Whenever I see stuff like this, the ITX Llama [1], Pixel x86, etc. I think it's finally the time to build my ultimate love-letter to old school DOS and retro computing but always stop short because of the monitor issue.
I feel like a lot of my nostalgia likely stems from the bright super low latency phosphor displays of a proper CRT. No amount of WebGL shaders/filters [2] ever quite seem to capture the original experience IMHO.
I'm the same as you. In my case, the monitor I grew up with was a monochrome screen with a slight sepia hue - I have never been able to find a similar CRT on eBay or elsewhere.
What completes the experience is the sounds, lights and loading times. When I push the power button, I want to hear all the familiar clicks and whirls followed by the loud BIOS POST beep, immediately followed by the sound of the floppy drive coming to life. I do NOT want a flash media drive, I want a slow, mechanical HDD where things actually takes times to load, and you get to hear the familiar disk spinning and access sounds. And the lights, don't forget those little LEDs which accompanied the sounds, like a conductor conducting an orchestra.
And you know what I miss the most? It's the modem. I miss the dialup sounds. I miss being able to tell what speed I'd be getting connected at based on the sounds. I miss the BBSes and telnet servers of the era. And IRC. And the early web, free of bloated modern Javascript. And apps - real apps coded in ASM/C/C++ that prioritised efficiency and produced tiny binaries that ran without needing a million dependencies. And operating systems that fit an entire GUI desktop in 1.44MB...
High-res high-refresh-rate OLEDs with modern shaders are getting close. Now somebody needs to make one that has a convex shape like an old CRT.
I wish we'd reach a point where modern technology allows us to make new CRTs relatively easily. I don't even necessarily care about the image quality, the screens and TVs I used in my youth were never particularly good. But it doesn't seem that this will become feasible in the next few decades.
CRTs were only ever made sense to manufacture on a really big scale, so that costs could be reduced. Early tubes which weren't manufactured on such a scale were accordingly stupid expensive.
I doubt anyone is going to spin up another factory to satisfy the potential demand, since the demand isn't that great to begin with (OLED satisfies most use-cases that CRTs do), and very few people are going to pay $5000+ for a new CRT, and I doubt they're going to be any cheaper than that.
Faster screen refresh rate improves the pixel switching latency (frame to frame). How do modern OLED screens in Game Mode compare to old CRTs for input latency (cable to screen)?
According to the above, the 2017 iPad pro with Apple Pencil replicated the Apple II's 30ms touch-to-pixel latency, four decades later! (Current M4/M5 models are supposedly 5-10ms, so perhaps a good emulator platform...)
CRTs wear out with use, so they're only getting rarer by the day. The electronics can mostly be fixed, but the tubes can't. You can extent their lives a bit, but you're only delaying the inevitable. When it's gone (too low brightness, burn-in, bad focus), there's nothing that can be done about it to get it back to the way it was when it was new.
There was some repair available. At very least, the neck could be cut off, and the electron gun bits replaced with new.
According to the Vintage Television Museum near Columbus, Ohio, the last company in the US to be able to do this closed in 2010, and the last one remaining in Europe closed in France in 2013. (I myself don't know if there are any in some other corner of the world.)
The museum did succeed in getting a bunch of the repair equipment from the shop in France, and one person involved was even trained there, but it's been a very long process.
Currently, the equipment seems to be in Maryland in the care of a person named Nick Williams. The last update I can find from him[2] is a few years old, and expressed concern about the war that had recently begun in Ukraine affecting the supply of electron guns.
tl;dr, it may still be possible to repair some aspects of some CRTs, and doing so is apparently not a completely-lost art -- yet.
No. Repairing phosphors require complete removal of phosphor layers and re-application using basic multi step deposition for RGB strips, on the inner surface of the tube. That's not a shop repair.
Interesting. I still have a bunch showing on my local Facebook Marketplace, but who knows what shape they’re in plus it probably varies a lot from city to city.
I can well imagine that it’s gotten expensive finding a quality one (eg trinitron) of reasonable size.
They are truly dying out. Wish I'd kept my color c64 monitor -- it would probably be worth a lot now (or at least would be awesome to use for retro purposes).
Right but you still have the latency of frame buffers inside the emulator, plus more again when that’s converted out to analog, especially if an HDMI connector is still in the mix— ideally you’d do this on original hardware or at least a PC with a graphics card that has native s-video or VGA outputs.
You only need one pixel worth of RAM to display HDMI input into a CRT. You don't need to buffer the whole thing, at all. Especially if you were driving the tube with your own driving circuit.
That said, yeah, in the special case of an HDMI-driven CRT that was specifically designed with ultra low latency in mind, you could buffer way less than a frame— though I imagine you'd probably want to buffer at least a line at a time just for sanity with the timing of driving the electron gun. And obviously this would depend on the HDMI picture resolution exactly matching that of the CRT.
HDMI is RGB plus clock in 4 differential pairs. Fundamentally you just need 3 shift registers with reset tied to clock. Out comes the signal and you wire that to RGB electron guns through an E24 resistors assortment pack.
LLMs probably don't know enough about them to be useful in this discussion. Classic Google Search would be better. Yours fixating on pixels shows that.
I think the difference here is more that I'm talking about the practical reality of today's display interfaces (both sides have a full frame in memory, typical overall latency is 5-50ms), whereas you're discussing what could be theoretically possible with dedicated emulation hardware that streams out an unbuffered HDMI signal and an HDMI-supporting CRT that operates similar to a modern VRR gaming display.
> "[...] but always stop short because of the monitor issue."
I always stop because of the case and target audience issue. I have no interest in a tower or a pizza box, but I wouldn't be able to resist a well-designed retro industrial workstation-specced x86 machine in a metal wedge-style computer case à la Amiga 600.
There's filters on retroarch for emulating or trying to recreate the appearance of a CRT. I have not personally tried them, but the screenshots are noticeable
> Dosbian is compatible with the following Raspberry Pi models:
I am amazed this doesn't run on literally any Pi since forever, it seems to be limited to Pi 3 and up. I have an old Pi 1B+ that I still use to host all of my websites.
I had it running on something old (a zero I think) playing with old Word Perfect and dbase. I later wanted to do the same and it no longer supported the zero. Must be some update at some point that dropped support. Too bad, I wanted to put the zero in an old mechanical keyboard.
At least I can probably make a throwaway discord account, at worst with a phone number verification. With facebook they demand selfie video of your head, maybe your driver's license probably also your phone number. And maybe they just ban the account after all that anyway.
I'm totally unaware of anything related to Discord or its reputation, other than having joined a PicoCalc server (board? group) and it seems fine. What's up with Discord?
Facebook at least can have public groups that get indexed by the search engines.
since web crawlers can't join non-public group chats, nothing there gets indexed and chats don't show up in web searches. This is opposed to bulletin boards like phpbb or even google groups and listservs where all the messages are submitted to a public repo. This is a choice by discord to give users a feeling of being in a private space, but it's kind of like being in a signal chat, the illusion only holds as long as you know and trust everyone in the group to not just screenshot all of it, so in that sense I appreciate Bluesky's choice to be public first. Somehow no one has rebuilt phpbb on atproto tho, seems like a minor rejiggering of the feeds-of-tweets interface. old forums didn't have threading anyway.
Anyway, it annoys me how there's all these open source projects that ostensibly believe in the mission of open source software, but they're all on proprietary third party hosted discrods when self hosting zulip or element is right there, in this sense facebook is better because
Projects like this are some of my favorite uses for single-board computers. Another one is Bare Metal C64, which aims for low-latency vsynced Commodore emulation on the Pi: https://accentual.com/bmc64/
There is one small difference, BMC64 uses Circle and circle-stdlib to produce a bare metal image and does not rely on a Linux distribution: https://github.com/smuehlst/circle-stdlib
Why not use https://www.freedos.org? Or boot FreeDOS straight from QEMU. Using Debian seems incredibly bloated when the goal is to use DOS. Alpine Linux would be a better base. Then you can use real DOS or a compatible one like FreeDOS.
The Raspberry Pi isn't x86 (or even x86_64) so it isn't compatible -- you have to do (at least) CPU emulation to get a DOS-compatible hardware environment. You probably also want to do other hardware emulation for sound, graphics, etc. to be compatible with DOS software.
Whenever I see stuff like this, the ITX Llama [1], Pixel x86, etc. I think it's finally the time to build my ultimate love-letter to old school DOS and retro computing but always stop short because of the monitor issue.
I feel like a lot of my nostalgia likely stems from the bright super low latency phosphor displays of a proper CRT. No amount of WebGL shaders/filters [2] ever quite seem to capture the original experience IMHO.
[1] https://smallformfactor.net/news/retro-sff-itx-llama-is-a-br...
[2] https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term
I'm the same as you. In my case, the monitor I grew up with was a monochrome screen with a slight sepia hue - I have never been able to find a similar CRT on eBay or elsewhere.
What completes the experience is the sounds, lights and loading times. When I push the power button, I want to hear all the familiar clicks and whirls followed by the loud BIOS POST beep, immediately followed by the sound of the floppy drive coming to life. I do NOT want a flash media drive, I want a slow, mechanical HDD where things actually takes times to load, and you get to hear the familiar disk spinning and access sounds. And the lights, don't forget those little LEDs which accompanied the sounds, like a conductor conducting an orchestra.
And you know what I miss the most? It's the modem. I miss the dialup sounds. I miss being able to tell what speed I'd be getting connected at based on the sounds. I miss the BBSes and telnet servers of the era. And IRC. And the early web, free of bloated modern Javascript. And apps - real apps coded in ASM/C/C++ that prioritised efficiency and produced tiny binaries that ran without needing a million dependencies. And operating systems that fit an entire GUI desktop in 1.44MB...
High-res high-refresh-rate OLEDs with modern shaders are getting close. Now somebody needs to make one that has a convex shape like an old CRT.
I wish we'd reach a point where modern technology allows us to make new CRTs relatively easily. I don't even necessarily care about the image quality, the screens and TVs I used in my youth were never particularly good. But it doesn't seem that this will become feasible in the next few decades.
CRTs were only ever made sense to manufacture on a really big scale, so that costs could be reduced. Early tubes which weren't manufactured on such a scale were accordingly stupid expensive.
I doubt anyone is going to spin up another factory to satisfy the potential demand, since the demand isn't that great to begin with (OLED satisfies most use-cases that CRTs do), and very few people are going to pay $5000+ for a new CRT, and I doubt they're going to be any cheaper than that.
> I wish we'd reach a point where modern technology allows us to make new CRTs relatively easily.
I have 100% confidence that we are at this point, at least for monochrome tubes. Only color tubes would be more complicated.
Shame that the Philips Zeus flat/thin (1cm) screen CRT never made it to market.
Regarding latency, you should be able to do pretty well with a modern 120Hz or 240Hz display.
Faster screen refresh rate improves the pixel switching latency (frame to frame). How do modern OLED screens in Game Mode compare to old CRTs for input latency (cable to screen)?
While oled have 0ms pixel refresh time, input lag is still around 5-10ms.
5ms input lag isn't a dealbreaker. Even the Apple II was around 30ms touch-to-pixel latency, limited by its ~30fps.
https://danluu.com/input-lag/
According to the above, the 2017 iPad pro with Apple Pencil replicated the Apple II's 30ms touch-to-pixel latency, four decades later! (Current M4/M5 models are supposedly 5-10ms, so perhaps a good emulator platform...)
Congratulations, Apple - seriously.
Can’t you still just use a real CRT? Or is it then just back to the latency question?
CRTs wear out with use, so they're only getting rarer by the day. The electronics can mostly be fixed, but the tubes can't. You can extent their lives a bit, but you're only delaying the inevitable. When it's gone (too low brightness, burn-in, bad focus), there's nothing that can be done about it to get it back to the way it was when it was new.
That's almost true, but just almost. Behold: https://colorvac.de/service/
There was some repair available. At very least, the neck could be cut off, and the electron gun bits replaced with new.
According to the Vintage Television Museum near Columbus, Ohio, the last company in the US to be able to do this closed in 2010, and the last one remaining in Europe closed in France in 2013. (I myself don't know if there are any in some other corner of the world.)
The museum did succeed in getting a bunch of the repair equipment from the shop in France, and one person involved was even trained there, but it's been a very long process.
Currently, the equipment seems to be in Maryland in the care of a person named Nick Williams. The last update I can find from him[2] is a few years old, and expressed concern about the war that had recently begun in Ukraine affecting the supply of electron guns.
tl;dr, it may still be possible to repair some aspects of some CRTs, and doing so is apparently not a completely-lost art -- yet.
[1] https://www.earlytelevision.org/crt_project.html
[2] https://www.earlytelevision.org/nick_report_5-1-2022.html
Colorvac.de is in Germany
Every small city used to have a repair shop that could fix them.
Were there really companies repairing the phospher wearing out?
Repairing the tvs, sure, but i find it hard to believe there were repair shops for the issue parent was mentioning.
No. Repairing phosphors require complete removal of phosphor layers and re-application using basic multi step deposition for RGB strips, on the inner surface of the tube. That's not a shop repair.
Re-adjust, not fix.
For me they are weirdly hard to obtain. Don't show up in second hand shops. Ebay shipping is prohibitively expensive.
Interesting. I still have a bunch showing on my local Facebook Marketplace, but who knows what shape they’re in plus it probably varies a lot from city to city.
I can well imagine that it’s gotten expensive finding a quality one (eg trinitron) of reasonable size.
They are truly dying out. Wish I'd kept my color c64 monitor -- it would probably be worth a lot now (or at least would be awesome to use for retro purposes).
They don't show up in second hand shops because their value is essentially negative. If it doesn't sell, you have to pay to dispose it.
Who's spreading that CRT latency thing? Latencies for CRTs are in nanoseconds.
Right but you still have the latency of frame buffers inside the emulator, plus more again when that’s converted out to analog, especially if an HDMI connector is still in the mix— ideally you’d do this on original hardware or at least a PC with a graphics card that has native s-video or VGA outputs.
You only need one pixel worth of RAM to display HDMI input into a CRT. You don't need to buffer the whole thing, at all. Especially if you were driving the tube with your own driving circuit.
Most monitors and TVs do buffer at least a whole frame because of the processing, scaling, etc that they're doing: https://www.rtings.com/monitor/tests/inputs/input-lag
That said, yeah, in the special case of an HDMI-driven CRT that was specifically designed with ultra low latency in mind, you could buffer way less than a frame— though I imagine you'd probably want to buffer at least a line at a time just for sanity with the timing of driving the electron gun. And obviously this would depend on the HDMI picture resolution exactly matching that of the CRT.
HDMI is RGB plus clock in 4 differential pairs. Fundamentally you just need 3 shift registers with reset tied to clock. Out comes the signal and you wire that to RGB electron guns through an E24 resistors assortment pack.
LLMs probably don't know enough about them to be useful in this discussion. Classic Google Search would be better. Yours fixating on pixels shows that.
I think the difference here is more that I'm talking about the practical reality of today's display interfaces (both sides have a full frame in memory, typical overall latency is 5-50ms), whereas you're discussing what could be theoretically possible with dedicated emulation hardware that streams out an unbuffered HDMI signal and an HDMI-supporting CRT that operates similar to a modern VRR gaming display.
There have been some low-latency demos using bare metal development on the raspberry pi. But DOSbian ain't it, which is the topic at hand.
> "[...] but always stop short because of the monitor issue."
I always stop because of the case and target audience issue. I have no interest in a tower or a pizza box, but I wouldn't be able to resist a well-designed retro industrial workstation-specced x86 machine in a metal wedge-style computer case à la Amiga 600.
This is a fun project - https://github.com/mausimus/ShaderGlass
There's filters on retroarch for emulating or trying to recreate the appearance of a CRT. I have not personally tried them, but the screenshots are noticeable
a 500Hz OLED has a much lower latency than a 60Hz CRT
> Dosbian is compatible with the following Raspberry Pi models:
I am amazed this doesn't run on literally any Pi since forever, it seems to be limited to Pi 3 and up. I have an old Pi 1B+ that I still use to host all of my websites.
I had it running on something old (a zero I think) playing with old Word Perfect and dbase. I later wanted to do the same and it no longer supported the zero. Must be some update at some point that dropped support. Too bad, I wanted to put the zero in an old mechanical keyboard.
I'd assume it is 64-bit, which would explain why it is limited to Pi 3 upwards
Shame it doesn’t run on a Pi Zero (or at least a Zero 2).
On the other hand arguably the best DOSBox version now is the new Pure Unleased, just released 2 days ago (Dosbian is using DOSBox Staging)
https://schelling.itch.io/dosbox-pure
https://github.com/schellingb/dosbox-pure-unleashed
Isn't DOSBox Staging better? At least the CRT emulation and audio is.
https://www.dosbox-staging.org/
> Join the official Facebook group […]
Of all the things, why Facebook?
At least is not discord?
I think most people consider discord a much better choice than fb group.
Personally the one or the other makes no difference: I wont use it.
At least I can probably make a throwaway discord account, at worst with a phone number verification. With facebook they demand selfie video of your head, maybe your driver's license probably also your phone number. And maybe they just ban the account after all that anyway.
I'm totally unaware of anything related to Discord or its reputation, other than having joined a PicoCalc server (board? group) and it seems fine. What's up with Discord?
The UX is even worst than facebook groups if that is even possible.
I loathe most of Facebook, but private Facebook groups work enormously better than Discord, IMO. (Public groups are nearly worthless)
Discord is a distracting fidgety visually overloaded place.
Facebook at least can have public groups that get indexed by the search engines.
since web crawlers can't join non-public group chats, nothing there gets indexed and chats don't show up in web searches. This is opposed to bulletin boards like phpbb or even google groups and listservs where all the messages are submitted to a public repo. This is a choice by discord to give users a feeling of being in a private space, but it's kind of like being in a signal chat, the illusion only holds as long as you know and trust everyone in the group to not just screenshot all of it, so in that sense I appreciate Bluesky's choice to be public first. Somehow no one has rebuilt phpbb on atproto tho, seems like a minor rejiggering of the feeds-of-tweets interface. old forums didn't have threading anyway.
Anyway, it annoys me how there's all these open source projects that ostensibly believe in the mission of open source software, but they're all on proprietary third party hosted discrods when self hosting zulip or element is right there, in this sense facebook is better because
So many retro things are on Facebook. It's a stereotype that the GenX/Boomer audience interested in retrotech is on Facebook, but it's kinda true.
Free hosting?
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Projects like this are some of my favorite uses for single-board computers. Another one is Bare Metal C64, which aims for low-latency vsynced Commodore emulation on the Pi: https://accentual.com/bmc64/
There is one small difference, BMC64 uses Circle and circle-stdlib to produce a bare metal image and does not rely on a Linux distribution: https://github.com/smuehlst/circle-stdlib
You’ll like this one: https://cbm-pi1541.firebaseapp.com/
I have an original Pi with BMC64 "permanently" slotted in. It seems to work great, even though I was a Sinclair ZX81/Spectrum kid.
So can I run Kings Quest on it if I get the files from GOG?
SummVM is probably a better option for it - it doesn't need any emulation.
I remember playing KQ6 in ScummVM on a RaspberryPI 1 over 10 years ago.
Was just looking into scummvm today too!
You could also run the remakes of the first three made by AGD Interactive.
https://agdinteractive.com/games/games.html
Woah I did not know about these. Thanks!
You should be able to -- https://www.dosbox.com/wiki/GAMES:King%27s_Quest:_Quest_for_....
Related: https://blog.tmm.cx/2022/05/15/the-very-weird-hewlett-packar...
What features or games are you most excited to explore with Dosbian?
I have an usb floppy disk drive. I wonder if dosbian could boot off it.
Why not use https://www.freedos.org? Or boot FreeDOS straight from QEMU. Using Debian seems incredibly bloated when the goal is to use DOS. Alpine Linux would be a better base. Then you can use real DOS or a compatible one like FreeDOS.
The Raspberry Pi isn't x86 (or even x86_64) so it isn't compatible -- you have to do (at least) CPU emulation to get a DOS-compatible hardware environment. You probably also want to do other hardware emulation for sound, graphics, etc. to be compatible with DOS software.
I was thinking how to “boot to Lode Runner” on my Pi400, so this might be close enough:)
Just add an "autoexec.bat"!
AutoCAD R12 here I come
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