Aside from nostalgia, people claim to like CRTs because they’re apprehendable– the technology just makes more sense than the arcane wibbly-wobbly solid-state madness going on inside the driver chip of your new OLED. CRTs weren’t the first technology used to display moving images though, and their mechanical forebears were even easier to understand. For that reason we suppose it was only a matter of time before one of The Youths– in this case a British YouTuber by the name of [smill]–tried gaming on a mechanical television display.
The game in question was Minecraft— because of course it was, that’s the new generation’s DOOM–and the mechanical TV in question is not a priceless 1920s antique but a commercial kit that reproduces [John Logie Baird]s 1925 televisor. If you’re not familiar, it uses a flat disk– called a Nipkow disk after its inventor– with a series of holes in a spiral to demodulate a single lamp’s brightness variations into monochrome image made of scan-lines. As you might imagine, the resolution depends both on the size of the disk and its speed, so with a tabletop example you’re not going to get much– in this case, 32 holes for 32 lines. At least they’re not interlaced this time.
Getting a video signal from the computer to the LED in the televisor kit was the hard part of the hack. Aside from actually playing on the diminutive monochrome display, that is. There is a “video2NBTV” tool that can do the job, as the Narrow Band TV signal used by amateur radio enthusiasts still has the compatible timing values and modulation as what the televisor kit uses. We suspect that’s because the Televisor people used the modern NBTV standard as a starting point for their electronics, since [Baird]’s device reportedly ran 30 lines at only 5 frames per second, compared to the 32 lines at 15 FPS here.
Some of you may turn your nose up at this as a mere YouTube stunt, which is fair enough. At the same time, we cannot wait for the eventual arms race. Imagine when someone decides to go for 4K cred? Staring through a supersonic Nipkow disk makes pointing a particle accelerator at your face downright mundane. The kit [smill] used was monochrome, but if you want to repeat his antics in glorious colour, you can 3D print your own TV.
Hi, this reminds me of the Mac software written by KD6CJI in the 2000s..
NBTV Communicator, NBTV Source/Monitor and DiskDesigner.
(Some of you may remember the author for MultiScan SSTV software or former MacRobot SSTV.)
The DiskDesigner allows creating/printing a Nipkow disc on OS X Tiger to Snow Leopard.
A copy can be found at the old homepage: https://tinyurl.com/y2uhahah
Betcha the latency is better than some modern televisions.
bit too much of a cringe preteen twitch type of content for my tastes
You can do much better in terms of resolution and refresh.
Use a mechanical screw mirror.
Notably, it’s practical to get them into low 8-bit era resolutions, and not impossible to get them into basic vga resolutions, if someone really wants to.
They were substantially better than any of the disk-based solutions or the drum-mirror designs, but they came out too late, and at the wrong moment in an intellectual property dispute…
There used to be a couple of sites dedicated to photos and videos of a genuine screw television (one of a couple of original screws brought to the us for testing, if I recall correctly), and modern illumination/electronics because period-accurate stuff largely is not available.
You just need a mechanical screw, a synchronous motor of fair power, and some simple electronics. After looking closely at the screw, it looks like someone could fabricate one fairly easily…
The mindsets kit (originally the Middlesex University Teaching Resources kit) uses the “club standard” of the Narrow Bandwidth Television Association, 32 lines at 12.5fps.
The website is a tad retro, but has a bunch of information for anyone interested in experimenting with mechanical TV http://www.nbtv.wyenet.co.uk/
I went down a rabbit hole looking at Scophony’s 1938 mechanical TV that consumed 1000 watts!
doom would have been a better choice i think, with a custom wad for monochrome. i do believe one exists, i wouldnt doubt that minecraft has a resource pack for monochrome as well. but running minecraft on weird hardware seems to be this guy’s shtick. anyway saw this a couple days ago and couldnt make it out one bit.
i do believe my grandma has one of these early tvs in her attic, if she hasnt sold it already. a real one, not a recreation. though ive never seen it.
If that is truly so, I suggest you’ll pay a visit to your grandma a.s.a.p.
Please keep us informed about this historical object that deserves to be preserved for future generations.