Retro 5″ Black and White TV as a computer monitor – A tale of pointlessness(blog.uchujin.co.uk) |
Retro 5″ Black and White TV as a computer monitor – A tale of pointlessness(blog.uchujin.co.uk) |
Little did they know, while they were at work, I went up into the attic and ran a coaxial cable from a splitter down into my room and into the back of the VCR, all neatly tucked behind my desk. I spliced an old mono 1/8 jack onto an RCA component for the video (ext.ant to VCR) and did a similar splicing for the audio, but I had to run it through an old 8 track player to amplify the audio. It may be obvious that I collected a lot of old junk and cables (I still do).
I did this all so I could primarily watch Conan O'Brien... which was available on channel 4 anyway (accessible via antenna) but I just wanted to watch the show in the highest definition possible.
Having my first kid soon, I'm curious if he'll be as determined to work around the rules.
When he came down an hour later and I was transfixed with the primordial web, he gave me a deadly serious warning - that he had a report he could run on the computer to list everything I was visiting. I was dubious. So I proved to myself that he didn't.
18 months later I was working at the ISP. I always wonder if that threat by him to avoid smut and bomb making was a deliberate seed being planted, or just a panicked father veneering over a complete loss of control.
At the dawn of the public internet there were no call centers or AOL discs. It was some local guy with enough scratch to afford a T1 and a bank of modems.
Anyway, as a kid, I found you could take an old B&W set with the fine tuning knob, and set it between channel 87 & 88, then manually get a few seconds of restored sync by twiddling the fine tuning.
Used that same TV on my C64, and few years later, the same TV could be used to eavesdrop on AMPS cell phones. Versatile devices.
I did something similar, also to watch late night comedy.
However, I used two 300 to 75 ohm converters and speaker cable to connect with a splitter to the TV.
I remember proving my father and RadioShack salesman wrong about the proper adapter needed to go from 3.5mm mono to the female coax connector.
I recently bought two 5” black and white portable TVs at a flea market for $5 total.
One of them does have a video input.
My friend and I did something like that to get cable to his room. He lived in a double-wide, his bedroom in the back, and the cable was in the front. We scrounged.
Came up with an adapter here, wire there, and some cellophane tape. Oh, and some thumbtacks.
Some of the wire was speaker cable, the rest was telephone cord. A pair of scissors, some cutting and splicing and taping and tacking - we had it ran.
Other than a very janky signal (gee - why's that?) - he had cable TV. We then proceeded to wire up his stereo to the TV (because we wanted better sound for the Sega Genesis, dangit!). In the end somehow it all worked, and didn't burn his mother's home down.
A month later his older brother saw what we did, and ran a proper run of coax under the trailer, and cleaned up our stereo/tv mess.
Regular old B&W TV connected via HDMI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMiMz1uGCXI
A tiny 1/2 inch CRT used as a display: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WY7olqQF8iM
Just knocking up a VGA to composite circuit similar to the one linked below (AD724 chip) to put my laptop onto a 21" Philips colour TV from the 1990s:
https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/403637/vga-t...
Times was hard for some of us!
;-p
Whatever you do with that TV watch, though, don't destroy it. It might not be right now, but someday in the not-too-far future it could be worth some serious cash by a TV collector. Honestly, it might be that way now - so check into that before jumping into something like this.
The Seiko T001 does have an external tuner and routinely go for $400-500+ on eBay, depending on condition.
https://monochrome-watches.com/seiko-t001-mother-smart-watch...
My plan was to make it a self-contained old-school PC (with green cellophane film on the monitor for aesthetics) and internally mounting the RPi inside the shell, but I'm being held back by my fear of the high-voltage circuitry of the CRT, and a couple of stripped screws.
One thing I don't miss from CRT monitors from the 90s.
Also while this can cause eye fatigue (which depends from person to person), i could never find any proof (and i just did a quick search) that there is any sort of permanent eye damage.
I've certainly noticed it myself, using 75 Hz CRTs made me feel tired after a few hours, unlike 85 Hz.
> In 1989, my colleagues and I compared fluorescent lighting that flickered 100 times a second with lights that appeared the same but didn’t flicker. We found that office workers were half as likely on average to experience headaches under the non-flickering lights.
Downside was that the Hercules - while being very high resolution for the day - was only monochrome, and amber. But it was a common solution for many CAD systems (with a price to match of course).
IIRC, it was also a setup that some later game programmers used (I may be wrong, but IIRC, Carmack used something like this?) - because they could run the debugger on the monochrome Hercules, while outputting the game on the color monitor (CGA/EGA/VGA). This was well after better solutions came around for CAD, so the Hercules setup was a relatively inexpensive upgrade.
Being bored of not too many games working, I decided to take matter in my hands. Early on, I got into making various resident applications - and made one (used Turbo Pascal with inline assembly), where I would "convert" the 320x200 VGA buffer into Hercules bits. It was not taking care of what the palette was, but just happened to work by accident for some of the games (like Trolls). I also had to hack Trolls to first ignore the fact that I did not have VGA, then hack it instead of using 0xA0000 as VGA buffer (the standard address for an VGA adapter), but I would hack that location with my own buffer.
It kind of worked, real slow - I've got about - I dunno - maybe 5-10fps - lol.
Fun fact of trolls that I've found, but could not completely understood it back then (I was probably 9th or 10th grade, english is my secondary language) was this: https://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/trolls/trivia
"This game was written on a very slow schneider 10mhz 286 with lots of wait states. If for some reason on your very fast xxxx 25mh 486 this game seems to be fast or unplayable, do no blame us for it was a penny pinching boss who would not buy us reasonable pc's to work on. signed THE PROGRAMMERS OF FLAIR SOFTWARE"
So having hercules card made me - lol - did a bit of fun hacking :)
However, I still agree that for the majority of the public, flat-panel displays are probably better. They take up less room, generally provide a sharper and higher-resolution image, and they're more compatible with the most common video devices found in homes today (connnecting many devices to SD CRTs requires jumping through some hoops).
I'd say for PC usage they _were_ unmatched, but that's no longer the case. I played games professionally at one point, of course using CRTs when they were the superior choice, but in this day and age with affordable 240hz sub-1ms G2G LCD displays...
I just can't see any argument for using a CRT with a PC in 2019.
For a long time LCDs really couldn't compete with CRTs. They had bad resolutions, terrible viewing angles and terrible colors (and especially horrendous blacks).
Resolution is (finally) no longer an issue, colors and viewing angles are still meh but steadily improving. Hopefully we'll get OLED or something similar in the near future that will solve that once and for all. I decided that it was good enough to finally make the switch definitively.
Are you buying good LCDs? There's a whole range of types: https://pcmonitors.info/articles/lcd-panel-types-explored/ The worst LCDs today are crap, but the best ones are going to be hard to tell apart from a CRT without putting it next to one. Since the only CRTs made today are high quality CRTs because there's zero market for bad CRTs anymore (and only barely a market for CRTs at all), a modern CRT may still outclass the best LCD, but mostly because of the fact that if the CRT couldn't outclass the best LCD it wouldn't exist at all.
Unfortunately, it can be difficult to buy a good LCD screen. Monitors you may have to dig into relatively technical reviews of to find out (generic tech magazine reviewer may not tell you), and finding out what specific kind of screen a laptop has can be very difficult sometimes. Manufacturers don't really want to talk about it as they tend to benefit from being fuzzy about exaggerated specs, and a lot of "reviewers" aren't really aware enough of these issues to make a point of it in their review.
I'm not an expert but I'd swear even in the TN space there's a lot of variation. I once accidentally bought a latop that basically literally didn't have a viewing angle; even at the "optimum" angle only the vertically-middle 50% of the screen was correct and the top and bottom were already showing major brightess drop-off and color inaccuracy. I don't just mean "I don't like to admit it but sometimes I can be a bit of a videophile" sort of complaints, either, I mean more like "literally can't read the word 'Start' on the Start Menu because the text and the background have both color shifted that much". Ironically, sold as a media laptop that only the most casual casual would have wanted to actually watch movies on. Dumped that one right quick. And this particular laptop was priced in the range where it really should have had a decent screen.
By contrast, I'm coding on what is almost certainly a TN monitor, and I really don't care. I wouldn't want it on my personal laptop, the Macbook screen driving it is much, much better by comparison, but I don't do anything color sensitive at work. There's very minimal viewing angle distortion and that's all I really need. (I mean, push comes to shove, I could pretty much do my job on a monochrome monitor and only be somewhat annoyed.)
I learned a lot about people very quickly. As we got more popular, we started to get busy signals, because we couldn't grow our hardware fast enough - and then people learned how to do keepalives, so that they wouldn't get stuck offline on a busy signal. That was a race to the bottom. Sharing a physical resource like a phone port is a dark ages thing I am glad we no longer contend with.
We have it much, much better than we did back then.
But I'd still like to go on a time-vacation to enjoy the selection bias of the times - I'm glad we made the Internet easy enough for everyone to get online, but it would be neat to visit 25 years to visit the greener pastures of old.
In some areas - probably. Here in Phoenix, I got the internet in 1993 - dialup shell access - from Internet Direct.
Yes - that Internet Direct.
"Could you do me a favor and look into that issue?". Answering yes implies you'll do it. Same goes for the "woulds" and "cans" and "mind doing ... s".
It's the same as everyone knows what she means when she says "libary", but I correct her to pronounce it "library".
Edit: added "seem to", as I'm fully aware that CRTs scan the tube rather than doing anything to the entire screen "at once".
I remember that my 67Hz macintosh monitor was really stressing my eyes as a teenager, while I never had this problem with a TV.
Want an idea? Look at this:
https://www.haplessgenius.com/mocha/
Now imagine being 10 years old, and having that in front of your face while coding in BASIC, glowing from a 19" TV mere inches in front of you...hehe. That was me!
I won't claim one way or the other to not have suffered damage of some sort - I'm really not sure.
Strangely, my mom always complained to me about "sitting to close to the TV" - but had no problem when I was in front of this thing for hours on end, typing away, etc.
Ps how did you make your 2nd smiley so smug? :P
You're right, I should've been a bit more explicit, I was mainly comparing "average" CRTs from up to about 2005 (back when they were still relatively mainstream) from an average LCD monitor today. Not the top of the line but not the bargain bin either.
For a long time switching from CRT to a comparably-priced LCD was a massive downgrade. You had a lower resolution, ridiculous ghosting, bad colors, black levels that looked like the rising sun and a viewing angle on par with the angular diameter of Pluto.
Nowadays you can find relatively cheap 4k LCDs that perform decently. Sure the blacks aren't perfectly black and it's not good enough for any serious color-sensitive work but for coding and gaming it's good enough for me.
That is, until they improve LCD's ability to block light. When you can turn off an LCD pixel and block virtually all light from coming through (or around) that pixel, then you'll get much deeper blacks