are the only displays that can do a 120Hz horizontal scan, which is darn critical when you are looking at protein and drug structures in quad-buffered stereo!

Sadly, the CRTs are dying off over time and it gets harder to find replacements that can work as well as they do. There are LCD alternatives, like Zalman, but they never impressed me much :-(

We have had good results with the Barco Medical Diagnostics monitor lines - they are the only thing other than CRT's that our Radiologists are willing to use.

Care to explain what the issue is? Delay? Blurriness?

Flicker. Anything less than 120Hz can give severe eye strain and headaches over long (30-60 min) work sessions.

As to the LCD replacements, the anti-aliasing is just not as smooth (yes, I'm being subjective) as on the CRTs. Perhaps, a "retina" level resolution display with 100+Hz refresh-rate will be a real solution. But those are probably still at the R&D stage and will be ridiculously expensive at launch! And the graphics cards to drive them as well!

I'm probably misinterpreting your requirements, but you should look into Korean IPS monitors. They're generally very cheap, are far better at reproducing colours than standard LCD monitors, have higher pixel densities (1440p@27") and can often be overclocked (90-120hz). The best deals are usually on ebay, shipped from Korea.

http://www.blurbusters.com/overclock/120hz-1440p-ips-monitor...

I'd gladly try that out for personal use!

But it is an entirely different manner when your purchase has to be approved by a pyramid of bureaucrats and more importantly, buying things at online auctions (eBay, gasp!) or even otherwise (amazon) takes weeks to be approved. And oh!, we need five of those monitors to start with (and they better work!).

Check out the nice collection of fonts too. :-)

https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term/tree/master/a...

I've been playing with them in iTerm2 and having flashbacks.

I've been developing a Clojure on Node.js curses terminal UI library[1] for some months, and though development has been going stronger than ever lately, I feel my motivation doubled up in seeing my interfaces displayed in this glorious orange glow. I should start working on a text game about being alone in a spaceship or a war-ravaged post-apocalypse right now. Suddenly my brother will go from joking that my computer must crash a lot because all he ever sees is terminals to being in awe.

I had tried Cathode for OSX but it didn't work, and now you come and tell me I can have it for free on my linux dev box and that it works flawlessly? Thank you.

[1]: https://github.com/goldfeld/i9n

Looks pretty good! In reality[1] the "CRT effect" isn't quite so intense, but I think that's just down to settings. This definitely has the right glowy and slightly-fuzzy feel to it.

[1] My Wyse-55: http://i.imgur.com/7x2JdmV.jpg

Nice keyboard, too. Must sound like a machine gun going off when you're "in the zone."

That's a remarkably sharp display and clean keyboard you've got there, it looks like it was unboxed yesterday!

Thanks! Yeah, I bought it as a refurbished unit and the company that did it does a nice job.

> In reality[1] the "CRT effect" isn't quite so intense

By CRT do you mean the "lensing" of non-flat CRT screens or something else? The Wyse 55 is a fairly modern display (it was released after 1988 since it follows the 150 though not sure exactly when), earlier models had more (late 70s to early 80s) had more curvature (and lensing)

The curvature is fine, mostly what seems off to me is the amount of "noise."

Does it accurately emulate the burning eyes and headaches after a long day? Burn-in artefacts and simulated line noise would be nice additions ;)

I should take a look to their shaders and tune up more Trillek CRT shader :

https://plus.google.com/118048310717476799717/posts/4CSV9LHq...

https://plus.google.com/118048310717476799717/posts/diBzDKJ2...

You might also appreciate http://timothylottes.blogspot.com/2014/08/scanlines.html

This reminds me that I have two Wyse WY-85 green screen terminals in the attic. I got them when they were being thrown out by a university in 1997 or 1998. They've been sitting there getting more and more depressed and dusty. At some point I really need to grab a Pi and a USB<->serial adapter and get them up and running. I've seen some blog pages from a couple of other folks who have managed to get them working in a similar way.

At this rate my wife will throw them out with the perfectly valid excuse that if I haven't set them up in the last fifteen years, I'm unlikely to do so in the next fifteen.

Just a quick glance at those screenshots and I'm instantly transported twenty years into the past, sitting in the campus computer lab printing out a report at 3 a.m. the day it's due.

It's weird how the brain works.

Someone™ posted an issue last july that this exquisite piece of software retro art did not compile on OS X. After a while someone™ actually managed to compile it on OSX, and the original author is working on a port, but until then we have to make do with the Cathode app.

Only problem with the Cathode app is that it flickers more and more till you get an epileptic fit if you don't upgrade to the paid version.

Well, on the Mac, you pay for stuff, that's just the way it is. If you care about gratis & libre software, start dogfooding a free OS.

That's complete recycled bovine waste my friend.

Just because I choose to use OS X does not mean I'm ignoring the bsd base its built on, nor not enjoying using / contributing to open projects.

There is a osx branch (https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term/tree/osx) that compiles.

Pay the Cathode guys. They really deserve your money.

It packages up a nice collection of vintage fonts for use in other applications: https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term/tree/master/a...

Looks like something out of Fallout. Awesome. Just the kind of thing you need on your Pip Boy.

make it into an app, and strap a smart phone to your wrist -- voila!

Yeah, the only thing missing is the cathode ray 'desync' effect which occurs when you first switch on the Pip-boy. That level of 'polish' on the Pip boy is fairly amazing in trying to emulate a good ole cathode ray tube ...

I would really like to do something like this in HTML5 + WebGL for some retro game ideas I have. Like, even doing this with a Z-Machine interpreter (Zork, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, etc.) would be fun.

Funny how being around in the days when this was common I couldn't wait to see the future. Now I am in the future and people get excited about recreating the past. I can't win.

Back in those days, sitting behind a WY-85 connected to a VAXstation 3540, I was terrified by a thought that these awful, ugly, clumsy x86 PCs are possibly the future. And now, the future turned out to be even worse than I imagined.

Here's an fork that works for OS X. https://github.com/chowyuncat/cool-retro-term/tree/osx-hacks Swordfish's osx branch is broken.

Awesome terminal, but too bad it's so cpu hungry. My laptop heated up in like 5 minutes.

Well done... down to getting to color of an old vt220 right... (that's the orange one)

$ ./cool-retro-term

loadAllColorSchemes

There's a menu, but nothing clickable. It's interesting though. If I "touch /tmp/asdf", then the file gets written. So it is actually executing what I type, it's just not displaying anything?

Debian Wheezy

Has someone tried getting it to compile/run under Windows?

There is something, I am not sure what, wrong with the 3278 font on Windows.

Is the borders around it necessary? Because personally I think that it would look great without the borders. Or is it to simulate the roundness of the monitor?

That's what old monitors looked like. They had big thick plastic bezels all around the screen.

You can remove the border (and change everything else) in the settings.

My build (installed with yaourt on Arch, just like it says on the page) crashes when I try to.

Awesome! I remember seeing this on reddit earlier in the year when it was in much earlier stages. Looks really great now!

While neat, the cpu consumption this is insane. It's not even as bad when I play unaccelerated HD video.

Interesting. I couldn't get it to go over maybe 5% on one core. Maybe it offloads some of the graphics work to the GPU.

Is it all on the CPU? could they not have used shaders?

Can't wait to use this in video projects. I already have a Kickstarter in mind.

LOL, very cool. But I think my eyes would hurt if I looked at it for too long.

thats metal as fuck

markdown file, so old school.

This has been reposted many times both here and on reddit.

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2FSwordfi...

It used to be called cool-old-term.

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2FSwordfi...

I don't mind seeing it again, though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com