11 ms·

Accurate CRT Simulation

272 points by jsnell 11y ago

chadaustin 11y ago
I love this topic and compiled a slew of related links last year: https://chadaustin.me/2015/11/crts-pixels-and-video-games/ https://chadaustin.me/2015/11/crts-pixels-and-video-games/
Animats 11y ago
From the article: "As the electron guns sweep across the screen, varying their intensity to adjust brightness, they tend to overshoot their desired value and bounce back a short time later. This creates alternating vertical bands of light and dark seen at the edges of high contrast changes in brightness." That's caused by a different effect. NTSC has terrible color bandwidth. The YIQ signal is really an I (intensity) signal at full bandwidth, and YQ signals with severely limited bandwidth (because, during the transition from black and white to color, they had to be stuck in subcarriers of the main black and white signal. NTSC Color TV is really greyscale TV with color tweaks superimposed. You can only go through the YQ color space about 10 times across the width of the screen. The way to simulate this is to convert to YIQ, apply a low-pass filter horizontally to the Y and Q components, then convert back. Note that this is a horizontal issue only; in the vertical direction, every line can be a different color without problems.
- gugagore 11y ago
  fyi(q), I doesn't stand for intensity, but for in-phase https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-phase_and_quadrature_components https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-phase_and_quadrature_compon...
  - Animats 11y ago
    Right, NTSC has luminance (Y), I and Q define a vector in the color space, and have much less bandwidth than the luminance signal.
- imtringued 11y ago
  >NTSC Color is really greyscale TV My old CRT only supported PAL. So this is the reason why NTSC inputs were displayed without color.
  - hausen 11y ago
    Your old CRT is probably PAL-M, a variant of PAL. Was it made in Brazil? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAL-M#Compatibility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAL-M#Compatibility
    - boomlinde 11y ago
      I (scandinavian) have a few old TVs and monitors that are able to synchronize to the NTSC clock, but are unable to decode NTSC colors. It's not uncommon, and even my 1084S does it. As far as I understand this, PAL is just a color encoding standard, and the synchronization characteristics typically associated with it are broadcast standards, e.g. PAL-M, PAL-B etc. If you have a TV that decodes PAL at 50Hz there is a good chance that it will decode PAL at 60 Hz even outside countries that had these broadcast standards. For NTSC, since it's only really the timing and color encoding that differs it's then not uncommon to get a grayscale picture from NTSC input.
  - mikepavone 11y ago
    Both PAL and color NTSC are derived from greyscale television standards and represent luminance a similar way. PAL uses a slightly different encoding scheme for color information that improves on some of the deficiencies of NTSC and uses a different color carrier frequency. Since the carriers are far enough apart your PAL TV doesn't even "see" the NTSC color signal and so you just get greyscale rather than incorrectly decoded color.
- sevensor 11y ago
  Back in the day, the joke was that NTSC stood for "Never Twice the Same Color".
Stratoscope 11y ago
This is a fun and interesting article! There are a few minor errors in this section: > Cathode ray tube displays work by repeatedly sweeping an electron gun back and forth across the extents of a fluorescent screen. The strength of the electron beam may vary during this sweep, and this in turn affects the brightness of the phosphors it illuminates. In early black-and-white models, only a single electron gun was necessary; with the introduction of color TVs, three electron guns were used, each tuned to a different phosphor, which would appear as the color red, green, or blue. > The points of light created by this interaction are too diffuse to produce a sharp image, so a shadow mask is used to focus the electron beams before they reach the screen. A shadow mask consists of a metal plate with holes or apertures designed to filter out unwanted electrons. The shape of the shadow mask and the configuration of its holes vary by model and contribute greatly to the characteristics of the resulting image. The shadow mask also defines the dot pitch of the display, effectively limiting its highest possible resolution. As we will see later on, the dot pitch of the display does not necessarily correspond to the resolution of the displayed image. The three electron guns in a color CRT aren't tuned to the different color phosphors, they are physically positioned so that the holes in the shadow mask or the gaps in the aperture grille block the beams from hitting the unwanted color phosphors and only hit the phosphor that each beam should light up. In a shadow mask CRT, there is a triad of phosphor dots (or stripes in newer TVs) for each hole in the shadow mask. The electron beam from each gun goes through this hole at a different angle, so it only hits the correct phosphor and is blocked from the other two. An aperture grille CRT uses a similar concept, but instead of mask with holes in it and triads of dots, it has a series of parallel vertical wires and vertical phosphor stripes serving the same function. The mask or grille is not there because the electron beam is too diffuse to produce a sharp image. A monochrome CRT has no shadow mask or aperture grille, and with proper focusing it can be plenty sharp. The mask or grille is there simply to block the the beams from hitting the wrong color phosphors. More information is in the Wikipedia articles on shadow masks and aperture grilles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_mask https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_mask https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture_grille https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture_grille
- evincarofautumn 11y ago
  > they are physically positioned so that the holes in the shadow mask or the gaps in the aperture grille block the beams from hitting the unwanted color phosphors and only hit the phosphor that each beam should light up. Moreover, if you physically rotate the display, then the colour changes because that alignment is thrown off—by Earth’s magnetic field, IIRC.
Coincoin 11y ago
At first I though the curvature was exaggerated but then I looked at some pictures and it was actually even worse. This reminds me the first time I used one of those flat CRT, I was so used to the convex curve that the flat one looked concave.
- makomk 11y ago
  Well, anything Trinitron-based didn't have nearly as much curvature for technical reasons, so if you always used higher-end sets and monitors you might never have had one with this kind of curvature.
jloughry 11y ago
In the analogtv.c source code, by Trevor Blackwell (part of XScreenSaver) is this comment [1]: A maxim of technology is that failures reveal underlying mechanism. A good way to learn how something works is to push it to failure. The way it fails will usually tell you a lot about how it works. To mimic the image on a 1970s-era colour TV, XScreenSaver uses an accurate DSP simulation of all the analogue circuitry, including bandwidth limits, noise, and distortion. A gigahertz processor is just capable of keeping up with this. [1] In XScreenSaver: a collection of free screen savers for X11 and MacOS by Jamie Zawinski [2]. Edit: if you want to read the source code---highly recommended!---retype the address below by hand or you'll become acquainted with jwz's countermeasures. [2] https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/xscreensaver-5.34.tar.gz https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/xscreensaver-5.34.tar.gz
- nikanj 11y ago
  Looks like JWZ didn't like your linking, and it now has a redirect to an offensive(?) picture on imgur
  - mappu 11y ago
    I assume it's temporary. For posterity, the image is http://imgur.com/32R3qLv http://imgur.com/32R3qLv
    - mintplant 11y ago
      No, he's been blocking all links from HN for a while.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- zaius 11y ago
  Ironic that JWZ takes offense to the link since the code in question is by Trevor, who is a cofounder of YC. Mirror here: http://web.mit.edu/ghudson/dev/nokrb/third/xscreensaver/hacks/analogtv.c http://web.mit.edu/ghudson/dev/nokrb/third/xscreensaver/hack...
mholt 11y ago
If you're on Mac (or iOS), I highly recommend the Cathode app[1]. It's a terminal in the style of old CRTs, and I always get a kick out of using it. [1]: http://www.secretgeometry.com/apps/cathode/ http://www.secretgeometry.com/apps/cathode/
- Razengan 11y ago
  And it's free text-editor cousin: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/blinky/id550873221?mt=12 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/blinky/id550873221?mt=12 Very cool and pretty fun.
  - karmakaze 11y ago
    Fun, Thanks. Noticing that 'Pokey' in the 8-bit Atari emulation is actually the analog in/sound chip--ANTIC was display.
- SyneRyder 11y ago
  Cathode is excellent, and makes working in the terminal so much more enjoyable. There's so many other little touches as well, you can include the sound of an old hard drive whirring up on startup, for instance. I've been trying to find something similar for my Windows 10 machines, but no luck. I wish they'd port it across, but failing that I'd love to hear recommendations for a Windows app like Cathode.
- carlesfe 11y ago
  Very similar to Cathode, and free: https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term
  - AlbertoGP 11y ago
    Thanks! Just tried it with the C64 font on a curved ultrawide monitor: http://matracas.org/tmp/cool-retro-term-C64-font-Dell-U3415W.jpg http://matracas.org/tmp/cool-retro-term-C64-font-Dell-U3415W...
rasz_pl 11y ago
In civilized world we used SCART or JP-21 to achieve pure RGB and avoid most of the artefacts author is so nostalgic about. http://retrorgb.com/rgbguide.html http://retrorgb.com/rgbguide.html so no, our consoles didnt look like http://i.imgur.com/Pq2Yra4.png http://i.imgur.com/Pq2Yra4.png, they did indeed look pixel perfect http://retrorgb.com/images/Link%20RGB%20Compare.jpg http://retrorgb.com/images/Link%20RGB%20Compare.jpg
- SixSigma 11y ago
  My BBC computer (1981) uses a 6-pin DIN digital RGB connector +5 V/0 V, 1 V p-p composite colour or monochrome video (link S39).
  - rasz_pl 11y ago
    My only computer with so-so video connection was C64 over svideo. Ever since then everything was RGB straight to TV(or 1084s). Amiga, sega megadrive, playstation, first xbox, all pixel perfect with zero artefacts. Its like someone in US decided to once again screw whole consumer base and remove essential feature in order to create expensive niche. Now that I think about it, what did people in US use professionally to send video? Were there "professional broadcast quality" labelled TVs with component inputs in the eighties?
    - SixSigma 11y ago
      Professional video used Betacam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betacam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betacam When I started editing, BetaSP was the broadcast format.
- jbmorgado 11y ago
  This article explains how to get that in the Commodore 64, by binding the A/V cable output to a SCART plug. The results are indeed brilliant. https://ilesj.wordpress.com/2012/03/30/c64-av-cable-theory-and-practice/ https://ilesj.wordpress.com/2012/03/30/c64-av-cable-theory-a...
Sami_Lehtinen 11y ago
Some claimed that low refresh rate on screen caused it to flash. But that wasn't true, as long as the screen had slow enough phosphor. With older CRT displays it was totally possible to read the text from the screen after three seconds of turning the display off or giving clear screen command. You could also play with magnets on the screen, not all screens got great degauss feature, so little magnet play was fun. It's also important to monitor that CRTs aren't equal. If you used regular 70s color TV it was very different from high end 21" Trinitron CRT used before flat panels became popular. Here you can see one nice CRT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IweoaOb53XQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IweoaOb53XQ One of the reasons why many computers didn't use 80 char line length was that TVs didn't produce sharp enough image and it was impossible to read 80 char lines. Of course it was also possible to modify displays to produce sharper image. With Spectravideo it was possible to use separate card to produce sharper image and 80 columns. http://www.samdal.com/SVIDOCS/STM-I_SVI806.pdf http://www.samdal.com/SVIDOCS/STM-I_SVI806.pdf
- kuschku 11y ago
  Funnily, my family still uses a Trinitron daily – it’s our youngest and largest TV. Around 30", amazing quality.
  - Pxtl 11y ago
    Jeeze, that thing must weigh as much as a vw bug.
    - jcadam 11y ago
      There were CRT-based 1080i 16:9 Trinitron HDTVs available (briefly) during the early days of HDTV. My parents had a 34-inch model. Heaviest television set I've ever had the displeasure of moving. Definitely a two-man lift. Awesome picture quality, though.
      - dekhn 11y ago
        Yeah, I had one of these. It was great for its day, but definitely far too heavy to be practical. Having that device carted out of my house (the mover said he could have carried it on his back, but they used two people and then nearly dropped it anyway) was one of my greatest days.
SixSigma 11y ago
NTSC - Never The Same Color
hellbanner 11y ago
I'm seeing a game development article on the front page almost every time I check HN now. How many of you are making games?
fake-name 11y ago
Maybe it's just me, but I think the old CRTs looked horrible, and I find games and other applications which strive to mimic them as closely as possible extremely visually unpleasant. Sure, there's the nostalgia factor, but 20 seconds later I'm over it. If you have a game or something that has a CRT emulation mode, let me turn it off.
jhallenworld 11y ago
I looked into early camera tubes recently- it's amazing that they work at all :-) The "image orthicon" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_camera_tube#Image_orthicon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_camera_tube#Image_orthic... can only be described as a Rube-Goldberg device.

272 points by jsnell 11y ago

I love this topic and compiled a slew of related links last year: https://chadaustin.me/2015/11/crts-pixels-and-video-games/ https://chadaustin.me/2015/11/crts-pixels-and-video-games/

Animats 11y ago

From the article: "As the electron guns sweep across the screen, varying their intensity to adjust brightness, they tend to overshoot their desired value and bounce back a short time later. This creates alternating vertical bands of light and dark seen at the edges of high contrast changes in brightness." That's caused by a different effect. NTSC has terrible color bandwidth. The YIQ signal is really an I (intensity) signal at full bandwidth, and YQ signals with severely limited bandwidth (because, during the transition from black and white to color, they had to be stuck in subcarriers of the main black and white signal. NTSC Color TV is really greyscale TV with color tweaks superimposed. You can only go through the YQ color space about 10 times across the width of the screen. The way to simulate this is to convert to YIQ, apply a low-pass filter horizontally to the Y and Q components, then convert back. Note that this is a horizontal issue only; in the vertical direction, every line can be a different color without problems.

gugagore 11y ago
fyi(q), I doesn't stand for intensity, but for in-phase https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-phase_and_quadrature_components https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-phase_and_quadrature_compon...
- Animats 11y ago
  Right, NTSC has luminance (Y), I and Q define a vector in the color space, and have much less bandwidth than the luminance signal.
imtringued 11y ago
>NTSC Color is really greyscale TV My old CRT only supported PAL. So this is the reason why NTSC inputs were displayed without color.
- hausen 11y ago
  Your old CRT is probably PAL-M, a variant of PAL. Was it made in Brazil? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAL-M#Compatibility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAL-M#Compatibility
  - boomlinde 11y ago
    I (scandinavian) have a few old TVs and monitors that are able to synchronize to the NTSC clock, but are unable to decode NTSC colors. It's not uncommon, and even my 1084S does it. As far as I understand this, PAL is just a color encoding standard, and the synchronization characteristics typically associated with it are broadcast standards, e.g. PAL-M, PAL-B etc. If you have a TV that decodes PAL at 50Hz there is a good chance that it will decode PAL at 60 Hz even outside countries that had these broadcast standards. For NTSC, since it's only really the timing and color encoding that differs it's then not uncommon to get a grayscale picture from NTSC input.
- mikepavone 11y ago
  Both PAL and color NTSC are derived from greyscale television standards and represent luminance a similar way. PAL uses a slightly different encoding scheme for color information that improves on some of the deficiencies of NTSC and uses a different color carrier frequency. Since the carriers are far enough apart your PAL TV doesn't even "see" the NTSC color signal and so you just get greyscale rather than incorrectly decoded color.
sevensor 11y ago
Back in the day, the joke was that NTSC stood for "Never Twice the Same Color".

Stratoscope 11y ago

This is a fun and interesting article! There are a few minor errors in this section: > Cathode ray tube displays work by repeatedly sweeping an electron gun back and forth across the extents of a fluorescent screen. The strength of the electron beam may vary during this sweep, and this in turn affects the brightness of the phosphors it illuminates. In early black-and-white models, only a single electron gun was necessary; with the introduction of color TVs, three electron guns were used, each tuned to a different phosphor, which would appear as the color red, green, or blue. > The points of light created by this interaction are too diffuse to produce a sharp image, so a shadow mask is used to focus the electron beams before they reach the screen. A shadow mask consists of a metal plate with holes or apertures designed to filter out unwanted electrons. The shape of the shadow mask and the configuration of its holes vary by model and contribute greatly to the characteristics of the resulting image. The shadow mask also defines the dot pitch of the display, effectively limiting its highest possible resolution. As we will see later on, the dot pitch of the display does not necessarily correspond to the resolution of the displayed image. The three electron guns in a color CRT aren't tuned to the different color phosphors, they are physically positioned so that the holes in the shadow mask or the gaps in the aperture grille block the beams from hitting the unwanted color phosphors and only hit the phosphor that each beam should light up. In a shadow mask CRT, there is a triad of phosphor dots (or stripes in newer TVs) for each hole in the shadow mask. The electron beam from each gun goes through this hole at a different angle, so it only hits the correct phosphor and is blocked from the other two. An aperture grille CRT uses a similar concept, but instead of mask with holes in it and triads of dots, it has a series of parallel vertical wires and vertical phosphor stripes serving the same function. The mask or grille is not there because the electron beam is too diffuse to produce a sharp image. A monochrome CRT has no shadow mask or aperture grille, and with proper focusing it can be plenty sharp. The mask or grille is there simply to block the the beams from hitting the wrong color phosphors. More information is in the Wikipedia articles on shadow masks and aperture grilles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_mask https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_mask https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture_grille https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture_grille

evincarofautumn 11y ago
> they are physically positioned so that the holes in the shadow mask or the gaps in the aperture grille block the beams from hitting the unwanted color phosphors and only hit the phosphor that each beam should light up. Moreover, if you physically rotate the display, then the colour changes because that alignment is thrown off—by Earth’s magnetic field, IIRC.

Coincoin 11y ago

At first I though the curvature was exaggerated but then I looked at some pictures and it was actually even worse. This reminds me the first time I used one of those flat CRT, I was so used to the convex curve that the flat one looked concave.

makomk 11y ago
Well, anything Trinitron-based didn't have nearly as much curvature for technical reasons, so if you always used higher-end sets and monitors you might never have had one with this kind of curvature.

jloughry 11y ago

In the analogtv.c source code, by Trevor Blackwell (part of XScreenSaver) is this comment [1]: A maxim of technology is that failures reveal underlying mechanism. A good way to learn how something works is to push it to failure. The way it fails will usually tell you a lot about how it works. To mimic the image on a 1970s-era colour TV, XScreenSaver uses an accurate DSP simulation of all the analogue circuitry, including bandwidth limits, noise, and distortion. A gigahertz processor is just capable of keeping up with this. [1] In XScreenSaver: a collection of free screen savers for X11 and MacOS by Jamie Zawinski [2]. Edit: if you want to read the source code---highly recommended!---retype the address below by hand or you'll become acquainted with jwz's countermeasures. [2] https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/xscreensaver-5.34.tar.gz https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/xscreensaver-5.34.tar.gz

nikanj 11y ago
Looks like JWZ didn't like your linking, and it now has a redirect to an offensive(?) picture on imgur
- mappu 11y ago
  I assume it's temporary. For posterity, the image is http://imgur.com/32R3qLv http://imgur.com/32R3qLv
  - mintplant 11y ago
    No, he's been blocking all links from HN for a while.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
zaius 11y ago
Ironic that JWZ takes offense to the link since the code in question is by Trevor, who is a cofounder of YC. Mirror here: http://web.mit.edu/ghudson/dev/nokrb/third/xscreensaver/hacks/analogtv.c http://web.mit.edu/ghudson/dev/nokrb/third/xscreensaver/hack...

mholt 11y ago

If you're on Mac (or iOS), I highly recommend the Cathode app[1]. It's a terminal in the style of old CRTs, and I always get a kick out of using it. [1]: http://www.secretgeometry.com/apps/cathode/ http://www.secretgeometry.com/apps/cathode/

Razengan 11y ago
And it's free text-editor cousin: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/blinky/id550873221?mt=12 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/blinky/id550873221?mt=12 Very cool and pretty fun.
- karmakaze 11y ago
  Fun, Thanks. Noticing that 'Pokey' in the 8-bit Atari emulation is actually the analog in/sound chip--ANTIC was display.
SyneRyder 11y ago
Cathode is excellent, and makes working in the terminal so much more enjoyable. There's so many other little touches as well, you can include the sound of an old hard drive whirring up on startup, for instance. I've been trying to find something similar for my Windows 10 machines, but no luck. I wish they'd port it across, but failing that I'd love to hear recommendations for a Windows app like Cathode.
carlesfe 11y ago
Very similar to Cathode, and free: https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term
- AlbertoGP 11y ago
  Thanks! Just tried it with the C64 font on a curved ultrawide monitor: http://matracas.org/tmp/cool-retro-term-C64-font-Dell-U3415W.jpg http://matracas.org/tmp/cool-retro-term-C64-font-Dell-U3415W...

rasz_pl 11y ago

In civilized world we used SCART or JP-21 to achieve pure RGB and avoid most of the artefacts author is so nostalgic about. http://retrorgb.com/rgbguide.html http://retrorgb.com/rgbguide.html so no, our consoles didnt look like http://i.imgur.com/Pq2Yra4.png http://i.imgur.com/Pq2Yra4.png, they did indeed look pixel perfect http://retrorgb.com/images/Link%20RGB%20Compare.jpg http://retrorgb.com/images/Link%20RGB%20Compare.jpg

SixSigma 11y ago
My BBC computer (1981) uses a 6-pin DIN digital RGB connector +5 V/0 V, 1 V p-p composite colour or monochrome video (link S39).
- rasz_pl 11y ago
  My only computer with so-so video connection was C64 over svideo. Ever since then everything was RGB straight to TV(or 1084s). Amiga, sega megadrive, playstation, first xbox, all pixel perfect with zero artefacts. Its like someone in US decided to once again screw whole consumer base and remove essential feature in order to create expensive niche. Now that I think about it, what did people in US use professionally to send video? Were there "professional broadcast quality" labelled TVs with component inputs in the eighties?
  - SixSigma 11y ago
    Professional video used Betacam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betacam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betacam When I started editing, BetaSP was the broadcast format.
jbmorgado 11y ago
This article explains how to get that in the Commodore 64, by binding the A/V cable output to a SCART plug. The results are indeed brilliant. https://ilesj.wordpress.com/2012/03/30/c64-av-cable-theory-and-practice/ https://ilesj.wordpress.com/2012/03/30/c64-av-cable-theory-a...

Sami_Lehtinen 11y ago

Some claimed that low refresh rate on screen caused it to flash. But that wasn't true, as long as the screen had slow enough phosphor. With older CRT displays it was totally possible to read the text from the screen after three seconds of turning the display off or giving clear screen command. You could also play with magnets on the screen, not all screens got great degauss feature, so little magnet play was fun. It's also important to monitor that CRTs aren't equal. If you used regular 70s color TV it was very different from high end 21" Trinitron CRT used before flat panels became popular. Here you can see one nice CRT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IweoaOb53XQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IweoaOb53XQ One of the reasons why many computers didn't use 80 char line length was that TVs didn't produce sharp enough image and it was impossible to read 80 char lines. Of course it was also possible to modify displays to produce sharper image. With Spectravideo it was possible to use separate card to produce sharper image and 80 columns. http://www.samdal.com/SVIDOCS/STM-I_SVI806.pdf http://www.samdal.com/SVIDOCS/STM-I_SVI806.pdf

kuschku 11y ago
Funnily, my family still uses a Trinitron daily – it’s our youngest and largest TV. Around 30", amazing quality.
- Pxtl 11y ago
  Jeeze, that thing must weigh as much as a vw bug.
  - jcadam 11y ago
    There were CRT-based 1080i 16:9 Trinitron HDTVs available (briefly) during the early days of HDTV. My parents had a 34-inch model. Heaviest television set I've ever had the displeasure of moving. Definitely a two-man lift. Awesome picture quality, though.
    - dekhn 11y ago
      Yeah, I had one of these. It was great for its day, but definitely far too heavy to be practical. Having that device carted out of my house (the mover said he could have carried it on his back, but they used two people and then nearly dropped it anyway) was one of my greatest days.

SixSigma 11y ago

NTSC - Never The Same Color

hellbanner 11y ago

I'm seeing a game development article on the front page almost every time I check HN now. How many of you are making games?

fake-name 11y ago

Maybe it's just me, but I think the old CRTs looked horrible, and I find games and other applications which strive to mimic them as closely as possible extremely visually unpleasant. Sure, there's the nostalgia factor, but 20 seconds later I'm over it. If you have a game or something that has a CRT emulation mode, let me turn it off.

jhallenworld 11y ago

I looked into early camera tubes recently- it's amazing that they work at all :-) The "image orthicon" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_camera_tube#Image_orthicon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_camera_tube#Image_orthic... can only be described as a Rube-Goldberg device.