Bringing Back The CRT TV Experience In Software

November 18, 2023 by Donald Papp 44 Comments

Cathode-Retro is a collection of shaders and sample C++ code for reliving the glorious days when graphics were composite video signals displayed on a CRT screen. How? By faking it in software and providing more configuration options than any authentic setup ever had.

Love it or don’t, there’s nothing quite like it.

Not satisfied with creating CRT-style color images with optional scanlines and TV picture controls like tint and saturation, Cathode-Retro can emulate more nuanced elements as well.

The tool includes the ability to imitate things like the slight distortion of a period-correct curved screen, the subtle effects of different methods CRT displays used to actually work (such as shadow mask vs aperture grille), and even taking into account the slight distortion of light refracting imperfectly through the glass face of the CRT. There’s even options for adding noise and ghosting, which may spark some artistic ideas.

If all you need is software to recreate an old-school CRT terminal, we have you covered. But if your needs are a bit more low-level, Cathode-Retro might be what you’re missing.

Reliving The Authentic 90s Linux Experience

November 8, 2023 by Bryan Cockfield 64 Comments

Installing Linux on a modern PC has never been easier. There are tons of tools available that will nearly-automatically download your Linux distribution of choice, image a USB drive, and make it bootable so you can finally ditch your bloated, privacy-violating operating system and get the free performance boost that comes along with it. This wasn’t always the case, though. In the 90s you had to take a trip to a store (or library) and buy (or borrow) a boxed copy of some variety of Linux on floppy disk or CDs, and then install it on your own, often without the help of the Internet. [Action Retro] demonstrates this process for us so we don’t have to relive the pain ourselves.

Complete with a 90s-era Pentium machine enclosed in a beige case, this is really the full 90s experience. He’s found a boxed version of Red Hat version 5.2 with everything needed to get it up and running and, after a brief issue with the installer crashing because it couldn’t figure out the ZIP disk drive, had another era-appropriate experience by erasing the existing Windows 98 installation. This was before automatic partitioning tools were widely available, so it was a real risk for beginner Linux enthusiasts if they were trying to dual boot.

With the installation complete, the X window system still needed to be set up, as well as making sure the settings for the old CRT monitor were correct. With everything finalized, the system can really be explored. It includes out-of-the-box some software plenty of us would recognize today such as GIMP and some other software we might not, like Netscape Communicator. It’s a real time machine experience to get this operating system running on period-appropriate hardware, and a lot of features of modern Linux systems can still be seen especially if your modern distribution of choice still requires a lot of manual configuration during installation. Old operating systems aside, this machine might be capable of running a modern Linux distribution as well, provided it has something slightly newer than a 486.

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Noble Graphs: Displaying Data With Neon Like Its 1972

October 17, 2023 by Adam Zeloof 11 Comments

In the days before every piece of equipment was an internet-connected box with an OLED display, engineers had to be a bit more creative with how they chose to communicate information to the user. Indicator lights, analog meters, and even Nixie tubes are just a few of the many methods employed, and are still in use today. There are, however, some more obscure (and arguably way cooler) indicators that have been lost to time.

[Aart Schipper] unearthed one such device while rummaging around in his father’s shed: a pair of Burroughs Bar Graph Glow-Transfer Displays. These marvelous glowing rectangles each have two bars (think the left and right signals on an audio meter, which is incidentally what they were often used for), each with 201 neon segments. Why 201, you may ask? The first segment on each bar is always illuminated, acting as a “pilot light” of sorts. This leaves 200 controllable segments per channel. Each segment is used to “ignite” its neighboring segment, something the manufacturer refers to as the “Glow-Transfer Principle.” By clever use of a three-phase clock and some comparators, each bar is controlled by one analog signal, keeping the wire count reasonably low.

Don’t get us wrong, the warm, comforting glow of Nixie tubes will always have a special place in our hearts, but neon bar graphs are just hard to beat. The two do have a similar aesthetic though, so here’s hoping we see them used together in a project soon.

Thanks to [Jan] for the tip!

Preserving Floppy Disks

September 15, 2023 by Bryan Cockfield 35 Comments

Time is almost up for magnetic storage from the 80s and 90s. Various physical limitations in storage methods from this era are conspiring to slowly degrade the data stored on things like tape, floppy disks, and hard disk drives, and after several decades data may not be recoverable anymore. It’s always worth trying to back it up, though, especially if you have something on your hands like critical evidence or court records on a nearly 50-year-old floppy disk last written to in 1993 using a DEC PDP-11.

This project all started when an investigation unit in Maryland approached the Bloop Museum with a request to use their antique computer resources to decode the information on a 5.25″ floppy disk. Even finding a floppy disk drive of this size is a difficult task, but this was further compounded not just by the age of the disk but that the data wasn’t encoded in the expected format. Using a GreaseWeazle controlled by a Raspberry Pi, they generated an audio file from the data on the disk to capture all available data, and then used that to work backwards to get to the usable information.

After some more trials with converting the analog information to digital and a clue that the data on the disk was not fragmented, they realized they were looking at data from a digital stenography machine and were finally able to decode it into something useful. Of course, stenography machines are dark magic in their own right so just getting this record still requires a stenographer to make much sense out of it.

Atari Introduces A New Old Console

September 11, 2023 by Tom Nardi 29 Comments

Readers of a certain age no doubt remember the Atari 2600 — released in 1977, the 8-bit system helped establish the ground rules for gaming consoles as we know them today, all while sporting a swanky faux wood front panel designed to make the system look at home in contemporary living rooms.

Now, nearly 50 years later, the Atari 2600 is back. The new system, imaginatively named the 2600+, looks exactly like the original system, albeit at around 80% scale. It will also work the same way, as the system will actually be able to play original Atari 2600 and 7800 cartridges. This is something of a surprise when compared to the previously released retro consoles from the likes of Sony and Nintendo, as they were all limited to whatever games the company decided to pack into them. Of course, this probably has something to do with the fact that Atari has been selling newly manufactured 2600 games for some time now.

Although it will play original cartridges, it’s still an emulated console at heart. There aren’t a lot of technical details on the product page, but it does say the 2600+ is powered by a Rockchip 3128 SoC with 256 MB of DDR3 RAM and 256 MB eMMC flash. Some quick searching shows this to be a pretty common board for set-top gadgets, and wildly overpowered considering the meager requirements for emulating a game console from 1977. We wouldn’t be surprised to find it’s running some kind of minimal Linux install and using one of the existing open source emulators.

While the 2600+ sports the same 9-pin D-sub controller connectors as the original console, it thankfully embraces modern display technology and outputs over HDMI. Each console will come with a “10-in-1” cartridge that contains some of the console’s most popular titles, as well as a modernized version of the original single-button joystick. (Unlike the original, the 2600+ comes with only a single joystick — the other is sold separately.)

Atari won’t start shipping the 2600+ until this fall, but they’re currently taking preorders for the $130 system. We’re eager to see somebody pull it apart, as the earlier “mini” consoles ended up being ripe for hacking.

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Restoring A 45 Year Old Video Game

August 30, 2023 by Julian Scheffers 28 Comments

When we say vintage video game, some of you may think of the likes of Lemmings, Mario or maybe even Donkey Kong but the game that [Vintage Apparatus] restored is slightly older and much more minimalist, using an LED matrix and some 7-segment displays rather than this newfangled color CRT thing.

The front and back covers, buttons and screws of the game on the workbench. — The game is disassembled before cleaning.

[Vintage Apparatus] starts by removing the battery and cover from the 1977 Mattel electronics (American) football game, which uses rather uncommon 2mm triangular screws. To his and our surprise, the circuit board and its beautiful array of LEDs seem to be in excellent condition, so he moves on to cleaning the case itself.

The case, on the other hand, is a bit dirty on the outside, so [Vintage Apparatus] takes out the buttons and starts cleaning with the back cover a Q-tip. After a bit of scrubbing and some extra care to avoid removing any stickers, he moves on to the considerably dirtier and somewhat scratched front case. After some wrestling with the creases and speaker grill of the front cover, the outside of the front case looks nice and clean. Finally, he puts back the buttons and circuit board in the front cover before adding closing it all up with the back cover and screwing it back together.

The game, which immediately comes to life and was actually made by the Mattel calculator division, is a sort of evasion game where the player is a bright dot that can move forward, up or down. The player avoids the dimmer dots, the “tacklers”, in order to run as far as possible as fast as possible. When one of the tacklers tackles the player, the amount of downs is increased and the fifth down means game over. After either scoring or getting downed one too many times, the field is flipped and it’s now player 2’s turn.

Video after the break.
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Turning Soviet Electronics Into A Nixie Tube Clock

August 27, 2023 by Donald Papp 17 Comments

Sometimes you find something that looks really cool but doesn’t work, but that’s an opportunity to give it a new life. That was the case when [Davis DeWitt] got his hands on a weird Soviet-era box with four original Nixie tubes inside. He tears the unit down, shows off the engineering that went into it and explains what it took to give the unit a new life as a clock.

Each digit is housed inside a pluggable unit. If a digit failed, a technician could simply swap it out.

A lot can happen over decades of neglect. That was clear when [Davis] discovered every single bolt had seized in place and had to be carefully drilled out. But Nixie tubes don’t really go bad, so he was hopeful that the process would pay off.

The unit is a modular display of some kind, clearly meant to plug into a larger assembly. Inside the unit, each digit is housed in its own modular plug with a single Nixie tube at the front, a small neon bulb for a decimal point, and a bunch of internal electronics. Bringing up the rear is a card edge connector.

Continues after the break…

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