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.
What, LED? You put a neon tube in that TV right now young man!
I remember seeing in magazines mid to late 60’s surplus ads for a neon TV tube. Sounded like you could make a camera or something with it. It was surplus from the mechanical age of TV, or maybe for a timing lamp. Much bigger than an NE-2.
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.
unlikely, the alaska branch of the family doesn’t talk to the arizona branch of the family. lots of bad blood on both sides. my beef is mostly with my brother, but grandma sides with him, even though he is a psychopath that just wants her money (he and my uncle will probibly fight each other to the death for it).
but the story is my grandpa was in the tv repair bushiness, later got into the early pc repair business. he had been collecting antiques in his latter years with home of opening an antique shop. he died of cancer before that could happen. i was doing computer classes at the time so i thought i might get to take over the business at some point, but grandma liquidated everything and all i got out of the debacle was a big spool of solder (which i still haven’t used up some 30 years later).
last i heard the tv is still up there, everyone knows its worth something, and everyone wants it. it will likely be sold if it hasn’t already. at least they are smart enough not to destroy it (my grandma had already destroyed a lot of ibm model m keyboards, she didnt offer a single one to me. a travesty for many out there).
Isnt a modern projector basically a mechanical device?
the thing about doom is it came out in 1993 and it required a fairly high-end machine but by 1998 almost everyone had a machine much faster than it could take advantage of. And that has extended to today, where we are now running it on toasters. But Minecraft…when it came out, it was dog slow. And today, it is still dog slow.
When Minecraft came out, it wasn’t a game at all. It was a tech demo with a random map generator, sold for money, and many suspected it would never actually be finished.
Hm, good point. Not sure what to think about Doom. I’m a bit torn between here, to be honest.
It depends.. Both point of views are possible, I think. There are pros and cons.
Doom was both demanding and undemanding in some ways,
an idea which the many modern ports to low-end platforms seem to support.
I mean, yes, a 486 PC (or 386 PC) without bottlenecks was indeed recommended in early 90s for playing it.
Something that wasn’t smart or sophistaced but had raw CPU power and a fast framebuffer, basically.
Say, a 386DX-40 based PC, which was both a solid workhorse and a budget-system at the time (with 10 MHz ISA bus or up).
Here’s an example of it running Doom: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_2qGaIOvjs
Or let’s take a 486DX2-66 multimedia PC with VLB graphics (or OPTI local bus etc),
single-speed or double-speed CD-ROM, 4 to 16 MB of RAM (CAD/DTP PCs had the latter).
An aged but fairly fast 12 or 16 MHz 80286 PC couldn’t run Doom anymore, by contrast, because of 32-Bit DOS4GW extender (needed i386).
And exactly in 1993, there was sort of a turning point in software world, I think.
286es were still common and out there, being capable of running DOS 5/6 and Windows 3.1 in Standard-Mode,
but many DOS games with DOS4GW appeared, locking out 286 and Turbo XT users with VGA graphics.
The 4 MB of RAM required by Doom were still possible on many 286 motherboards, though.
They supported 4x 1 MB SIMMs (upper limit) just fine, generally speaking.
Though most DOS PC users were cheap on RAM back then, saw no point in investing into RAM expansion.
They spent their money on soundcards, modems or HDDs etc.
Especially an (S)VGA card with a fast frame buffer and fast host interface (VLB, EISA or overclocked ISA bus) was recommended, I think.
Say, a Trident 8900D or ET-4000 or Cirrus GD-54xx or similar.
Because there was no software support for graphics acceleration as it was provided by IBM 8514/A,
TIGA or XGA/XGA-2 (Mach 8 and Mach 32 had 8514/A support. ET-4000 had an 8514/A emulator).
A slow OAK OTI-37c, AT VGA Wonder or slow Trident 8900 wasn’t great here, in short.
On other hand, I never understood the hype of Doom at the time.
When I tried the shareware version by mid-90s, my reaction was rather reserved.
Same goes for Corridor-7, btw (released March ’94, shortly after Doom).
I remember how comedically pixelated the aliens looked at close-view (those floating eye balls for example). :)
That wasn’t cutting-edge technology that I saw.
It rather was pixelated VGA mode 13h gory, um, glory in 320×200 256c.
A far cry from what arcades used. Or what CD32, CD-i, Atari Jaguar had promissed to offer in early 90s (then considered state-of-the-art tech).
(Mode 13h was both very common, easy to use and also dated by that time, had been in use since late 80s.)
To me, both games rather looked like a retro game already, in short. Despite the term not really being coined back then, maybe.
Then-current games (by ca. ’95) like Myst, Descent, A final unity or Zone Raiders looked more impressive to me.
Visual novels/adventures and strategy games like Metal&Lace or Knights of Xentar (those Megatech titles) had used VGA mode 12h (640×480 16c) for years, too.
Even the average SNES and Sega Genesis/MD game from early 90s did look more impressive to me, I think.
Alas, the rest of the world was thinking different, obviously. People were amazed by it.
There was a hype about Doom going on that was beyond me (like there was for The Secret of Monkey Island too).
Probably because of the genre (FPS, boom-boom!) being appealing to that mainstream audience, not sure. It’s same with sports and alcohol, after all.
If I had to name a positive low-res game of the era,
I’d rather mention Commander Keen IV, Jill of Jungle or Skunny Kart/Wacky Wheels, maybe.
Or Jet Pack, In Search of Dr. Riptide.. Shareware stuff, in short.
Alone in the Dark also was low-res, but had real polygon graphics.
I mean, if Doom was truely “state of art” of 1993 (-the Dec ’93 release date basically was ’94-) the way I understand it (ie, cutting-edge),
then it should have optionally supported 640×400, 640×480 or 800×600 resolution and VESA VBE 1.2 (with LFB support, ideally, but to befair VBE 2.0 with offical LFB wasn’t out until late ’94).
Or the aforementioned 8514/A, TIGA, XGA standards etc.
Because that’s what was technologically possible with latest PC technology of the time (but not found in mainstream PCs).
Flight simulators such as FS 4 or FS 5 already did support 640×480 and 800×600 pixel resolutions by that time.
Albeit unaccelerated using SVGA/VBE only, I do admit.
For comparison: Macintosh color games of early 90s ran in 640×480 256c resolution by default.
Though I admit they may had v-sync issues due to System 7/Mac OS limitations.
And some early 90s Macs had just a simple framebuffer on-board instead of a real graphics card
(Windows 3.1x PCs of the time had GDI accelerators/Windows accelerators in the SVGA chips).
Mac ports (or remakes) of games such as Prince of Persia used 4 times the pixels than their DOS versions.
I don’t mean to criticise Doom too much here,
but from a very strict perspective (talking about being state-of-the-art tech) I wonder why there wasn’t an updated DOS executable
with better hardware support being released in the following years after.
Considering the on-going popularity and re-releases (games bundles) of the time.
The x87 floating-point unit or MMX could have been supported by 1996 or so.
There now was VBE 2.0 with LFB (linear frame buffer), for example. UniVBE would have helped with outdated VBE BIOSes.
By that time (say ’95-’96), OS/2 and Windows 3.1 had some ports of the Doom engine that could make better use of PC hardware (WinDoom used WinG etc).
Games of the time such as Descent supported VR hardware, too, like for example cyber helmets and 3D shutter glases.
Flight Unlimited supported that, too, I think?
So why I’m bothering to write these lines?
Personally, for the record, I merely want to point out that not all users of the time were enamoured by Doom or found it to be exceptional.
There were a few users (players) like me that shook their heads in disbelief and thought otherwise, were more reserved, questioned the hype.
I think here and there there are similar comments to be found in old Usenet posts, too.
Some criticised the popularity of the FPS genre as such, too, which I think was refreshing (Why playing a game about flying/shooting etc. if the act of doing it wouldn’t appeal to you in real-life at least a little bit, too?)
If I had to write something positive about Doom,
I’d mention the 4 MB RAM requirement that pushed a reasonable RAM expansion into the old PC world and the WAD file format, I think.
The latter was used in other games and genres, too and was useful for, say, labyrinth or “dungeon crawlers” kind of games.
It was like a DXF format equivalent for 2.5D games, so to say. :)
^Sorry about the long comment, I was basically thinking out loud about Doom and hardware requirements/hardware support.
I didn’t mean to criticise the rendering engine itself so much, either.
Early ports like “Doom for OS/2” using DART/DIVE were quite sophisticated on PC platform, I think.
https://doomwiki.org/wiki/OS/2
It’s just that plain mode 13h DOS version and its low-res textures that were visually behind the times, I think.
Not uncommon, by any means, but also nothing to write home about anymore.
The PC hardware was capable of more (early 1988 SVGA cards such as PVGA1A already could do 640×400 pixels in 256c if directly being supported).
If you were an advanced PC user at the time using OS/2, DESQView/X or Novell DOS 7, for example,
or if you had seen a Mac or an Unix workstation before, then you were already looking forward to more modern technologies.
By 1994, there had been so much multimedia related events happening.
QuickTime, Video for Windows, P2P networking, OS/2 Warp/Ultimotion codec,
world wide web, WinG, CD-i, VideoCD, TV capture cards, sound cards with CD interfaces, modems or on-board MIDI synths etc.
And then you had Doom or Corridor 7, which operated in same 320×200 resolution that already CGA had been using for PC booter games in 1984..
I know graphics isn’t everything, but since this is an FPS/splatter game its storyline isn’t exactly saving it, either.
Anyway, that’s what I meant to say, basically. I hope that doesn’t make things worse.
… describes an argument as well as e-sports :o)