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Cool-retro-term: A terminal emulator which mimics the old cathode display
- tdicola 12y agoAwesome! I remember seeing this on reddit earlier in the year when it was in much earlier stages. Looks really great now!
- mercurial 12y agoLooks like something out of Fallout. Awesome. Just the kind of thing you need on your Pip Boy.
- hayksaakian 12y agomake it into an app, and strap a smart phone to your wrist -- voila!
- kelvin0 12y agoYeah, the only thing missing is the cathode ray 'desync' effect which occurs when you first switch on the Pip-boy. That level of 'polish' on the Pip boy is fairly amazing in trying to emulate a good ole cathode ray tube ...
- SG- 12y agoReminds of "Cathode" app for OSX: http://www.secretgeometry.com/apps/cathode/ http://www.secretgeometry.com/apps/cathode/ it seems they have an iOS version now too that lets you SSH to your servers. Also I believe the demo version would appear as tho the cathode screen was about to fail and get worse and worse.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- aragot 12y agoCool-retro-term and this are awesome! It's like Instagram for the terminal!
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- PostOnce 12y agoI wanted that program badly, there never was a linux port, never got a chance to give them money, now I don't need it. Almost bought a mac just for that app :p I'd still buy it if it were available on linux, it's still prettier than this, even though this is very very good.
- masklinn 12y ago> Also I believe the demo version would appear as tho the cathode screen was about to fail and get worse and worse. Correct, which actually makes me prefer the demo to the "final" product, it's really fun to see the display "degrade" over time. And the various sounds are awesome (to annoy colleagues). Plus Cathode provides configurable line speeds.
- Sami_Lehtinen 12y agoGreat, except not authentic. They forget that image on the screen, affects the image on the screen. So basically same dim image looks different than same bright image. Geometry often also changed when brightnes was changed. It's complex thing to receate authentic CRT. Also many emulations fail with phosphor decay in very obvious ways. So it's not being done in a correctly at all. This cathode project is good, but many of these are clearly done by people, who haven't ever used the authentic thing and do not know what it should be like. I remember that I laughed when people were talking about 25 ms TFT being slow. From good green / amber display you could still read text after 5 seconds since powering it off. ;) I had one of these, lovely. http://sales.hansotten.nl/uploads/msx/monitoren/IMG_6798.JPG http://sales.hansotten.nl/uploads/msx/monitoren/IMG_6798.JPG And this beauty is pretty modern one, because it's color display. With many older CRTs you had to use 40 chars per line, because image was so fuzzy that 80x25 would have been unreadable. About noise, I have seen some extremely cheap and old VGA adapters generate so much noise and timing jitter into signal, that it looks like old TV even with modern dispalys. I got really baffed by it when I first encountered it.
- outworlder 12y agoOoooh, a MSX. I guess you are not from the USA, then :)
- teh_klev 12y agoThat Philips monitor, that's a blast from the past! My parents bought me one of those back in 1984 for my BBC micro. Then I had it hooked up as a second monitor on my Opus 286 PC that I bought when I started college in 1985 (1MB RAM, 12Mhz 286, 37.5MB RLL 3.5" disk) for C debugging. I was a bit fancy back then and had two video cards in my PC. The C compiler I used (pretty sure it was the Microsoft C V5 one) knew how to talk to a second video card. I kept the Philips around for years and years then donated it somewhere along the way with a couple of CGA and EGA monitors I'd collected over the years. Just a wee nitpick, that particular Philips monitor wasn't "colour" as such, it had amber phosphor instead of green or white. That said it was a really nice display, very crisp and sharp and a bargain at around 99 quid in the day. Getting back on topic, the best displays (in their day) I ever used were the Data General Dasher 2 and D200's. Sadly the later Dashers (the model 20's with the cream and brown cases) shipped with crappier CRT's that would wobble when sat next to any switched mode power supply.
- hadoukenio 12y ago$ ./cool-retro-term loadAllColorSchemes <blank window opens> There's a menu, but nothing clickable. It's interesting though. If I "touch /tmp/asdf", then the file gets written. So it is actually executing what I type, it's just not displaying anything? Debian Wheezy
- peatmoss 12y agoIn a modern world where we backlight semiconductors to produce high dpi screens, it almost feels weird to think we used to fire electron guns towards our eyes. I was always partial to the amber screen. Has anyone recently played with an old Asteroids cabinet? The screen is a black and white CRT. When you fire a missile, the screen effect is insanely bright. I'd forgotten just how intense that was. I can't wait until someone pieces together an art piece that makes use of all the crazy analog video effects that we used to take for granted, but now look like alien technology.
- digisign 12y agoAsteroids was a vector game, interesting technology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroids_%28video_game%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroids_%28video_game%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_monitor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_monitor
- mnw21cam 12y agoBack in '97, I built myself a vector graphics card for a computer which plugged into an oscilloscope for a university project. Good fun. Of course, to persuade the university to let me do it, I described it as a "programmable dual synchronised waveform generator", but it was always intended to display images.
- joezydeco 12y agoJed Margolin (ex-Atari) has the definitive history of the Atari vector games and how the hardware works: http://www.jmargolin.com/xy/xymon.htm http://www.jmargolin.com/xy/xymon.htm http://www.jmargolin.com/vgens/vgens.htm http://www.jmargolin.com/vgens/vgens.htm Asteroids was a humble 6502 running at 1.5 MHz with a PROM-driven pseudo-CPU acting as the vector generator.
- kubiiii 12y agoBetter resolution and frames per second than modern games :)
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- bbunix 12y agoWell done... down to getting to color of an old vt220 right... (that's the orange one)
- jnaglick 12y agomarkdown file, so old school.
- zura 12y agoAs an old cathode display user, I'd really like to have a terminal emulator which mimics the modern LCD display.
- Gracana 12y agoLooks pretty good! In reality[1] the "CRT effect" isn't quite so intense, but I think that's just down to settings. This definitely has the right glowy and slightly-fuzzy feel to it. [1] My Wyse-55: http://i.imgur.com/7x2JdmV.jpg http://i.imgur.com/7x2JdmV.jpg
- hudibras 12y agoNice keyboard, too. Must sound like a machine gun going off when you're "in the zone."
- pjc50 12y agoThat's a remarkably sharp display and clean keyboard you've got there, it looks like it was unboxed yesterday!
- Gracana 12y agoThanks! Yeah, I bought it as a refurbished unit and the company that did it does a nice job.
- masklinn 12y ago> In reality[1] the "CRT effect" isn't quite so intense By CRT do you mean the "lensing" of non-flat CRT screens or something else? The Wyse 55 is a fairly modern display (it was released after 1988 since it follows the 150 though not sure exactly when), earlier models had more (late 70s to early 80s) had more curvature (and lensing)
- Gracana 12y agoThe curvature is fine, mostly what seems off to me is the amount of "noise."
- hudibras 12y agoJust a quick glance at those screenshots and I'm instantly transported twenty years into the past, sitting in the campus computer lab printing out a report at 3 a.m. the day it's due. It's weird how the brain works.
- no_future 12y agothats metal as fuck
- mrmondo 12y agoThis has been reposted many times both here and on reddit.
- icebraining 12y agohttps://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2FSwordfish90%2Fcool-retro-term https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2FSwordfi...
- sanqui 12y agoIt used to be called cool-old-term. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2FSwordfish90%2Fcool-old-term https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2FSwordfi... I don't mind seeing it again, though.
- teddyh 12y agoSee also “Phosphor”¹, a screen saver part of XScreenSaver², but also usable as a terminal: /usr/lib/xscreensaver/phosphor -scale 2 -delay 0 $SHELL ① http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6ZWTrl7pV0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6ZWTrl7pV0 ② http://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/ http://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/
- teddyh 12y agoWorking command: /usr/lib/xscreensaver/phosphor -scale 2 -delay 0 -program $SHELL
- g047f4c3 12y agoAlso xscreensaver-data-extra, /usr/lib/xscreensaver/apple2 -text -fast -program $SHELL
- thrownaway2424 12y agoI'd love to know if the authors of this thing were unaware of the 15-year-old phosphor hack, or if they were inspired by it.
- Zardoz84 12y agoI should take a look to their shaders and tune up more Trillek CRT shader : https://plus.google.com/118048310717476799717/posts/4CSV9LHqq41 https://plus.google.com/118048310717476799717/posts/4CSV9LHq... https://plus.google.com/118048310717476799717/posts/diBzDKJ2gYY https://plus.google.com/118048310717476799717/posts/diBzDKJ2...
- corysama 12y agoYou might also appreciate http://timothylottes.blogspot.com/2014/08/scanlines.html http://timothylottes.blogspot.com/2014/08/scanlines.html
- konradb 12y agoThis reminds me that I have two Wyse WY-85 green screen terminals in the attic. I got them when they were being thrown out by a university in 1997 or 1998. They've been sitting there getting more and more depressed and dusty. At some point I really need to grab a Pi and a USB<->serial adapter and get them up and running. I've seen some blog pages from a couple of other folks who have managed to get them working in a similar way. At this rate my wife will throw them out with the perfectly valid excuse that if I haven't set them up in the last fifteen years, I'm unlikely to do so in the next fifteen.
- goldfeld 12y agoI've been developing a Clojure on Node.js curses terminal UI library[1] for some months, and though development has been going stronger than ever lately, I feel my motivation doubled up in seeing my interfaces displayed in this glorious orange glow. I should start working on a text game about being alone in a spaceship or a war-ravaged post-apocalypse right now. Suddenly my brother will go from joking that my computer must crash a lot because all he ever sees is terminals to being in awe. I had tried Cathode for OSX but it didn't work, and now you come and tell me I can have it for free on my linux dev box and that it works flawlessly? Thank you. [1]: https://github.com/goldfeld/i9n https://github.com/goldfeld/i9n
- safeaim 12y agoAwesome terminal, but too bad it's so cpu hungry. My laptop heated up in like 5 minutes.
- faizmokhtar 12y agoIs the borders around it necessary? Because personally I think that it would look great without the borders. Or is it to simulate the roundness of the monitor?
- tdicola 12y agoThat's what old monitors looked like. They had big thick plastic bezels all around the screen.
- nkuttler 12y agoYou can remove the border (and change everything else) in the settings.
- seszett 12y agoMy build (installed with yaourt on Arch, just like it says on the page) crashes when I try to.
- techrat 12y agoWhile neat, the cpu consumption this is insane. It's not even as bad when I play unaccelerated HD video.
- nkuttler 12y agoInteresting. I couldn't get it to go over maybe 5% on one core. Maybe it offloads some of the graphics work to the GPU.
- lawlessone 12y agoIs it all on the CPU? could they not have used shaders?
- thomasfl 12y agoSomeone™ posted an issue last july that this exquisite piece of software retro art did not compile on OS X. After a while someone™ actually managed to compile it on OSX, and the original author is working on a port, but until then we have to make do with the Cathode app. Only problem with the Cathode app is that it flickers more and more till you get an epileptic fit if you don't upgrade to the paid version.
- pervycreeper 12y agoWell, on the Mac, you pay for stuff, that's just the way it is. If you care about gratis & libre software, start dogfooding a free OS.
- osxrand 12y agoThat's complete recycled bovine waste my friend. Just because I choose to use OS X does not mean I'm ignoring the bsd base its built on, nor not enjoying using / contributing to open projects.
- sschueller 12y agoThere is a osx branch (https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term/tree/osx https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term/tree/osx) that compiles.
- rbanffy 12y agoPay the Cathode guys. They really deserve your money.
- shiven 12y agoIn my X-ray crystallography/structural biology lab we still use CRTs from over a decade old Silicon Graphics systems. They are the only displays that can do a 120Hz horizontal scan, which is darn critical when you are looking at protein and drug structures in quad-buffered stereo! Sadly, the CRTs are dying off over time and it gets harder to find replacements that can work as well as they do. There are LCD alternatives, like Zalman, but they never impressed me much :-(
- centizen 12y agoWe have had good results with the Barco Medical Diagnostics monitor lines - they are the only thing other than CRT's that our Radiologists are willing to use.
- raverbashing 12y agoCare to explain what the issue is? Delay? Blurriness?
- shiven 12y agoFlicker. Anything less than 120Hz can give severe eye strain and headaches over long (30-60 min) work sessions. As to the LCD replacements, the anti-aliasing is just not as smooth (yes, I'm being subjective) as on the CRTs. Perhaps, a "retina" level resolution display with 100+Hz refresh-rate will be a real solution. But those are probably still at the R&D stage and will be ridiculously expensive at launch! And the graphics cards to drive them as well!
- neftaly 12y agoI'm probably misinterpreting your requirements, but you should look into Korean IPS monitors. They're generally very cheap, are far better at reproducing colours than standard LCD monitors, have higher pixel densities (1440p@27") and can often be overclocked (90-120hz). The best deals are usually on ebay, shipped from Korea. http://www.blurbusters.com/overclock/120hz-1440p-ips-monitors/ http://www.blurbusters.com/overclock/120hz-1440p-ips-monitor...
- kelvin0 12y agoHas someone tried getting it to compile/run under Windows?
- rbanffy 12y agoThere is something, I am not sure what, wrong with the 3278 font on Windows.
- thirdtruck 12y agoCan't wait to use this in video projects. I already have a Kickstarter in mind.
- k2enemy 12y agoIt packages up a nice collection of vintage fonts for use in other applications: https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term/tree/master/app/qml/fonts https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term/tree/master/a...
- kator 12y agoCheck out the nice collection of fonts too. :-) https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term/tree/master/app/qml/fonts https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term/tree/master/a... I've been playing with them in iTerm2 and having flashbacks.
- coldcode 12y agoFunny how being around in the days when this was common I couldn't wait to see the future. Now I am in the future and people get excited about recreating the past. I can't win.
- sklogic 12y agoBack in those days, sitting behind a WY-85 connected to a VAXstation 3540, I was terrified by a thought that these awful, ugly, clumsy x86 PCs are possibly the future. And now, the future turned out to be even worse than I imagined.
- lwh 12y agoDoes it accurately emulate the burning eyes and headaches after a long day? Burn-in artefacts and simulated line noise would be nice additions ;)
- VikingCoder 12y agoI would really like to do something like this in HTML5 + WebGL for some retro game ideas I have. Like, even doing this with a Z-Machine interpreter (Zork, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, etc.) would be fun.
- chowyuncat 12y agoHere's an fork that works for OS X. https://github.com/chowyuncat/cool-retro-term/tree/osx-hacks https://github.com/chowyuncat/cool-retro-term/tree/osx-hacks Swordfish's osx branch is broken.
- aceperry 12y agoLOL, very cool. But I think my eyes would hurt if I looked at it for too long.