If you have VHS tapes sitting around with recorded TV shows from channels that had Teletext, there's a good chance that you have Teletext signals stored along with the show! Video recorders used to just dump the entire broadcast signal into tape, including the invisible part.
You can get to this data with these tools: https://github.com/ali1234/vhs-teletext
https://codeberg.org/krafal
I'll move some of my (dead) projects later
@Truck Damn, I missed first half. Awesome as always, replaying all entries right now :)
@esheep The only proprietary driver I use sometimes is for Datapath VisionRGB frame grabber (which wasn't updated for latest kernels yet), so I have one less worry.
Last time I was using Debian with KDE it was stable, but back then it didn't had all QoL changes which were added in newer versions.
I need to check which proprietary software I actually need for my projects, maybe I could move everything to containers and switch to Alpine Linux in the future...
And no, I have no time for experimenting with Gentoo. I don't need much from my workstation, Liquorix kernel gives enough optimalizations for desktop.
Crisis averted; after few days of working on second PC, I was able to find some time to smash `apt dist-upgrade` and `apt upgrade` until everything was updated to the latest versions.
Because Snaps still suck and I need Firefox, I installed it from Flathub and added symlink to ~/.mozilla (who needs sandboxing anyway).
For now everything works quite stable, but after this... incident, I guess I should prepare for distrohopping again... nah, I'll just migrate to Debian and Flatpaks.
At least I can say that IRL81A IR LEDs work with LPT80A.
Maybe next time I'll go to hackerspace with A500, so I can debug everything at once.
I moved phototransistors in this mouse to their place and installed new IR emitters. One axis moves only by one pixel, while the other one works fine OR moves by one pixel, which implies that cable might be broken?
wait wait wait what the actual
you can play ACTUAL ARCADE GAMES on a vectrex?
https://www.ombertech.com/pitrex.php
I mean ACTUAL BATTLEZONE? ACTUAL STAR WARS? (ok a bit slow, but... still.) ACTUAL TEMPEST?
(can't find anyone playing tempest yet, likely because everyone who is playing tempest on vectrex is very busy playing tempest on vectrex and therefore cannot make videos of such)
and obviously, this makes running demos a bit easier on the hardware, etc... well crap I didn't need to order any new hardware (and I need to get my vectrex fixed, it doesnt' like turning on, which I believe is a capacitor issue or something that is fixable, but not by me)
oops! I accidentally Bad Apple!! to the WonderSwan
This serves as another proof-of-concept work for the "Wonderful" toolchain I've been working on. I've been nerd-sniped by GuyPerfect on a Discord server, and spent a night hacking away at it.
It's not a masterpiece of compression (you could probably squeeze it into 4MB), but...
Download: https://asie.pl/files/wswan/bad_apple_ws.zip
Pouet: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=91556
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZ1Ihorlr5c
Seeking feedback: what kind of built-in library functionality would you find helpful for programming a 16-bit handheld, given a C toolchain? (... yes, the WonderSwan)
I opened a GItHub issue with some ideas I already collected: https://github.com/WonderfulToolchain/wonderful-i8086/issues/3
Retro fact of the day
"Winter Gold" was a PAL-exclusive Norwegian-made SNES game released in 1996, utilizing the Super FX for rendering three-dimensional sports courses and containing an impressive-for-its-hardware introduction sequence.
One of the game's developers was Paul Endresen, better known as a member of a certain popular demoscene group. Can you tell which demoscene group it was just by watching the aforementioned introduction sequence?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rySAYiWTjbE
Retro fact of the day
The Bandai WonderSwan is a handheld console released in 1999. Notably, it did not feature a headphone jack - you had to buy a licensed adapter (internally a DAC) for the proprietary EXT port.
This caused problems to modern-day collectors, as the adapters became very expensive on the second-hand market, and the only person making custom EXT ports charges $85 for the privilege...
... until someone found out that you can just use an HDMI plug (!?) and it fits just well enough to electrically connect (!?).
https://github.com/zwenergy/wsheadphone
Screams at FPGA systems for living. Music taste stuck in the 90's.