We’ll take this baby back to 1975.
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for the sake of completing the retro look the grey box better be a floppy drive
the grey box is the signal converter…
Duh. It should be pretty obvious what with the feed from the laptop and the output to the TV. There’s no accounting for some people’s lack of common sense.
Pong conversion
It must be Tape Recorder!
Duct tape recorder!
If it’s gonna be that retro it needs to be an 8-inch floppy. And those are hard to come by nowadays.
I’ve got a 5¼”…
I’m not impressed.
My computer still uses punchcards ^^
My punches still discard computers.
Really 8″ floppies were rarely used with the sort of home computer that didn’t have it’s own monitor. full height 5.25″ drives were more common. Now cassette tape drives however….
Really, you’ll have to tell it to someone who was not writing software for CP/M machines back in the early 1980s.
For really retro, he needs spools of paper punch-tape.
Those were more reliable than those damn cassette tapes.
I wonder if there’s a MS Windows version of Pong.
Making Pong is one of the assignments in pretty much every computer programming class ever, so yeah, I’d say there are a few.
*giggles*
There is, actually. There’s dozens of old shareware versions of it floating around out there on the internet.
Here’s one…
http://www.classicgamesarcade.com/game/21599/Pong-arcade-game.html
I even saw a gread 3D-Version of Pong. My neighbours played in the backyard and called it badminton. Don’t know if its freeware but additional controller hardware seemed to be necessary to play it. must be some new wii or ps3 stuff… *wonder*
It’s even color!
Yes, but after 10PM you only get the test pattern display.
I did this with a desktop 10 years ago to avoid lugging my monitor to my girlfriend’s house for the weekend. The problem is that you can’t read a thing on a (480i?) CRT tv.
U can if u use proper resolution
LOL… A true nerd. Spending the weekend at your girlfriends house
playing with your computer.
Nailed it! Nice!
It’s like you know me!
Assuming it’s NTSC, yes. And it’s only 30 frames (images) per second, consisting of two interlaced fields per frame at 262.5 lines per field and 60 fields per second. That’s not good image quality at all… lots of flicker.
Reminds me of my timex sinclair 1000 back in the 80′s, had it hooked up to a singer brand B&W TV.
Ahhh! I have one of those! I pulled it out recently, but it took a good 10 tries to get Frogger to load off the cassette tape. Any idea where we could get those programs on cd?
If it’s like my old Z80, you just need to figure out how to dump the program again, and attach the output to your modern PC’s sound card input. Capture the recording, convert to MP3 if you want to, and there you have it. (Worked for me with Galaxians on the Exidy Sorcerer.)
NO! MP3 is a bad idea for saving old computer tapes. They work by high speed rhythmical swapping between two different frequencies, a few hundred times (300, 600, or more) per second.
And mp3 works partly by chopping up the incoming sound into a certain number of chunks per second and recording what frequencies made up the sound at that point. Generally less than 50 times per second (or 100/200 for _occasional_ “short” frames that generally make up less than 10% of a file), as that’s enough to fool the human ear. If you’ve got a bad encoder it won’t even put ANY short frames in and ends up mangling normal music as well as data.
Can you see where this is going?
You don’t need any higher resolution than about 11khz, mono 8-bit anyway (the highest frequency is about 2khz and the signal itself is 1-bit), so you’re perfectly fine to save it as WAV (at an equivalent rate of 88kbit; in fact, go wild and use 16khz, as that’s still only like MP3 at 128k). Depending on your chosen quality level, the MP3 could actually be more wasteful as well as much less reliable.
(If you go down below about 96kbit, then it’ll probably switch to 22khz encoding… and as the temporal frame length is based on the sample rate (certain number of samples per frame) the above encoding problem gets worse)
The most reliable and compact way however is to use one of several freeware programs that exist in the emulation community that will take your recorded input (all the way up to CD quality WAV if you wish) and basically back-convert it into a file that stores the seperate tape “blocks” and the data (including headers and images) contained within. Any decent emulator will be able to load those, faster and more reliably than a sound file, and you can even use them to re-generate the tape sounds to play into the actual hardware, as there’s no particular magic to their creation. Each file will only be a handful of kilobytes… e.g. a typical one for a 48k Sinclair Spectrum may come out to 50k tops, if it near-fills the memory and doesn’t leave much room for variables (game code + data, a loading screen (which is then erased from memory anyway), and headers/checksums). That’s worth a little over three seconds of 128k MP3.
I’d recommend googling “lossless audio compression”.
Thanks for the tips! I will give them a try. I’ve been itching to acutually make use of that 16k memory module. Does anyone have the modem that they sold to go with this thing? I wonder if it could be configured to telnet with my PC and send the files with no loss of quality at all.
Yep, I had one in 1989 which my father wired to our colour TV for me to play without a specialized monitor. It’s pity that this notebook is actually modern, there’s a Windows XP installed.
If he raises the antenna, he’ll get a better picture.
Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear, when from out of the past come the thundering hoofbeats of the great horse Silver! The Lone Ranger rides again!
Hey! Where did they find a picture of my computer?
Still not as good as my Commodore 64.
I miss my C64 …
Emulators don’t have the same comfort level.
mine is still hooked up, was playing Jumpman Jr. last night… I even have tapes from 1982 that still load… and diskettes from the late 80′s that survived over the years
No kidding … the hardware companies decided they had to have more cash … so they hired top-rate engineers and chemists to decide how to create things that would decay within 4-5 years.
Oh, please, you have to see the NEW Commodore computers, if you have not:
http://commodoreusa.net/CUSA_C64.aspx
This isn’t a bad thing if you’re only getting data off a messed up system. I’d hope they’re transfering the data to a new machine.
Gotta love Target Disk Mode on the Mac……
If that’s the case, why go to the effort of removing the LCD?
Its a long-term fixumhack not a short term savemys**thack.
Looks like someone’s trying to resurrect WebTV….
Kludging the right way?
No big thing, it’s just an RF converter. I’m too cheap to spring for an LCD TV right now so I have a similar setup at home for my custom DVR (not on a TV anywhere near as old as this one, though).
Me too, except I use an old vcr (that doesn’t play tapes anymore) to convert the s-video output of my pc (an old emachine I got from the office and resurrected) to RF for my old CRT TV. This is my kids’ Netflix setup.
OMFG, that’s crazy!
this thing reminds me of my old amiga 2000. i was using a gui system back in 89. i think i still have 2 or 3 around somewhere. i still use the monitor in the garage. 20 years and the picture is still great.
i had one just like this in my bedroom as a kid.
OMG I must be Methuselah I’ve got that old tensor lamp on my desk RIGHT NOW…..
Meh… what’s on the other channel?
Something called an Apple, but it will never catch up.
Lulz … you don’t have to catch up when you’re Apple — or were you getting your news from an old TV set?
lolz, last week i had a old tv, like this, got all s**t out and put a LCD pc screen in, now i use it as PC screen lol
Heh, I had to do something like this with an old desktop when my monitor fritzed out at college. Luckily had a (slightly more modern) 14″ portable TV and an already-installed TV-out card (for dumping DivXs to VHS*).
Hooked it up and suffered Win98 at 720x512ish resolution (inside an overscanned 800×600 frame, thank heavens for custom video mode utilities) for a short while until I managed to win a cheap replacement off ebay
Being in a PAL area made for somewhat better resolution, but I tell you what, a 50Hz interlaced refresh is hell on the eyes. No wonder our old Phillips monitor for our Atari ST had a “green screen” switch (made word processing MUCH less painful when I tried it). Even getting the cheapo fill-in monitor up to 72Hz was heavenly in comparison.
And now LCDs have come along and freed us from all that. But there will come a day when my heavily-used laptop’s backlight is sure to go, and on that day I’ll probably end up plugging its S-Video out into that same TV (it’s in a cupboard round here somewhere) because lugging the family 32″ flatscreen upstairs to use whilst hunting the lappie’s replacement would be even crazier.
You C-64 punks make my VIC-20 seem redundant!
wow the person who made this has banes!
Wow. That is extreme kludge to the max!! btw Why is everyone talking about 8 inch floppy discs??
you’d think a TV as old as that one is unable to do that, but I guess you found a way.
windows zenith edition. I’m sure the res is so bad you can’t read email without hitting ctrl+ like 10 times.