00:00SPEAKER- Did you know you can run your own firmware on Kindles now?
00:03SPEAKER- I just weirdly the other day got a YouTube recommendation
00:07SPEAKERalong the lines of it's time to de-Amazon your Kindle.
00:10SPEAKERSo I guess I did know that.
00:12SPEAKER- Yeah, people were talking about it
00:13SPEAKERin the Discord this morning.
00:14SPEAKERAnd I was, when they first figured out
00:17SPEAKERhow to jailbreak them years and years ago,
00:19SPEAKERI looked at what you could do with the jailbroken Kindle.
00:22SPEAKERAnd it was basically like, you can put Linux on it
00:26SPEAKERand you can run a Sudoku app.
00:27SPEAKERAnd there was some, there was like a version of Snake
00:31SPEAKERor something, and that was pretty much it.
00:33SPEAKER- Yeah, I also have been of the mind
00:34SPEAKERthat it never really seemed worth it.
00:36SPEAKERBut when you mentioned the Snake is on there, I might-
00:38SPEAKER- Well, so I was curious to see,
00:40SPEAKER'cause there's this whole, there's a whole interface
00:42SPEAKERfor like your DRM-free audio books and eBooks
00:46SPEAKERthat you buy from places now.
00:48SPEAKER- Yeah, 'cause that was the big thing, you know,
00:49SPEAKERthe big, what do you wanna call it?
00:51SPEAKERThe DRM kerfuffle of a couple months ago,
00:53SPEAKERthe way that they changed your ability
00:55SPEAKERto get your stuff off of there.
00:56SPEAKER- Well, and there's tools now, kind of like Plex,
01:00SPEAKERbut for eBooks and books and comics in audio bookshelf.
01:05SPEAKERAnd so I was looking at it and I was like,
01:07SPEAKERoh, is this a thing, is this a thing I can do?
01:12SPEAKERAnd then the answer turns out it's no.
01:14SPEAKER- But your model is not capable?
01:16SPEAKER- No, no, no, my model's capable.
01:17SPEAKERThere's like no interface with any kind of external,
01:22SPEAKERlike what I want is a thing that I can put books on my NAS
01:25SPEAKERand then pull them over onto the Kindle
01:27SPEAKERand all the stuff that they have are like,
01:29SPEAKERyo, you can use Glibri and plug it into USB on your computer.
01:33SPEAKERI'm like, no, I'm uninterested in this as a concept.
01:37SPEAKER- You want to use your device to consume media
01:38SPEAKERlike a normal person.
01:39SPEAKER- Yeah, I want something that is painless,
01:42SPEAKEReasy, fast, and cheap.
01:44SPEAKER- And free, not free as in like,
01:47SPEAKERI'm not gonna use the free as in beer thing here,
01:49SPEAKERbut I don't mean free as in no money,
01:51SPEAKERI mean free as in like liberating, right?
01:53SPEAKER- Exactly.
01:54SPEAKER- You can freely be able to put documents onto your device
01:56SPEAKERand consume them.
01:57SPEAKER- Exactly, so anyway, so here we are.
02:00SPEAKERIt's a bad news on the Kindle hacking front, it seems like,
02:05SPEAKERbut I mean, maybe things will change, who knows?
02:09SPEAKER- Well, first of all, I feel like I have got a laundry list
02:11SPEAKERof like six to eight different hacking.
02:13SPEAKERI use hacking in kind of not sneer quotes,
02:16SPEAKERbut goofy quotes here.
02:17SPEAKERLike I'm not actually hacking things,
02:18SPEAKERbut you know what I mean?
02:19SPEAKERLike I'm constantly looking at like,
02:21SPEAKERdid I put open WRT on my UniFi access points?
02:25SPEAKERLike it's the old Linksys custom firmware disease, right?
02:27SPEAKERCarried over to every device you own.
02:29SPEAKERLike I'm constantly looking around at things
02:31SPEAKERand thinking like, what if that RAM and open source thing
02:34SPEAKERthat's made by three people instead of whatever
02:37SPEAKERthe company put on there, but Kindle is on that list
02:39SPEAKERand I have been thinking since I saw that video.
02:41SPEAKER- Once I set Portainer up on my little server guy,
02:46SPEAKERso that running Docker containers is like
02:49SPEAKERa web-based interface instead of me having to remember
02:51SPEAKERsome esoteric commands that I'm never gonna remember
02:53SPEAKERthree months from now.
02:54SPEAKERI've started making all,
02:55SPEAKERI've started asking all sorts of questions like,
02:57SPEAKERhey, can I run Pi-hole in a Docker on my Linux box?
03:01SPEAKERAnd the answer is yes.
03:02SPEAKER- Yes, you can.
03:04SPEAKER- The real answer is probably it's better to have it
03:06SPEAKERjust on a dedicated machine for something
03:08SPEAKERthat both doles out all the IP addresses in my house.
03:11SPEAKER- Okay, check this out.
03:13SPEAKER- Yeah.
03:14SPEAKER- What if your second Pi-hole ran in the Docker container?
03:16SPEAKER- Okay, so I'm gonna go and tell you,
03:18SPEAKERI did get to that point.
03:20SPEAKERI was like, what if I just run the exact same configuration
03:23SPEAKERPi-hole on an x86 box in this Docker container?
03:28SPEAKERAnd then I have redundancy.
03:30SPEAKERSo I have two DNS servers instead of just one.
03:33SPEAKERBut then I realized what would happen though.
03:35SPEAKER'Cause what would happen is I wouldn't realize
03:37SPEAKERthat the first DNS server has gone down.
03:39SPEAKER'Cause it doesn't like, it's like maybe once a year,
03:42SPEAKERI need to reboot the thing.
03:44SPEAKERAnd what would happen then is I wouldn't notice
03:46SPEAKERthat it went down until the second one went down a year in.
03:50SPEAKERAnd so realistically, I'd always have checking the first DNS,
03:54SPEAKERthe DNS is down and DNS would get real slow
03:56SPEAKERfor inexplicable reasons.
03:58SPEAKERAnd nobody would complain about it.
03:59SPEAKERI just be like, man, the internet's really slow.
04:00SPEAKERBut I wouldn't look at it.
04:02SPEAKER- You've uncovered a use case where redundancy
04:04SPEAKERis somehow a net negative.
04:05SPEAKER(upbeat music)
04:20SPEAKER(upbeat music continues)
04:34SPEAKER- Welcome to "Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod."
04:36SPEAKERI'm Will. - I'm Brad.
04:37SPEAKER- Brad, it's time.
04:40SPEAKER- I'm for...
04:42SPEAKER- I did a pregnant pause there, did you catch that?
04:43SPEAKER- I did.
04:44SPEAKER- It's time...
04:45SPEAKER- The anticipation is building here.
04:47SPEAKER- It's time to talk about,
04:49SPEAKERI don't wanna say ill-advised purchases,
04:52SPEAKERbut we try not to fetishize old technology here.
04:57SPEAKER- Yeah, well, maybe you do.
04:59SPEAKEROr we try it unsuccessfully, perhaps.
05:02SPEAKER- Like I dream of a world
05:03SPEAKERwhere I don't fetishize old technology.
05:05SPEAKER- Okay, yes, it's good to have goals.
05:07SPEAKER- Yeah, and about a month ago, I failed.
05:11SPEAKERWe were at the electronics flea market and I bought a...
05:14SPEAKERI saw my childhood TV.
05:16SPEAKERWe talked about this.
05:17SPEAKERI have since plugged it in, hooked up to the mystery.
05:20SPEAKERWe're gonna talk about that today.
05:21SPEAKER- Yes, we're here to talk about CRTs.
05:23SPEAKER- I did a minor repair on it.
05:25SPEAKER- Okay, that's awesome.
05:28SPEAKER- It turns out I like the CRT a lot.
05:30SPEAKERThe colors are real good.
05:31SPEAKERIt's real bright.
05:32SPEAKERAnd I forgot what video games used to look like.
05:34SPEAKER- I wanna draw a line here.
05:37SPEAKER- Yeah, hi.
05:37SPEAKER- In the context of fetishizing old technology
05:39SPEAKERaround the things you grew up with.
05:42SPEAKERI think it is perfectly fine to fetishize the things
05:45SPEAKERthat were formative for you.
05:47SPEAKERAnd maybe not CRTs writ large
05:49SPEAKERor you don't need to own every tape deck ever made,
05:51SPEAKERbut you might wanna own the tape deck
05:53SPEAKERthat you had as a child, right?
05:54SPEAKERWhich is exactly what you've done here.
05:56SPEAKERI've gone the other direction, which we'll also get to.
05:58SPEAKERBut I think as a subcategory of being into old stuff,
06:02SPEAKERbeing into the old stuff that was yours
06:04SPEAKERis perfectly fine and even good.
06:07SPEAKER- So you're saying if I go to eBay right now
06:09SPEAKERand I search for 1981 Kenner at at Walker,
06:15SPEAKERand I look at this and I'm like,
06:16SPEAKER"Oh, this is only, the yellow ones that are classic
06:19SPEAKERare only 200 bucks."
06:20SPEAKER- Acceptable use of funds.
06:22SPEAKER- Oh, I'm gonna have to talk to my wife about this.
06:24SPEAKERI bet she has different feelings.
06:25SPEAKER- Possibly, how big are those things?
06:28SPEAKER- Like two feet tall, they're not that big.
06:30SPEAKER- That's decent, I had a friend
06:32SPEAKERthat had the Millennium Falcon and that thing was large.
06:35SPEAKER- I had, so my, the Star Wars toys that I like,
06:38SPEAKERI had a bunch of, I had a TIE fighter and an X-wing
06:40SPEAKERand an A-wing and all that, B-wing,
06:42SPEAKERall these spaceships, right, the fighters.
06:45SPEAKERBut then the big one that I had was the Millennium Falcon
06:49SPEAKERand I wanted desperately to get an AT-AT.
06:52SPEAKERI think I've told this before,
06:53SPEAKERbut my parents bought me the Ewok Village instead
06:55SPEAKER'cause they thought it was cooler.
06:57SPEAKERThey were like, "Look, it has an elevator,
06:59SPEAKERthere's an escape hatch."
07:00SPEAKERThat AT-AT, all it does is stand there,
07:02SPEAKERit's like the AT-AT is the coolest thing
07:03SPEAKERthat Star Wars has ever made, mom, dad.
07:06SPEAKER- Grit your teeth and say thank you.
07:07SPEAKER- I said thank you and I played with the,
07:10SPEAKERlook, I'll tell you, the Transformers
07:12SPEAKERhad some real adventures in the Ewok Village as a child.
07:14SPEAKERLike Transformers, Star Wars, everybody, big fights there.
07:18SPEAKERBut I always wanted that Kenner AT-AT.
07:22SPEAKEROkay, another hard swerve here,
07:24SPEAKERbut these AT-ATs are all yellow, just like SNESs get.
07:28SPEAKER- Oh, that's- - Yeah.
07:30SPEAKER- I've been sifting, we'll get into this,
07:31SPEAKERI've been sifting through old consoles all week
07:33SPEAKERand that yellow plastic is a particular form of ick for me.
07:38SPEAKERIt's like it triggers something,
07:39SPEAKERsomething stomach-turning when I see it.
07:41SPEAKER- Well, Wes Fanlon, back in the tested days,
07:44SPEAKERdid a thing about how to fix this.
07:46SPEAKERIt has to do with de-brominating or something.
07:49SPEAKER- Yeah, I think, isn't the process colloquially
07:51SPEAKERcalled retrobriting, I think, if you want to look it up.
07:53SPEAKERAlthough I think that's like spelled with zero
07:55SPEAKERand B-R-I-T-E, if you're Googling this,
07:57SPEAKERit's not how you would normally expect it to be spelled.
08:00SPEAKERIt'll only look retrobrite. - Perfect.
08:03SPEAKERBut it also tends to make the plastic a little more brittle,
08:07SPEAKERwhich probably doesn't matter for your SNES,
08:09SPEAKERbut on something as thin as these old Kenner toys, it might.
08:13SPEAKER- Yeah, my Super Nintendo's got it really bad.
08:15SPEAKERThe front of my Dreamcast, not the back for whatever reason,
08:18SPEAKERwhich normally the entire panel,
08:20SPEAKERor the entire piece of plastic kind of yellows consistently.
08:24SPEAKERBut on my Dreamcast, the entire top,
08:26SPEAKERwhich again is one piece of plastic,
08:28SPEAKERis like on the front is yellowed.
08:30SPEAKERIt might've been like a sun exposure thing.
08:32SPEAKER- Yeah, maybe, maybe, that's weird.
08:35SPEAKERBut we're not here to talk about plastic
08:36SPEAKERand yellowing and all that stuff today.
08:38SPEAKERAlthough we are gonna talk about old stuff.
08:39SPEAKERWe're gonna talk about CRTs, cathode ray tubes.
08:41SPEAKER- Yeah, not broadly.
08:43SPEAKERThis is not gonna be like your one-stop shop
08:45SPEAKERfor all things CRT.
08:46SPEAKERI think this is gonna be much more hands-on.
08:48SPEAKERLike you and I both obtained CRTs recently
08:50SPEAKERand have been messing with them.
08:52SPEAKERAlthough CRT is from very different eras.
08:54SPEAKERSo this is more of like a,
08:55SPEAKERI think that this will be more of a hands-on report.
08:57SPEAKERJust kind of like, here's all the goofy stuff
08:59SPEAKERwe've had to get into to work with these.
09:01SPEAKER- Yeah, a trip report.
09:02SPEAKERSo I was at the flea market, I bought this CRT.
09:05SPEAKERIt's the one, it's literally the same TV I had as a kid.
09:09SPEAKERRight, like the one that my Nintendo and my TI-99-4A
09:13SPEAKERand later my SNES were all hooked up to.
09:15SPEAKERI got a different TV when I went to college.
09:17SPEAKERI got like a 19 inch Sharp that's in deep storage
09:21SPEAKERin the city that I kind of want to go dig out now,
09:26SPEAKERactually, after this whole experience.
09:28SPEAKER- Wait, you have a storage unit here?
09:30SPEAKER- Yeah, I have a storage unit.
09:31SPEAKER- Really?
09:32SPEAKER- Well, I lived in a 400 square foot apartment
09:34SPEAKERwhen I first moved here.
09:34SPEAKERSo I've had a storage unit for 20 years now,
09:37SPEAKERwhich I don't, let's not talk about that too much.
09:39SPEAKER- How often do you visit your storage unit?
09:41SPEAKER- Twice a year.
09:42SPEAKER- Really?
09:42SPEAKERJust to check in? - Yeah, probably.
09:43SPEAKER- Wait, just keep an eye on things or?
09:45SPEAKER- So for a long time, we kept like Christmas decorations
09:47SPEAKERand stuff there.
09:49SPEAKERAnd then not so much that, but of late,
09:52SPEAKERit's been going to, like we're trying to clear out
09:55SPEAKERthe one in the city, honestly,
09:56SPEAKERbecause it's a pain to get to, it's pretty small.
09:59SPEAKERIt's in an ancient building.
10:01SPEAKERAnd like, I'd rather have one that's closer to the house
10:05SPEAKERthat I don't have to drive for 30 minutes to get to.
10:08SPEAKERSo we've been gradually emptying it out is the kind of TLDR.
10:12SPEAKERBut it's mostly stuff that was like when I moved
10:15SPEAKERfrom a four bedroom house into a 400 square foot apartment,
10:17SPEAKERdidn't fit anymore, which is an incredibly stupid thing
10:21SPEAKERto store for an extended period of time.
10:23SPEAKERSo anyway, we don't need to talk about that too, too much.
10:27SPEAKERBut what I do want to, so the TV is a GE,
10:29SPEAKERit's an 11 inch GE RF only set,
10:32SPEAKERwhich means it does not have an RCA plug
10:35SPEAKERor even a coaxial plug.
10:37SPEAKERIt has four screws on the back,
10:39SPEAKERtwo leads for VHF and two leads for UHF.
10:42SPEAKER- Sorry, can I stop you and have you read the model number?
10:45SPEAKER- Yeah, you want the model number?
10:45SPEAKERIt's the General Electric 10, alpha beta,
10:49SPEAKER3406, whiskey, foxtrot 02.
10:53SPEAKER- Rolls off the tongue.
10:54SPEAKER- Yeah, let me tell you, the nice thing is, very searchable.
10:58SPEAKERThere was one page on the internet with information about it
11:01SPEAKERand it had no, nothing of value.
11:05SPEAKERThe GE page recognized it as a GE part number,
11:08SPEAKERlike the GE part number lookup recognized it
11:11SPEAKERas a GE serial number or model number format,
11:14SPEAKERbut didn't have any information about it.
11:15SPEAKER'Cause it's from like 1984, '85.
11:17SPEAKER- Oh, was it that recent?
11:18SPEAKERI was thinking like mid '70s or something.
11:21SPEAKER- No, so I think, so I could for $22
11:25SPEAKERbuy a photo fact original manual,
11:30SPEAKERwhich contains schematics, voltages, waveforms,
11:33SPEAKERcomponent location guides, parts list,
11:35SPEAKERand adjustments covering this particular model of TV,
11:39SPEAKERbut I didn't want to pay $22 for that.
11:41SPEAKER- Kind of pricey for a manual.
11:43SPEAKERIt really is crazy though.
11:44SPEAKERLike this is one of those rare Google searches
11:45SPEAKERwhere you put that, like you said,
11:47SPEAKERyou put that number into Google,
11:49SPEAKERfour results come back, like literally four pages
11:52SPEAKERand that's it on the entirety of Google.
11:55SPEAKER- Yeah, it's, well, I mean,
11:57SPEAKERit is a random series of letters and numbers,
11:59SPEAKERbut yeah, so it's an 11 inch TV.
12:02SPEAKERIt's got real good clicky volume knob that turns it on.
12:05SPEAKERIt's got a VHF and UHF knob, but it's got one of those,
12:09SPEAKERI don't know, I had forgotten this,
12:11SPEAKERbut it has a two stage knob.
12:12SPEAKERSo it has one that is like a big chunky knob
12:15SPEAKERthat clonks and goes from channel to channel.
12:18SPEAKERSo for like from U to two to three to four
12:21SPEAKERup to 13 or whatever.
12:22SPEAKERAnd then inside that knob, there's a little dial
12:25SPEAKERthat you can use to like fine tune the tuning
12:28SPEAKERto get it on exactly the frequency they want.
12:33SPEAKERSo you get a real nice clean picture
12:35SPEAKERif there was any analog TV anymore.
12:37SPEAKER- Yeah, we had a TV with that exact same knob
12:38SPEAKERand it may have also been a GE,
12:40SPEAKERbut I don't know how common that was generally
12:42SPEAKERfor analog TVs of that era, that specific,
12:44SPEAKERthat little kind of knob within a knob for fine tuning.
12:47SPEAKER- This is the only TV we had that had that,
12:49SPEAKERwell, actually, you know what, that's not true.
12:51SPEAKER'Cause I think our Philco set in the living room,
12:53SPEAKERthe 19 inch, that was the family TV had a big chunky knob.
12:57SPEAKERAnd then I think you had another little dial
12:59SPEAKERon the outside of the knob that you could turn
13:01SPEAKERto tune it in.
13:02SPEAKERMaybe this is what all pre-digital click TVs had.
13:06SPEAKER- Maybe, I'm sorry, Philco still to me,
13:09SPEAKERjust sounds like a fake company
13:10SPEAKERfrom Ren and Stimpy or something.
13:12SPEAKER- Isn't Philco Phillips company?
13:14SPEAKER- Is it?
13:16SPEAKER- Philco is an American electronics manufacturer
13:18SPEAKERheadquartered in, oh, it's short
13:19SPEAKERfor the Philadelphia Battery Company.
13:21SPEAKER- Okay, sure.
13:23SPEAKER- A pioneer in battery radio and television production.
13:26SPEAKERIt was purchased by Ford, renamed Philco Ford,
13:29SPEAKERsold to GTE in 1974 and was purchased by Phillips in 1981,
13:33SPEAKERwhich became a subsidiary of the Dutch company Phillips
13:36SPEAKERin 1987.
13:38SPEAKERIn North America, the Philco brand is owned by Phillips
13:40SPEAKERand other markets, it's owned by Electrolux.
13:44SPEAKER- Electrolux also sounds like a fake company name.
13:47SPEAKER- Electrolux is one of the great,
13:49SPEAKERthat was the thing that happened in the '60s, right?
13:51SPEAKERThey started jamming, if you had standard oil company,
13:56SPEAKERwas your name, you'd rename it to Esso,
13:57SPEAKER'cause it was short for, but you spell it out.
14:01SPEAKERElectrolux is one of those, I believe,
14:05SPEAKERit's a Swedish company originally.
14:07SPEAKER- Do they make vacuums?
14:08SPEAKERI wanna say we might've had an Electrolux vacuum
14:09SPEAKERwhen I was a kid.
14:11SPEAKER- Electrolux was famous for bag vacuums specifically.
14:14SPEAKER- Sure.
14:16SPEAKERDoes the TV also have the combination power on
14:20SPEAKERand volume knob?
14:21SPEAKER- Yeah, it makes the best click.
14:23SPEAKER- Yes, like it's a little knob
14:25SPEAKERand it's got an extremely meaty click
14:27SPEAKERwhen you turn it to the right to turn the TV on,
14:28SPEAKERbut then you keep turning it to turn the volume up.
14:30SPEAKER- In fact, I'm actually gonna drag it in here
14:32SPEAKERafter we record and I'll record some samples
14:35SPEAKERof the clocks and the clicks so that I can put them in,
14:38SPEAKER'cause it's unlike anything.
14:39SPEAKERI'd forgotten, like I think I talked about this before
14:43SPEAKERon either here or one of the other podcasts,
14:45SPEAKERwhen my daughter was exposed to the knob for the first time,
14:49SPEAKERshe was like, this is the best thing I've ever seen in my,
14:51SPEAKERlike, this is the best feeling control
14:53SPEAKERI've ever touched in my life.
14:54SPEAKERIt's got very good knob feel, although maybe I shouldn't.
14:57SPEAKER- Look, you can't contest the knob feel, Brad.
15:01SPEAKER- No, I suppose not.
15:02SPEAKERI'm gonna put a call out right here.
15:04SPEAKERThis is where I'm going to put the click sounds
15:05SPEAKERthat you send me, just for an easy venue in this edit.
15:24SPEAKER- Behold the glory of the clicks.
15:27SPEAKER- Yeah, right?
15:27SPEAKERIt's like, and I'll be like, hey, it's a click
15:30SPEAKERand then it's a kachunk and let you know which one's which.
15:33SPEAKERThe UHF knob also makes a good turn.
15:35SPEAKERNo reason to use any of that anymore,
15:36SPEAKER'cause it's all cell phone.
15:37SPEAKERIt's all 5G now or 4G, LTE, whatever.
15:40SPEAKER- I think the inputs on this thing
15:42SPEAKERare the interesting part to me or the lack thereof,
15:44SPEAKER'cause I don't think I remember ever having a TV
15:47SPEAKERthat didn't at least have a coaxial input for RF on it.
15:51SPEAKERSo what does this have exactly?
15:52SPEAKER- This has two screws for UHF and two screws for VHF.
15:57SPEAKERSo in order to convert the coaxial,
15:59SPEAKERyou have to have a transformer.
16:01SPEAKERAnd that transformer is a 75 ohm to 300 ohm adapter
16:05SPEAKERthat converts the coaxial to the two U-shaped hooks
16:12SPEAKERthat go into those screws.
16:16SPEAKERAnd I just took, normally you'd put those on
16:18SPEAKERin addition to the antenna in the old days,
16:22SPEAKERbut I just took the antenna off 'cause there's no signal.
16:25SPEAKERSo it doesn't matter.
16:26SPEAKERWe're channel three only here, baby.
16:28SPEAKER- And when you say screws,
16:29SPEAKERI mean like these are literally screws
16:30SPEAKERthat you can screw in and out on the set.
16:32SPEAKERLike you're just kind of-
16:33SPEAKER- They are standard flat screws
16:35SPEAKERwith a little square metal pad underneath
16:38SPEAKERthat has a connection.
16:39SPEAKERI'll take a picture.
16:40SPEAKERYou can use this for show art if you want.
16:42SPEAKER- And you just insert the wire and almost like,
16:45SPEAKERI mean, there's a similar like screw in terminal
16:47SPEAKERon the back of a lot of like AV receivers
16:49SPEAKERfor speaker wire, right?
16:50SPEAKERLike same kind of deal.
16:52SPEAKER- No, those have a specific name.
16:56SPEAKERThis is literally just a flat screw
16:59SPEAKERwith a metal pad underneath it.
17:01SPEAKERAnd you want to mash the U-shaped connector
17:03SPEAKERon this transformer into that.
17:05SPEAKERSo then, because I have to be able to get the analog out
17:10SPEAKERfrom the mister, we'll talk about that in a minute,
17:14SPEAKERbut the analog out from the mister, I'm using RCA
17:17SPEAKERjust because it's the easiest thing I can get in.
17:20SPEAKERAnd to convert the RCA into the RF signal
17:23SPEAKERthat this TV needs to generate picture,
17:26SPEAKERI'm using an old VCR.
17:27SPEAKER- Of course, the classic.
17:29SPEAKER- Yeah.
17:29SPEAKER- It's the classic maneuver.
17:30SPEAKERIt's just a shove of an old VCR in the chain.
17:32SPEAKER- Yep, but to hit that TV VCR button, it all works.
17:35SPEAKERAnd it's funny because my kid's been playing games on this
17:40SPEAKERand I don't think she still knows how to turn it on
17:42SPEAKERbecause it's like, first you got to turn on the TV,
17:44SPEAKERyou got to make sure it's on channel three,
17:45SPEAKERthen you got to turn on the VCR,
17:47SPEAKERmake sure it's on TV/VCR.
17:49SPEAKERMake sure the channel on the VCR is set to AV
17:53SPEAKERbecause the AV comes in the RCA ports.
17:55SPEAKERAnd then you got to turn on the mister and navigate
17:58SPEAKERwith all the weird mister controls to get into the thing.
18:01SPEAKER- Most of that sounds doable for a kid.
18:02SPEAKERI mean, even turning the TV on like the knob stuff
18:04SPEAKERis tactile and you can figure that out.
18:06SPEAKERI bet it's the channel requirements
18:07SPEAKERthat are what would throw a child
18:09SPEAKERwho was born in the 21st century.
18:11SPEAKERLike it's like, who today has experience of TVs
18:14SPEAKERneeding to be on the right channel for signals to work
18:17SPEAKERor you know what I mean?
18:18SPEAKER- Yeah, now when you turn on,
18:19SPEAKERlike when you put your switch into the dock
18:21SPEAKERand hit the button, it just, everything gets set up for you.
18:24SPEAKERYou don't need a harmony remote now.
18:25SPEAKERYou know, it just, it just works.
18:28SPEAKERWell, and also like, I think I've done a bad
18:31SPEAKERwith my mister configuration
18:33SPEAKERin terms of how I opened the mister menus
18:36SPEAKERusing the game pads.
18:38SPEAKER'Cause I hit like up and start on the game pad
18:41SPEAKERin order to open the mister menu.
18:43SPEAKERI don't remember where I set that at this point.
18:46SPEAKER- Oh, that is, that's rough.
18:47SPEAKERYeah, you can put that just on a single button press
18:50SPEAKERif you have enough buttons on your controller.
18:52SPEAKER- So I don't have enough buttons on my controller
18:53SPEAKERis the problem.
18:54SPEAKER- Yeah.
18:55SPEAKER- Yeah, so it has to be a cord.
18:56SPEAKER- That's kind of the kind of the mister,
18:58SPEAKERI guess the mister control recommendation
19:00SPEAKERI've always found is like, you kind of always want like
19:02SPEAKERnice controller plus one in terms of number of buttons.
19:05SPEAKERLike you need all the buttons you need for the games
19:07SPEAKERplus at least one or two extras for menu type stuff.
19:10SPEAKER- Well, we're mostly playing SNES and NES stuff right now.
19:13SPEAKERSo it's all like, I'm using those 8BitDo SN30
19:17SPEAKERlike the ones that don't have the analog sticks.
19:19SPEAKERIt's just like a SNES controller shaped game pad.
19:22SPEAKER- Yeah, that does put you at kind of a disadvantage.
19:23SPEAKERI use a, I use a DualShock 4 mainly for mine,
19:26SPEAKERwhich has the like the little PS,
19:28SPEAKERlittle PlayStation button is my menu button
19:30SPEAKER'cause it's an extra, works well.
19:32SPEAKER- That makes sense.
19:33SPEAKERSo yeah, anyway, so that's that.
19:36SPEAKERI ended up upgrading the mister in order to get this to work
19:38SPEAKER'cause I had a digital output on it before
19:41SPEAKERand I didn't want to do,
19:43SPEAKERI didn't want to add the latency of an HDMI to analog.
19:47SPEAKERLike I don't have a retro tinker,
19:49SPEAKERone of those, you know, one of the fancy DHDM-ers
19:53SPEAKERand I didn't want to buy a cheap one
19:55SPEAKER'cause they had latency
19:56SPEAKERand the cables I needed to do it the cheap way
19:59SPEAKERwere $8 less than just replacing the IO board on my mister
20:04SPEAKERwith one of the fancy new ones.
20:06SPEAKERI don't know if you've seen it,
20:08SPEAKERbut Mr. Addons has added a two new IO board options.
20:14SPEAKERThere's an analog one and a digital one.
20:16SPEAKERThe digital one also does analog,
20:19SPEAKERwhich is important to note.
20:20SPEAKERThe analog one is really cool, especially for you,
20:23SPEAKERbecause you can hook it,
20:24SPEAKERyou can have the analog going simultaneously
20:27SPEAKERwith the digital.
20:28SPEAKERSo like if you wanted to stream an old game,
20:29SPEAKERyou could put HDMI out into your capture card,
20:32SPEAKERbut play the game on your TV, which is like,
20:35SPEAKERI remember when Dan Reichert tried to do that
20:37SPEAKERwith Punch Out at Giant Bomb 10 years ago
20:40SPEAKERand poor Jason had to do like some heavy duty
20:44SPEAKERvideo engineering work to get that to happen.
20:46SPEAKER- We ran into the same thing
20:47SPEAKERwhen I was streaming Super Mario Brothers 2,
20:49SPEAKERthe Japanese version,
20:50SPEAKERlike the original brutally punishing one.
20:53SPEAKER- The Lost Levels, you mean?
20:54SPEAKER- Yes, the Lost Levels.
20:55SPEAKERWe had to pull that out of the studio,
20:57SPEAKERbig matrix switcher chain
20:59SPEAKER'cause I was adding enough latency
21:00SPEAKERthat I was just like missing very obvious jumps
21:03SPEAKERin that game and stuff,
21:03SPEAKER'cause those games have zero tolerance for latency.
21:07SPEAKER- As an aside on that, there's a really good,
21:10SPEAKERI think the Celeste developers did a,
21:13SPEAKERhey, here's why some platforms feel hard
21:16SPEAKERand some feel easy,
21:17SPEAKERand they showed all the ways
21:18SPEAKERthat like modern platformers cheat
21:19SPEAKERto make sure that you land the jumps
21:21SPEAKERthat you should by rights miss.
21:23SPEAKER- Yeah, that's like a,
21:24SPEAKERif it's the same Twitter thread
21:26SPEAKERI'm thinking of that you're talking about,
21:27SPEAKERthat's like a canonical thread of game development Twitter,
21:30SPEAKERwhere they went through like a bunch of like,
21:33SPEAKERthere needs to be a term for this
21:34SPEAKER'cause games have been doing this
21:35SPEAKERsince time immemorial, right?
21:36SPEAKERBut the little like invisible sort of like usability tweaks,
21:40SPEAKERI guess I would say,
21:41SPEAKERor like fudging things, like you said,
21:42SPEAKERit was like, oh, you know,
21:43SPEAKERif you're within six pixels of making a jump,
21:45SPEAKERwe just have you make the jump,
21:46SPEAKEReven though you technically would have missed it by rules.
21:50SPEAKER- Yeah, and when you play,
21:51SPEAKERthat's the big thing for her.
21:52SPEAKERShe's been playing Super Mario Brothers.
21:54SPEAKERIt doesn't fudge jumps.
21:57SPEAKER- Only if you miss, you just straighten the hole.
21:59SPEAKER- NES games definitely were by the book.
22:02SPEAKER- Yeah.
22:03SPEAKER- Yeah, I did look at the,
22:04SPEAKERthose Mr. Atons boards that he has come out with actually,
22:08SPEAKERfor reasons I'll get into,
22:09SPEAKERbut the IO direct board is the one you're talking about.
22:11SPEAKERThat's like, it's like a digital IO board,
22:13SPEAKERbut it also can do analog out
22:15SPEAKERbecause it uses a little bridge,
22:16SPEAKERlike literally uses, I guess that's the one you got, right?
22:19SPEAKERIt's the uses a little HDMI bridge
22:21SPEAKERfrom the HDMI out on the Mr. to an HDMI in on this thing,
22:25SPEAKERand then it converts it to the Saturn plug.
22:28SPEAKER- So that's exactly it.
22:29SPEAKERYeah, it uses the Saturn 10 pin mini din,
22:31SPEAKERwhich I believe we rated as a D in our rating of connectors,
22:35SPEAKERbut it's, and you can get a bunch of different tails for it.
22:38SPEAKERI just bought the,
22:39SPEAKERlike they sell one that has like VGA
22:41SPEAKERand component and the whole deal.
22:45SPEAKERI just bought the $10 RCA only one
22:49SPEAKER'cause that's what I had the option for.
22:51SPEAKER- Yeah, I priced out this whole setup too.
22:53SPEAKERI thought about, I ended up going a much cheaper route
22:56SPEAKER'cause I turned out to have basically 90%
22:59SPEAKERof what I needed already.
23:00SPEAKERBut yeah, I was looking at like a,
23:02SPEAKERit's like 50 bucks for that board.
23:03SPEAKERThe Saturn plug to every connector
23:06SPEAKERyou would ever need the cable is like 35 bucks.
23:09SPEAKER- 35 bucks, yeah.
23:09SPEAKER- Like need a new power supply to run the whole thing on.
23:12SPEAKERSo it was gonna be like a hundred bucks,
23:13SPEAKERwhich is like, nah, not nothing.
23:15SPEAKER- So I'm just running it on a normal USB.
23:18SPEAKERI have a 25 watt Anker power brick.
23:23SPEAKERThat's plugged into it, it's running fine.
23:27SPEAKERBut yeah, so I ended up going to the digital one also
23:28SPEAKERbecause it lets you keep both memory sticks in.
23:31SPEAKERI ended up through,
23:33SPEAKERbecause when we did the original Mr. episode,
23:36SPEAKERI bought my Mr. card from a guy in Portugal
23:40SPEAKERwho had a really hard time shipping.
23:42SPEAKERAnd the shipping during the pandemic was slow.
23:45SPEAKERSo I'd given up on it.
23:46SPEAKERI just ordered a new memory stick.
23:48SPEAKERAnd then like two days after the new one arrived,
23:49SPEAKERthe first one finally got here.
23:51SPEAKER- I remember the saga.
23:52SPEAKERI too am an owner of Portuguese Ram.
23:54SPEAKER- Yeah.
23:55SPEAKER- I think that's ultimate Mr. is the vendor in Portugal.
23:58SPEAKER- I think so, yeah.
23:59SPEAKER- I found his stuff to be quite good.
24:00SPEAKER- But the upshot was I ended up with two Ram sticks.
24:02SPEAKERAnd when we got to cores that could use two Ram sticks,
24:05SPEAKERI was good to go.
24:06SPEAKERSo I just jammed them in there.
24:08SPEAKERAnd I decided like the ability to run analog
24:11SPEAKERand the main difference that I could tell on these
24:14SPEAKERwas that on the analog board,
24:15SPEAKERyou can only run one memory stick,
24:17SPEAKERbut you can simultaneously pipe video out
24:20SPEAKERthe analog outputs and HDMI.
24:22SPEAKER- That's correct.
24:23SPEAKER- Which is really cool for people like you
24:28SPEAKERthat stream old games, less useful for me,
24:32SPEAKERwho's mostly just gonna sit in front of a TV
24:34SPEAKERand play old games.
24:35SPEAKER- To be clear, the ability to get analog
24:37SPEAKERand digital video out at the same time
24:39SPEAKERis way more useful day to day than two Ram sticks.
24:43SPEAKER- Yeah.
24:43SPEAKER- Like for people who don't know,
24:46SPEAKERlike the most you're getting out of dual Ram at this point
24:48SPEAKERis like slightly higher accuracy in a couple of cores.
24:51SPEAKER- Actually, I think the Saturn core still does work.
24:55SPEAKERThey're fairly substantially better with two.
24:57SPEAKER- I think the 32X core, I haven't looked in a while,
25:01SPEAKERbut last time I looked,
25:02SPEAKERthe 32X core was one of those ones
25:04SPEAKERthat was weirdly complicated and needed more Ram too,
25:06SPEAKERbecause of the way they composite stuff
25:09SPEAKERbetween the Saturn and the 32X bits.
25:12SPEAKER- Yeah, we should say there have been some arcade cores
25:14SPEAKERand I believe the Jaguar core that is forthcoming
25:17SPEAKERwhere they are talking like it's going to require two Ram.
25:20SPEAKER- Why does the Jaguar core require two Ram sticks?
25:23SPEAKER- Look, man, it's the only 64-bit game in town
25:26SPEAKERat the time, right?
25:28SPEAKER- God, that thing is so, okay.
25:29SPEAKERWell, anyway, we don't have to get into that, but yeah.
25:31SPEAKER- The extra Ram requirement is just a latency thing.
25:34SPEAKERIt's just that they need more memory bandwidth
25:36SPEAKERto work with than one stick can provide.
25:38SPEAKERSo maybe the Jaguar was doing some, who knows?
25:42SPEAKER- Yeah, it had some really fast SD Ram.
25:45SPEAKERSo yeah, so a couple of things that I had
25:47SPEAKERwhile I was going.
25:48SPEAKEROne is that I love that they shipped the service manual
25:51SPEAKERon this TV.
25:52SPEAKERIt's just, it's like, it's in a little plastic cubby
25:54SPEAKERthat's built into the frame of the TV on the back.
25:58SPEAKERIt has a note that says, "This is the service manual.
26:00SPEAKERIt's only accessible for inside the case.
26:02SPEAKERDo not open if you're an end user."
26:04SPEAKER- What?
26:05SPEAKER- Yeah.
26:06SPEAKER- Wait, so can you see it in there or like?
26:08SPEAKER- Yes, you can see it,
26:09SPEAKERbut the hole is too small to pull it out.
26:11SPEAKER- So what, is there some specialized tool
26:13SPEAKERyou need to get it open?
26:14SPEAKER- Well, no, you just unscrew it.
26:15SPEAKERBut like, people knew not to unscrew TVs
26:18SPEAKER'cause there's shit in there that would kill you.
26:19SPEAKER- Oh, okay, this was an honor system thing?
26:22SPEAKER- Yeah, this is a straight up,
26:23SPEAKERhey, the repair tech isn't gonna have the manual
26:25SPEAKERfor every TV.
26:26SPEAKERSo we're just chipping our TV with the manual built in.
26:29SPEAKER- That's smart.
26:30SPEAKER- It's like, it's really clever.
26:33SPEAKERAnd the fact that it's there in a window
26:34SPEAKERthat you can see it says,
26:35SPEAKERhey, you know, if I'm the repair tech,
26:37SPEAKERI know what to do without having to like phase one,
26:40SPEAKERopen the back of this thing.
26:41SPEAKER- Right, and it actually was useful in a world
26:43SPEAKERwhere independent third-party TV repair actually existed
26:46SPEAKERand that isn't so much a thing anymore.
26:49SPEAKER- And you couldn't just type 100-AB-3406-WF02 into Google
26:54SPEAKERand get a $22 manual for the TV,
26:56SPEAKERwhich just to be clear is half of what I paid for the TV.
26:58SPEAKER- Yeah, but you're just reminding me though
27:00SPEAKERof driving around town as a kid in the '80s
27:02SPEAKERand just seeing like TV repair shops all over the place
27:04SPEAKER'cause that used to be a thing.
27:06SPEAKER- Yeah, the appliance repair guy would come out.
27:09SPEAKERNow the appliance repair guy comes out
27:10SPEAKERand he charges you 500 bucks.
27:12SPEAKERHe looks at the dishwasher.
27:12SPEAKERHe's like, yeah, you should just replace that dishwasher.
27:15SPEAKERLike, thank you for the five.
27:16SPEAKERThat was an incredible use of my money and time.
27:18SPEAKERThank you.
27:19SPEAKER- At least seems to be the universal advice these days
27:21SPEAKERis just buy a new one.
27:22SPEAKER- Well, anyway, so the picture was a little jumpy though,
27:27SPEAKERout of the box.
27:28SPEAKERSo I talked to a friend of the show, Steve Lynn,
27:30SPEAKERand was like, hey, this feels like I should just take
27:33SPEAKERthe knob off and blast some contact cleaner situation.
27:36SPEAKERAnd he's like, yeah, that's exactly what I would do first.
27:38SPEAKERHe's like, if you have to replace the knob switch,
27:42SPEAKERthe switch inside the knob, it's gonna be complicated
27:45SPEAKERand a pain in the butt.
27:47SPEAKERBut usually contact cleaner just does this.
27:49SPEAKERAnd so I took it off, got a can of contact cleaner.
27:52SPEAKERI blasted it right on the switch,
27:53SPEAKERturned the switch around a few times,
27:55SPEAKERturned the tuning dial around a few times.
27:57SPEAKERWorks like a charm.
27:58SPEAKER- Great. - Yeah.
27:59SPEAKER- Love a quick fix.
28:01SPEAKER- Yeah, it's the easiest thing I've fixed in like in years.
28:04SPEAKERSo I think that's it.
28:06SPEAKERI think that's the whole thing.
28:07SPEAKER- I've got a question about maintaining your TV
28:09SPEAKERand also my TV, which is let's say at least 20 years
28:14SPEAKERnewer than yours, if not 25.
28:17SPEAKERBut I don't know if the question is relevant
28:18SPEAKERto both TVs or not.
28:19SPEAKERAnd I guess I'll just ask now,
28:21SPEAKERsince we're still talking about your TV,
28:22SPEAKERthis could be like highly electrically ignorance.
28:26SPEAKER- Yes.
28:27SPEAKER- Are there capacitors in that TV?
28:28SPEAKERThere are, right?
28:29SPEAKERIt's like we're using like normal modern style
28:32SPEAKERof capacitors and TVs at that time, right?
28:36SPEAKER- I don't know if they're huge capacitors,
28:38SPEAKERbut there will absolutely be scary capacitors inside.
28:41SPEAKERLike the reason you don't take TVs apart,
28:42SPEAKERif you don't know what you're doing
28:43SPEAKERis that there are scary capacitors
28:45SPEAKERin almost everything with a cathode ray tube.
28:47SPEAKER- Right.
28:47SPEAKERYeah, I don't know.
28:48SPEAKERI'm way out over my skis on asking questions like this
28:51SPEAKER'cause I barely understand this stuff.
28:52SPEAKERBut like you're getting into territory with CRTs now
28:55SPEAKERwhere they're old enough that you see
28:56SPEAKERa lot of people talk about replacing the capacitors
28:59SPEAKERbecause as they age and give out,
29:01SPEAKERit affects the quality of the image, right?
29:03SPEAKERLike it causes actual issues with the video output
29:07SPEAKERor display.
29:08SPEAKER- And there's for popular TVs for like the PVTs
29:11SPEAKERand stuff like that that people use
29:12SPEAKERfor a lot of classic game stuff.
29:14SPEAKERAnd for arcade monitors,
29:16SPEAKERthere's a lot of guidance about how to do that.
29:18SPEAKER- Right.
29:19SPEAKERThat's what I was wondering.
29:20SPEAKERBut again, that question is,
29:23SPEAKERyour TV is a quarter of a century older than mine probably.
29:25SPEAKERSo they're in different categories
29:27SPEAKERor phases of their lifespan.
29:29SPEAKERBut I'm just wondering like when do you know it's time
29:31SPEAKERto start replacing capacitors?
29:33SPEAKER- Well, fundamentally the capacitors
29:36SPEAKERshould last a really long time
29:37SPEAKERunless there was some sort of mechanical
29:39SPEAKERor chemical defect in them
29:40SPEAKERwhen they were manufacturing them, right?
29:41SPEAKERIt's like, you don't have to replace,
29:45SPEAKERlike we think about capacitor failures
29:49SPEAKERbecause there have been multiple famous failures
29:52SPEAKERof noteworthy capacitors.
29:54SPEAKER- Yes, I am sitting here laughing
29:55SPEAKERbecause my TV came out in 2002,
29:57SPEAKERwhich I think is right around that territory
30:01SPEAKERthat the bad capacitor plague took place.
30:03SPEAKER- Yeah, Microsoft or Nvidia or Microsoft
30:07SPEAKERput a bunch of bad capacitors on Enforce motherboards
30:09SPEAKER'cause they were a little bit cheaper than the other ones.
30:12SPEAKERThe clock capacitor on the original Xbox
30:14SPEAKERis another classic example.
30:16SPEAKERThere's a bunch.
30:17SPEAKERAnd what happens generally is they get swollen
30:19SPEAKERand then leak and then the shit that they leak
30:21SPEAKERis real bad for motherboards and causes cascading failures.
30:25SPEAKERSo you wanna, like if you have an original Xbox,
30:28SPEAKERyou wanna clip that clock capacitor off now,
30:30SPEAKEReven if you're not gonna put a new one on.
30:33SPEAKERIf you have an Enforce motherboard,
30:35SPEAKERjust upgrade your computer
30:36SPEAKERand put that in e-waste at this point.
30:38SPEAKER- Yeah, I was just holding my Enforce motherboard
30:41SPEAKERthree days ago as a matter of fact.
30:43SPEAKER- Oh my God, Brad.
30:44SPEAKER- I've had, we were off at Nexlander this week.
30:46SPEAKERMy dual projects have been,
30:48SPEAKERA, I went and bought eight big new nice plastic storage bins
30:53SPEAKERand have been unloading closets and boxes
30:55SPEAKERand kind of reorganizing and consolidating old stuff.
30:58SPEAKER- I do, I can't help but notice that there is an arcade stick
31:01SPEAKERwith a green ball top behind you.
31:04SPEAKER- Hang on, are we just gonna do a live pan
31:06SPEAKERthis camera around the room?
31:07SPEAKER- Oh wow, I didn't realize you could do this.
31:09SPEAKEROoh, that's a nice cable coils.
31:12SPEAKER- A lot of the stuff is in bins already.
31:14SPEAKER- I love it.
31:14SPEAKERYour bins are the best.
31:16SPEAKERDo those seal, do those top seal on those?
31:18SPEAKER- They're not waterproof.
31:20SPEAKER- But they're like, the air won't get in.
31:23SPEAKER- I think we might've talked about this
31:24SPEAKERback with the hurricane business a few months ago
31:27SPEAKER'cause I went and bought,
31:28SPEAKERin fact, I bought the same type of bins here
31:29SPEAKERthat I bought back home a few months ago
31:30SPEAKER'cause I wanted them all to be stack compatible.
31:33SPEAKER- Oh yeah, that's important.
31:34SPEAKER- You know, at some future date
31:36SPEAKERwhen all these bins live in the same place
31:37SPEAKERbut when I was picking out those bins a few months ago,
31:40SPEAKERI did find waterproof ones that,
31:41SPEAKERwhat's the industry standard waterproof rating?
31:44SPEAKERIt's like IPV or whatever.
31:45SPEAKER- IP something, something, yeah.
31:47SPEAKERLike they had a literal numerical rating
31:49SPEAKERon these bins at the store
31:51SPEAKERthat were in fact airtight and fully sealed
31:53SPEAKERbut they were way more expensive.
31:55SPEAKER- Well, so I don't know if you want,
31:56SPEAKERlike where we live, where I live,
31:58SPEAKERI don't know that you want airtight
31:59SPEAKERjust because you don't,
32:01SPEAKERif you do that then you have to put in like silica gel
32:04SPEAKERor something to suck the moisture out because it's wet.
32:07SPEAKER- I don't know if these were actually fully airtight
32:09SPEAKERbut they were supposed to be waterproof at least.
32:10SPEAKER- Okay, okay.
32:12SPEAKER- Anyway.
32:13SPEAKER- Did I see a Nintendo 64 over there
32:14SPEAKERunderneath your TV, Brad?
32:15SPEAKER- Yes, well, not under the TV.
32:17SPEAKERThere is an N64 in one of these bins behind me.
32:19SPEAKERYou did not see it on the floor though.
32:21SPEAKEROn the floor, there's a GameCube and a PS2 Slim
32:25SPEAKERand my Mr. Rat's Nest.
32:26SPEAKERSo yeah, my two projects this week
32:28SPEAKERwere A, start going through all these bins
32:30SPEAKERwhich has necessarily had me handling things
32:33SPEAKERlike an Enforce motherboard
32:34SPEAKERand my original Xbox and GameCube and stuff.
32:37SPEAKERAnd the other project was get the CRT working finally
32:40SPEAKERwith the Mr. and some of this other stuff.
32:42SPEAKERSo I guess I'll talk about my TV a little bit.
32:45SPEAKER- Yeah.
32:46SPEAKER- It's a Toshiba 14AF42, see?
32:49SPEAKER- Oh yeah, the 14AF42, that's a classic.
32:51SPEAKER- Nice and pronounceable, you know,
32:53SPEAKERlike a good modern TV model number.
32:55SPEAKER- Is it a 14, is it 14AF?
32:58SPEAKER- You jest, but the 42 actually turns out
33:01SPEAKERto have been a highly desirable model
33:02SPEAKERbecause they made 43 through 46 after this.
33:06SPEAKERIt was, they made 41 through 46 total for this line.
33:09SPEAKERApparently the 43s and on,
33:11SPEAKERthey switched to a different jungle chip, I want to say.
33:15SPEAKERIs that the right term?
33:16SPEAKER- Is this Dota business again?
33:18SPEAKERAre we getting back into jungling?
33:19SPEAKER- No, it's not.
33:20SPEAKERI think it's like an RGB thing.
33:21SPEAKERIt's like, okay, I have now just Googled jungle chip.
33:25SPEAKERAnd in fact, an integrated circuit found
33:26SPEAKERin most analog TVs in the 1990s.
33:28SPEAKERIt takes a composite video signal
33:30SPEAKERfrom the radio frequency receiver electronics
33:32SPEAKERand turns it into separate RGB outputs, okay.
33:35SPEAKER- Okay, so this is the big difference
33:37SPEAKERbetween your TV and my TV.
33:38SPEAKER'Cause my TV is designed to take a,
33:43SPEAKERsignals from the airwaves, radio waves,
33:46SPEAKERand it uses those signals with analog circuits
33:50SPEAKERto change the position of the electron gun
33:53SPEAKERin such a way that colors and pictures come out of the tube.
33:58SPEAKER- Yes.
33:59SPEAKER- Like it is directly reading the airwaves.
34:02SPEAKERYours is doing some magic with computers.
34:04SPEAKER- Some slightly more advanced video processing
34:06SPEAKERgoing on inside this TV.
34:08SPEAKERSo, this thing is a highly desirable TV.
34:11SPEAKERIt's only 14 inches, but it has composite S-video
34:16SPEAKERand component on it.
34:18SPEAKER- Holy shit, component on a TV from that era
34:20SPEAKERis impressive, yeah.
34:21SPEAKER- Or a TV that size is the main thing.
34:23SPEAKERLike you did not see component on TVs
34:25SPEAKERprobably smaller than like 27 inches back then,
34:27SPEAKERor maybe 20, I don't know, but like.
34:29SPEAKER- I think the first TV I had component on
34:31SPEAKERwas that 36 inch Panasonic tube.
34:34SPEAKERAnd that was so you could do the anamorphic squeeze
34:36SPEAKERon that bad boy.
34:37SPEAKER- Ah, the anamorphic squeeze.
34:38SPEAKERMagic, the first day.
34:39SPEAKER- Can we talk about the anamorphic squeeze for a sec?
34:41SPEAKER- Ah, the anamorphic squeeze was pretty.
34:43SPEAKERI never quite understood what was going on electronically
34:47SPEAKERinside the TV when you did this,
34:48SPEAKERbut it was basically like late era CRTs
34:52SPEAKERhad higher resolution than, you explain it.
34:56SPEAKER- Okay, so what you were doing was
34:58SPEAKERyou were using the entire resolution of the TV
35:01SPEAKERfor the rendered picture on a letterbox image.
35:05SPEAKERSo on a standard DVD 480p resolution,
35:12SPEAKERthey would have a square picture.
35:14SPEAKERAnd if it was widescreen,
35:15SPEAKERthe top third or top eighth and bottom eighth, whatever,
35:19SPEAKERthe black bars would be burned into the video, right?
35:22SPEAKERThey'd be baked into the video.
35:23SPEAKEROn anamorphic discs, they used all of the lines
35:27SPEAKERfor the picture.
35:28SPEAKERSo you got more image data,
35:30SPEAKERbut your TV had to know what to do with it
35:32SPEAKERor your DVD player had to know what to do with it.
35:33SPEAKERAnd either-
35:34SPEAKER- 'Cause otherwise it came out looking vertically stretched.
35:37SPEAKER- Tall and stretched, it looks like coneheads.
35:38SPEAKER- Right, 'cause it was in fact stretched on the disc.
35:41SPEAKER- Yeah, see pixels weren't square.
35:43SPEAKERSo on a TV that knew what to do,
35:45SPEAKERit would take all of those pixels, all that image,
35:48SPEAKERand scrunch it in and put the black bars in
35:51SPEAKERjust by not aiming the electron gun there.
35:54SPEAKERAnd you'd get a higher quality picture,
35:57SPEAKERimperceptibly higher quality picture.
35:59SPEAKER- I thought it was pretty perceptible.
36:01SPEAKER- I will tell you, on all the other TVs I saw it on,
36:06SPEAKERI was unimpressed until I got that 36 inch Panasonic.
36:09SPEAKERAnd I was like, okay, I kind of get it.
36:11SPEAKER- Yeah.
36:12SPEAKER- Like that size, it makes a difference.
36:13SPEAKER- My roommate in college in the dorm
36:15SPEAKERspent like all of his money on an ICV at some point.
36:18SPEAKER- Hell yeah.
36:19SPEAKER- Like basically just saved and like went without eating
36:24SPEAKERor whatever, like he bent his will
36:25SPEAKERtoward getting a nice TV for a room.
36:27SPEAKER- We all were in college at one point
36:30SPEAKERand we're like, you know what?
36:31SPEAKERIf I can buy a semester's worth of ramen
36:34SPEAKERand Chef Boyardee for $47,
36:38SPEAKERand that means I'll have $550 left from my meal plan
36:42SPEAKERthat I can use to buy a new video card
36:44SPEAKERor whatever studentship we bought at the time.
36:47SPEAKER- I think it was a Sony Vega.
36:48SPEAKERAnyway, that was right in the heyday of DVDs getting big.
36:50SPEAKERAnd that was the first place I ever saw
36:52SPEAKERthe anamorphic squeeze and it was a revelatory moment,
36:56SPEAKERI will say.
36:58SPEAKER- So anyway, okay.
36:59SPEAKERSo your, I bet your TV doesn't do the squeeze
37:02SPEAKERjust because of-
37:03SPEAKER- I don't, I doubt it.
37:04SPEAKERI highly doubt it.
37:05SPEAKER- Because of the size, yeah.
37:06SPEAKER- I don't think so.
37:07SPEAKERThis was a sidewalk find as a matter of fact.
37:10SPEAKERActually, I hope he doesn't mind me saying
37:12SPEAKERSteve Lin was my generous benefactor on this TV.
37:15SPEAKERHe found this TV on the sidewalk.
37:17SPEAKER- Wow, we found my TV in a parking lot.
37:20SPEAKER- Yeah, technically, but it was being-
37:22SPEAKER- It was at a swap meet, I guess, so.
37:25SPEAKER- It was the object of commerce at that point.
37:26SPEAKERYou know, like they wanted money for it.
37:28SPEAKERThis thing was just sitting there.
37:29SPEAKER- Wow, that's pretty good.
37:31SPEAKER- And he's the type of guy to rescue a CRT
37:33SPEAKERfrom the sidewalk when he sees one.
37:35SPEAKER- Look, I know that there,
37:36SPEAKERwe have multiple listeners in the audience
37:38SPEAKERwho will pick up a sidewalk TV, a CRT, should they see one?
37:43SPEAKER- So I kind of started Googling around
37:44SPEAKERand like reading some Reddit stories after he gave me this,
37:46SPEAKERjust kind of seeing what other people do.
37:48SPEAKERAnd like, it's a thing.
37:49SPEAKERLike you can find these fairly regularly,
37:52SPEAKERlike, especially if you go to e-waste places,
37:53SPEAKERbut even just on the sidewalk,
37:55SPEAKERthere's plenty of stories on Reddit of people
37:58SPEAKERsometimes finding like very valuable old TVs,
38:01SPEAKERbut you'll frequently, you'll see things like,
38:03SPEAKERoh, they had cut the power cable off of it.
38:05SPEAKERAnd so I had to like put a new power cord in.
38:06SPEAKER- Why would you do that?
38:07SPEAKER- Or stuff like that.
38:09SPEAKER- The heck's wrong with you putting it on the sidewalk?
38:12SPEAKERThe nice thing is they're pretty easy to fix
38:16SPEAKERfor the most part, even if they're broken, right?
38:18SPEAKERAssuming you don't kill yourself on the capacitors.
38:20SPEAKER- Yes, I mean, I think you definitely, like, okay,
38:22SPEAKERmaybe we should just say anybody listening to this
38:24SPEAKERwho's never opened a CRT before,
38:25SPEAKERplease look up what to do if you open a CRT.
38:28SPEAKER- Yeah, the good news is there's a lot of YouTube videos.
38:30SPEAKERI watched a bunch of them before I decided
38:31SPEAKERI wasn't gonna do it and was gonna take it over
38:34SPEAKERto Steve's house and ask him for help if I wanted to do that.
38:38SPEAKERAnd then the contact cleaner worked,
38:39SPEAKERso I don't have to worry about it.
38:40SPEAKER- I need to learn how to discharge a CRT properly
38:43SPEAKERat some point.
38:44SPEAKER- I watched Vinny do it on a joust machine
38:46SPEAKERin the basement of the old whiskey media office
38:48SPEAKERback in the day.
38:49SPEAKERAnd it was real scary.
38:50SPEAKER'Cause like he touched a screwdriver to two things
38:52SPEAKERand it made a really loud noise
38:54SPEAKERand his arm whammed back into space
38:56SPEAKERand it was all he could do to hold onto the screwdriver.
38:58SPEAKERAnd I was like, I don't know, no thank you.
39:00SPEAKER- Yeah.
39:01SPEAKER- Unsubscribe.
39:02SPEAKER- Yes, anyway, he found it on the sidewalk.
39:04SPEAKERThe infrared sensor did not work on it.
39:09SPEAKER- Does it have buttons?
39:10SPEAKER- It only has power on channel and volume on the front.
39:13SPEAKERSo you can't change inputs without a remote on this TV.
39:16SPEAKERSo you can see why. - Oh, that sucks.
39:17SPEAKER- You can see why somebody probably junked it
39:19SPEAKERwhen they realized they could no longer switch inputs.
39:21SPEAKER- Yeah.
39:23SPEAKER- He sourced a new IR receiver for it,
39:24SPEAKERwhich he said at this point
39:25SPEAKERit was getting pretty hard to find.
39:26SPEAKERLike you could find the part number for what you need,
39:29SPEAKERbut finding the actual part is getting tough.
39:31SPEAKERSo I think he said he bought like five of them just in case.
39:34SPEAKER- Wow.
39:35SPEAKER- But so he did replace the IR receiver
39:37SPEAKERand had to source a new remote.
39:38SPEAKERObviously there was no remote on the sidewalk
39:42SPEAKERand got it working.
39:43SPEAKERAnd then later on.
39:45SPEAKER- Is this the one that he replaced
39:47SPEAKERwith the TV that he bought when I bought my bad TV?
39:50SPEAKER- Yes, he got that TV on when you bought,
39:51SPEAKERthe same day you bought your old TV
39:53SPEAKERat the flea market last month.
39:54SPEAKERAnd this was his like test bench fixing old consoles,
39:57SPEAKERjust like test screen kind of thing.
40:00SPEAKERSo he didn't need this one anymore when he got that PVM.
40:03SPEAKERSo it very generously found its way to my house.
40:06SPEAKER- Wow.
40:07SPEAKER- So I went through the same process you did
40:09SPEAKERof once I had the TV ready to go,
40:11SPEAKERlike staring at the mister, trying to think like,
40:13SPEAKERwhat's the best way to get video out of this thing
40:14SPEAKERinto this TV?
40:15SPEAKERAnd obviously in my case, I had a lot of options
40:17SPEAKER'cause S-Video component, there's a lot of stuff I could do.
40:21SPEAKER- That's a lot.
40:22SPEAKER- It's a lot.
40:23SPEAKERThe mystery project, like you go to the compatibility site
40:26SPEAKERand there's like a giant matrix.
40:27SPEAKERI'm sure you've seen this table, right?
40:29SPEAKEROf like connector types, signal types,
40:32SPEAKERbecause like it's not just, you know,
40:33SPEAKERlike S-Video is not a signal or S-Video is a signal type,
40:36SPEAKERsorry, but like over component, for example, or VGA,
40:40SPEAKERyou've got like RGB, I think RGSB is another one.
40:44SPEAKERThere's like multiple flavors of RGB.
40:46SPEAKERThere's whatever comes out of component, which is,
40:49SPEAKERI've never known how to pronounce this.
40:50SPEAKER- YP-
40:51SPEAKER- YPBR.
40:52SPEAKER- Yeah.
40:53SPEAKER- Is how it's the actual-
40:54SPEAKER- It's chroma luminance in one other,
40:57SPEAKERI can't remember what the other one is, blacks maybe.
41:00SPEAKERWe talked about this on the video episode.
41:01SPEAKERI can't, it's just, it's gone from my head.
41:03SPEAKER- I don't know if there's a way to pronounce that,
41:05SPEAKERthat is not just the letters.
41:08SPEAKERAnyway, like figuring out what you can get out of a mister
41:10SPEAKERover different connection types
41:12SPEAKERand what will be accepted by your average TV
41:15SPEAKERis kind of complicated.
41:16SPEAKER- It like, and it's not just complicated from a,
41:19SPEAKERlike you have to, in the old days of analog video,
41:22SPEAKERyou basically like plug the yellow wire into the yellow wire
41:25SPEAKERor the red wire to the red wire,
41:26SPEAKERthe white wire to the right wire and it worked.
41:28SPEAKER- That was kind of, yes,
41:29SPEAKERthat was the extent of what I did back in the day basically.
41:32SPEAKER- Yeah, with this, you have to like set up the mister,
41:35SPEAKERthe software in the mister to output the right video
41:37SPEAKERusing the right output.
41:39SPEAKERAnd it was, it's fairly intense.
41:41SPEAKER- Yeah, it makes you realize there was way,
41:43SPEAKERway more going on under the hood
41:44SPEAKERof getting video out of stuff back in the day
41:47SPEAKERthan you realize.
41:48SPEAKER- Except also it just kind of worked.
41:49SPEAKER- Well, sure.
41:50SPEAKER- So, so yeah, the, the component stuff is chroma
41:54SPEAKERis the other thing, is the other output.
41:56SPEAKERSo it's luminance chroma and Y, whatever Y is, anyway.
42:01SPEAKER- So I, like I said, I looked at that mister add-on stuff
42:04SPEAKERand I was like, ah, this is,
42:06SPEAKERthis is not intended to be my permanent analog mister setup.
42:09SPEAKERThis is just, I just want to kind of get a quick
42:10SPEAKERand dirty output going to play around with it.
42:12SPEAKERCause I want to get, you know,
42:13SPEAKERthere's a lot more interesting mister products coming out
42:16SPEAKERthese days that have got analog stuff built into them.
42:19SPEAKERSo I kind of want to get one of those for,
42:22SPEAKERfor my more permanent setup.
42:24SPEAKERSo I was just looking for something quick and cheap here.
42:26SPEAKER- Do you have a case for your mister or just,
42:28SPEAKERare you raw dogging it still?
42:29SPEAKER- No, remember, remember you laser cut me
42:31SPEAKERsome nice little acrylic plates for the top and bottom,
42:35SPEAKERlike a fan mount.
42:36SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.
42:37SPEAKER- So I've still just got the open,
42:38SPEAKERI've got the open PCB stack still.
42:41SPEAKER- And do you, do you have a, do you have an analog,
42:43SPEAKERdo you have an input board on top?
42:44SPEAKER- Oh no, so I've, I've never had an IO board
42:46SPEAKERcause I've never had an info one before.
42:48SPEAKER- You want my old one?
42:49SPEAKER- Well, sure, if you're looking to get rid of it.
42:52SPEAKER- Yeah.
42:53SPEAKER- I don't know if I'd, well, we'll talk later.
42:55SPEAKERI might use it, I'm not sure if I would,
42:57SPEAKERI'll have to think about how that would fit.
42:59SPEAKER- Decide it's available if you want it,
43:01SPEAKERit's just going to age in my garage.
43:03SPEAKER- It might get, you'll take it to the storage locker
43:05SPEAKERand then it will get way better.
43:07SPEAKER- 20 years from now, people are going to be like,
43:08SPEAKERwhat the hell is this weird thing?
43:09SPEAKER- The thing will be ripe.
43:11SPEAKER- Yeah, ready to go.
43:12SPEAKER- Yeah, so, so the Mr. also, they added a feature
43:15SPEAKERthree, four years ago, like later into the project
43:18SPEAKERcalled direct video that lets you actually get analog video
43:21SPEAKERout of the HDMI port.
43:23SPEAKER- That's amazing.
43:23SPEAKER- Which I know sounds crazy.
43:24SPEAKERI have no idea what kind of magic they're doing,
43:26SPEAKERsending signals on different HDMI pins or whatever.
43:29SPEAKER- Well, so there's an HDMI,
43:31SPEAKERthere's always been an HDMI to analog option
43:34SPEAKERas part of the spec, yeah.
43:36SPEAKER- Oh, I didn't know that.
43:36SPEAKER- So you used to be able to get an HDMI adapter.
43:39SPEAKERIt's part of the back compatibility stuff.
43:42SPEAKERSo you used to really get like HDMI to VGA adapters
43:44SPEAKERand stuff like that.
43:45SPEAKER- That's exactly what I bought here.
43:46SPEAKER- Oh yeah.
43:47SPEAKER- This is what I ended up doing.
43:48SPEAKERSo in fact, that's how that feature is intended to be used.
43:51SPEAKERWhen you turn on direct video, you need exactly that,
43:54SPEAKERan HDMI to VGA adapter.
43:56SPEAKERBut that ties back into the different signal types
43:58SPEAKERthat I was talking about earlier,
43:59SPEAKERwhere I think all you're getting out of VGA at that point
44:02SPEAKERis RGB, so you need something that can take RGB,
44:04SPEAKERwhich this TV cannot.
44:06SPEAKERDoes that make sense?
44:07SPEAKER- Yeah.
44:08SPEAKER- Like what I'm saying is,
44:09SPEAKERI couldn't just get this VGA adapter.
44:11SPEAKER- Oh, 'cause you need YPBP-Y.
44:15SPEAKER- So you couldn't just get a dumb passive VGA
44:20SPEAKERor DB9 to component adapter and feed that into the TV,
44:25SPEAKER'cause it's a signal that the TV can't understand.
44:28SPEAKERSo you would need yet another converter box
44:30SPEAKERto convert that into component coming out of the VGA, right?
44:34SPEAKERWhat I ended up doing is I have,
44:36SPEAKERI actually have a little S-video converter,
44:39SPEAKERVGA to S-video that was made by Mr. Add-ons
44:41SPEAKERthat Steve let me have
44:43SPEAKERwhen he was offloading some of this stuff.
44:45SPEAKERBut that thing takes power,
44:46SPEAKERlike I don't get any image out of it
44:48SPEAKERunless I have to power that off a USB brick,
44:50SPEAKERbecause it is doing some active something.
44:54SPEAKER- That is happening.
44:55SPEAKER- Comb filter, I don't know,
44:56SPEAKERsome kind of encoding is turning the RGB VGA signal
44:59SPEAKERinto S-video somehow as it passes through that thing.
45:02SPEAKER- Weird.
45:03SPEAKER- Anyway, it is a fairly ugly Frankenstein's mess
45:06SPEAKERof HDMI to VGA, VGA to little box, box to S-video.
45:11SPEAKERYou know, it's a lot.
45:12SPEAKER- Okay, so the cables are a problem, right?
45:15SPEAKER'Cause I have power, I have the multiple audio,
45:18SPEAKERthe audio, the yellow, red, white RCA's going into the VCR.
45:25SPEAKERAnd then I have a big giant long coax cable
45:28SPEAKERgoing from the VCR to the TV.
45:31SPEAKERBut I also have a bunch of USB cables
45:34SPEAKERgoing to the controllers,
45:35SPEAKER'cause I'm not using wireless on any of those,
45:37SPEAKER'cause wireless is kind of a pain in the butt
45:40SPEAKERin all of these contexts.
45:41SPEAKERAnd also it feels weird to stand there
45:43SPEAKERand use a SNES controller
45:45SPEAKERand not have it be plugged into the thing
45:47SPEAKERthat you're talking to,
45:48SPEAKEReven though I realize that we're past that
45:50SPEAKERin the 21st century.
45:54SPEAKERI don't know that there's a solve for the wire problem.
45:56SPEAKER- Yeah, I don't think so.
45:58SPEAKERI mean, the solve is carve out some space behind the TV
46:01SPEAKERwhere you can tuck it away and not have to see it,
46:03SPEAKERand then you can just press buttons and stuff.
46:04SPEAKER- Well, sure.
46:05SPEAKERIf you need to interact with it, that's a bigger problem.
46:08SPEAKER- Just as a point of clarification,
46:10SPEAKERthe HDMI legacy analog compatibility requires devices
46:15SPEAKERthat know how to export VGA analog signals out through HDMI.
46:21SPEAKER- Interesting, okay.
46:22SPEAKER- They're not, like all HDMI ports aren't good
46:25SPEAKERwith the HDMI to VGA adapter.
46:26SPEAKERThis was the part I wanted to look up
46:28SPEAKERto make sure I got right.
46:29SPEAKER- Okay, I had no idea that was part of the spec.
46:31SPEAKERI thought that was just some kind of like ground up
46:33SPEAKERwitchcraft that the mystery developers had concocted.
46:36SPEAKERI didn't realize that was something
46:37SPEAKERthey were piggybacking on.
46:38SPEAKER- No, in the early days of HDMI,
46:40SPEAKERand when you'd get video cards that had HDMI,
46:42SPEAKERoften you'd have either a DVI,
46:44SPEAKERwhich like DVI does have that built into the spec, right?
46:46SPEAKERLike you can get a passive DVI to VGA cable
46:50SPEAKER'cause there are analog pins inside the DVI cable.
46:54SPEAKER- Right.
46:55SPEAKERIn this case though, your adapter has to go with a device
47:00SPEAKERthat knows how to use the adapter.
47:01SPEAKERAnd the adapters may be specific to devices
47:04SPEAKERthat I don't know.
47:05SPEAKERAnyway, so how is it?
47:07SPEAKERAre you enjoying it?
47:08SPEAKER- Looks great, yeah.
47:09SPEAKERIt's like, I mean, I've had, it's been, God,
47:11SPEAKERalmost five years since I put my MiSTer together
47:13SPEAKERright around five years.
47:14SPEAKERSo it's not like a new thing or whatever,
47:16SPEAKERbut like there's something more transportive
47:19SPEAKERabout playing it on the type of screen
47:21SPEAKERthat it was made to be played on, right?
47:22SPEAKEROr the games were made to be played on.
47:23SPEAKERLike I can play old arcade games all I want
47:26SPEAKERon these nice modern digital LCD screens.
47:31SPEAKERThere's something that enhances the feeling
47:34SPEAKERof getting away with something illicit, you know?
47:36SPEAKERWhen I'm playing like Ninja Turtles or The Simpsons
47:39SPEAKERor you name it, like any game
47:42SPEAKERthat you pumped quarters into back in the day,
47:44SPEAKERlike playing it on an actual CRT in your house feels like,
47:47SPEAKERoh wow, like my 10-year-old dream
47:51SPEAKERof owning a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles machine.
47:53SPEAKERIt's like kind of being realized here.
47:55SPEAKERWell, I mean, you're not wrong.
47:57SPEAKERThere's a, the thing I noticed before I did anything else
48:02SPEAKERwas how even when the dial was kind of janky still,
48:07SPEAKERlike the colors are intense, like really, really bright,
48:12SPEAKEReven compared to like my nice OLED 4K monitor and all that.
48:17SPEAKERAnd as I was setting up the MiSTer to work on the TV,
48:20SPEAKERI had it plugged into the capture card on my computer
48:22SPEAKERand I was running it on the screen, on this nice OLED,
48:26SPEAKERand I put that screen view, the screen window
48:30SPEAKERthat we talked about a couple of weeks ago,
48:32SPEAKERup on top of it, and it looks really nice.
48:34SPEAKERLike it looks good, it has good scan lines,
48:37SPEAKERthe whole thing, everything you want.
48:39SPEAKERBut damn, when you plug it into the real TV,
48:41SPEAKERit's pretty amazing.
48:42SPEAKERNow, one of the things that's interesting on mine
48:45SPEAKERis when I, I aimed the high-speed camera on my phone at it
48:49SPEAKERjust to see what, see if I could see scan lines
48:51SPEAKERto show the kiddo how it worked.
48:53SPEAKERAnd they're diagonal, so there's like a diagonal bar,
48:57SPEAKERwhich I assume is the blanking, is the blank,
49:00SPEAKERis the blank screen, the blank passes
49:02SPEAKERthat you're seeing or something, I don't know.
49:04SPEAKERIt's really weird, it's not like anything I've seen before.
49:07SPEAKERIt's also only 240 hertz camera,
49:09SPEAKERso it might be that it's not fast enough
49:11SPEAKERto pick it up reliably, but.
49:14SPEAKER- One thing I found is that I had most of the cores
49:17SPEAKERthat I use regularly, I had turned on a bunch of the fake,
49:22SPEAKERyou know, scan line and shadow mask type stuff,
49:24SPEAKERlike a lot of the video processing.
49:26SPEAKERIt's supposed to replicate the look of a CRT,
49:28SPEAKERand I had forgotten about that,
49:29SPEAKERso as I was playing all these things on this TV
49:31SPEAKERfor the first time, I had to remind myself like,
49:34SPEAKERoh wait, I'm overlaying a bunch of fake scan lines
49:36SPEAKERand fake shadow mask patterns on top of a real TV
49:39SPEAKERthat has real physical versions of that stuff,
49:41SPEAKERso I could turn all that stuff off.
49:44SPEAKER- I went through and made sure I had the right audio chip
49:47SPEAKERfor the RNS and Genesis that I had.
49:51SPEAKERI declared Mr. Bankruptcy when I started out on this.
49:55SPEAKERI kept, my ROM stuff was all organized and right,
49:58SPEAKERbut I wiped out the settings folder
49:59SPEAKERand just started from scratch
50:00SPEAKERbecause it had been long enough.
50:03SPEAKERAnd like, it's been, so my Mr. goes through intense periods
50:08SPEAKERof use and then ages for six or eight months at a time.
50:10SPEAKER- That'll happen.
50:12SPEAKER- So like the last time I probably got into it
50:14SPEAKERwas when the PS1 core was new.
50:16SPEAKER- Okay.
50:17SPEAKER- Maybe the N64 core.
50:18SPEAKER- It's been a couple of years.
50:19SPEAKER- And it's been a minute.
50:21SPEAKERSo like, it was nice to come in
50:23SPEAKERwith a relatively fresh start.
50:25SPEAKERNow, configuring all the cores
50:28SPEAKERand having to dig a keyboard and stuff out
50:30SPEAKERto make it all work was a little bit of a hassle.
50:32SPEAKER- Yes, actually that brings me to,
50:33SPEAKERI can't believe I was about to forget this,
50:35SPEAKERbut the troubleshooting phase of getting this thing working.
50:39SPEAKER- Yeah, so mine just worked.
50:41SPEAKER- Yeah, yours, because you did the sensible thing
50:44SPEAKERand got the all-in-one board
50:45SPEAKERthat kind of just does all this for you.
50:47SPEAKER- Well, no, I still had to set up in the Mr. NE,
50:49SPEAKERI had to set up the resolution and all that stuff, right.
50:52SPEAKERBut in that, but like I did that on the computer
50:55SPEAKERand then I moved it into the other room with the TV.
50:56SPEAKERAnd when I plugged it in, it just, I was really shocked.
50:59SPEAKERI was expecting to have a real back and forth
51:01SPEAKERand a pain in the ass.
51:02SPEAKER- Well, what I mean is I went the direct video route
51:04SPEAKERwhere I've just had to go buy a,
51:05SPEAKERI bought a just a $10 Ugreen HDMI to VGA adapter,
51:08SPEAKERbut there's all kinds of conflicting info out there
51:10SPEAKERabout which adapters work and which don't.
51:12SPEAKERAnd then when I was going through this extra
51:15SPEAKERkind of little encoder dongle to turn it into S-video,
51:17SPEAKERlike it just introduced all kinds of extra variables
51:20SPEAKERthat might or might not work based on like exactly
51:23SPEAKERwhat ship is in this VGA adapter I got.
51:26SPEAKER- So this is literally, I was reading these how-tos
51:29SPEAKER'cause you had recommended that you had said,
51:30SPEAKERhey, you can do this.
51:31SPEAKERAnd Steve pointed me to her a couple of things
51:33SPEAKERand the Mr. Jan will help me with similar info.
51:36SPEAKERAnd I looked at it all and I was like,
51:37SPEAKERif I end up buying three VGA to HDMI adapters,
51:40SPEAKERI might as well have just bought the Mr. add-ons board.
51:43SPEAKER- That was my fear.
51:43SPEAKERThat was exactly it.
51:44SPEAKERAnd even, you know, you can return stuff.
51:46SPEAKERIt's not the end of the world if it doesn't work.
51:48SPEAKER- But it's a hassle.
51:49SPEAKER- But that was the thing.
51:50SPEAKERIt was just like, oh man,
51:51SPEAKERlike I've got some time off this week.
51:52SPEAKERI really just want to play with this thing.
51:53SPEAKERI don't want to cycle through three or four adapters,
51:56SPEAKERtrying to find one that works.
51:57SPEAKERAll of this is a preamble for me saying,
52:00SPEAKERwhen I finally got all this stuff hooked up
52:01SPEAKERand started trying to make it work,
52:04SPEAKERwhat I was getting, it's kind of hard to,
52:05SPEAKERI actually posted a video on the Discord
52:07SPEAKERif you want to go look at it,
52:07SPEAKERbut it's kind of hard to describe.
52:08SPEAKERI was getting like sort of three images
52:12SPEAKERof the image side by side.
52:13SPEAKERAll scrolling horrors are vertically, very rapidly.
52:16SPEAKER- Yeah, that seems bad.
52:17SPEAKER- It was like, okay, well maybe I just got a bad adapter
52:19SPEAKERor like one that is not compatible
52:20SPEAKERwith whatever the Mr. is doing.
52:22SPEAKERI spent like most of a morning trying to troubleshoot stuff.
52:26SPEAKER- Do you have to just switch the component cables?
52:28SPEAKER- Trying to figure out what was going on with this thing.
52:30SPEAKERIt finally got to the point where I could not find help
52:32SPEAKERanywhere else, so I ended up on the actual Mr. Discord
52:34SPEAKERin the help channel, posting a video there.
52:37SPEAKERPeople were going like, oh, I've got that same equipment.
52:39SPEAKERLike I haven't seen that, that's weird.
52:41SPEAKERCan you post your INI file?
52:43SPEAKER- Yeah.
52:44SPEAKER- And I was like, sure, I drag it in there.
52:47SPEAKERThe person who's helping me,
52:48SPEAKERthe very top of the INI file,
52:50SPEAKERit's like kind of a classic INI
52:52SPEAKERwhere it's arranged into sections.
52:54SPEAKEREach section name goes in brackets.
52:57SPEAKERThe person was like, can you add a bracket
53:00SPEAKERat the beginning of the first line?
53:02SPEAKER- Oh my God, really?
53:03SPEAKER- And I was like, are you fucking kidding me?
53:05SPEAKERAre you actually serious right now?
53:07SPEAKERSomehow in tweaking and going and changing the settings
53:10SPEAKERto turn on all the analog video stuff,
53:12SPEAKERI had, and yes, I was using Vim for this,
53:15SPEAKERI had somehow deleted the first bracket
53:17SPEAKERat literally the first character of the file.
53:19SPEAKER- Look, Vim does all sorts of things for you.
53:21SPEAKERIt'll mess up your Mr. INI, no problem.
53:23SPEAKERThat's amazing.
53:24SPEAKER- Anyway, it was basically failing
53:27SPEAKERto parse the entire INI file
53:29SPEAKERbecause the first section name
53:30SPEAKERdid not have the proper brackets in closing.
53:34SPEAKER- It's like we always say here,
53:35SPEAKERBrad and Will made a tech pod.
53:36SPEAKERIf something's broken, it's probably Vim.
53:38SPEAKER- I was like over the moon when I saw this.
53:40SPEAKERI can tell you exactly what happened also
53:41SPEAKERbecause X is the delete character key in Vim
53:45SPEAKERand control X is save and quit.
53:47SPEAKERAnd at some point I'm quite positive
53:50SPEAKERI had tried to save and quit a file
53:52SPEAKERand it had not registered command mode
53:54SPEAKERwith the colon for whatever reason.
53:55SPEAKERAnd instead it just took the X and deleted it.
53:58SPEAKERAnyway.
53:59SPEAKER- Which Vim user has not suffered
54:01SPEAKERthis exact same indignity, Brad?
54:02SPEAKERYou should put a couple extra brackets at the front
54:04SPEAKERso you're good to go now.
54:05SPEAKER- Anyway, as embarrassing as that was,
54:06SPEAKERI was over the moon that they had caught that though,
54:08SPEAKERbecause I had just been banging my head on this thing
54:10SPEAKERfor most of a morning.
54:11SPEAKERAnd it probably would have taken me forever
54:13SPEAKERto discover that myself.
54:16SPEAKER- But it's interesting 'cause if you'd,
54:18SPEAKERwhen I was editing my Mr. INI,
54:20SPEAKERI opened it up.
54:21SPEAKERI just opened up the Samba share on my Mr.
54:24SPEAKERfrom my Windows machine and opened Notepad++,
54:27SPEAKERwhich has this syntax highlighting stuff.
54:29SPEAKERSo when you have a missing bracket,
54:30SPEAKERit just highlights everything after that bracket.
54:33SPEAKERThat's not working.
54:35SPEAKERI'm just gonna take a screenshot of your face right now here.
54:38SPEAKERYep, that's going in the file.
54:42SPEAKERI'm sorry about your Vim problems.
54:43SPEAKER- It's fine.
54:44SPEAKERIt was not, look, Vim's fine.
54:46SPEAKERAnd it honestly felt pretty good when they caught that.
54:51SPEAKERAnd I SSH'd into the thing, added the bracket,
54:53SPEAKERsaved it, turned the Mr. or rebooted the Mr.
54:55SPEAKERand it just worked.
54:56SPEAKERI was like, okay, that actually felt very good
54:59SPEAKERto go change one character
55:00SPEAKERand have it solve all of these problems.
55:03SPEAKERIt was a good time. - That's really funny.
55:04SPEAKER- It was a good time. - This is really funny.
55:06SPEAKER- Yes, anyway.
55:08SPEAKER- So I went through as part of the Mr.,
55:11SPEAKERI had at one point mounted,
55:13SPEAKERI made some choices when I first set up the Mr.
55:15SPEAKERAnd I think when I was,
55:16SPEAKER'cause I mount my ROMs are for the most part
55:18SPEAKERstored on the NAS, so that I don't have,
55:22SPEAKERI have like a small SSD, a small SD card in the Mr.
55:27SPEAKERAnd I think I at one point had mounted,
55:30SPEAKERI'd mounted the ROMs in like a subfolder of the subfolder
55:33SPEAKERthey were supposed to be in
55:33SPEAKERinstead of the subfolder they were supposed to be in.
55:35SPEAKERSo they were like, I had multiple ghost Mr.
55:39SPEAKERfolder hierarchies on my SD card
55:42SPEAKERand I had to go through and clean up all that stuff.
55:44SPEAKERBut the nice thing is, as a result of cleaning all that stuff
55:47SPEAKERup and getting the BIOSes and the places
55:48SPEAKERwhere they're expected to be
55:49SPEAKERand getting the config files for the different cores
55:52SPEAKERwhere they're supposed to be,
55:53SPEAKERis that now stuff is just really easy to manage
55:55SPEAKERand I can flip it on and remote into it
55:59SPEAKERand do it from a PC or laptop.
56:01SPEAKERSo I can sit there with my laptop in another room
56:04SPEAKERwith the Mr. just connected over wifi
56:06SPEAKERand it works pretty good for the most part.
56:08SPEAKERThe wifi connection's not stable enough to do like,
56:12SPEAKERto move like big ROMs onto it,
56:14SPEAKERbut also I can just put those on on the NAS
56:16SPEAKERand it turns out that works fine.
56:17SPEAKER- Yeah, two things here on the storing all your games
56:20SPEAKERon the NAS thing that really proved its worth
56:23SPEAKERlike the next day when I found there, you know,
56:25SPEAKERlike a lot of people are making old games or sorry,
56:27SPEAKERnew games for old consoles, you know,
56:28SPEAKERyou're like developers making like,
56:29SPEAKERhey, we made a shoot 'em up for the Genesis or whatever.
56:33SPEAKERA Japanese developer has put out a new side scrolling
56:35SPEAKERshooter, side scrolling shooter.
56:37SPEAKER- Ooh.
56:38SPEAKER- Like similarly Gradius, Life Force, that style of shooter.
56:40SPEAKER- Oh wow.
56:41SPEAKER- Not the vertically scrolling one like 1943 or whatever.
56:44SPEAKER- Or Xevious or whatever, yeah.
56:45SPEAKER- They had, I found a demo ROM of it.
56:48SPEAKERLike they're only selling physical parts.
56:50SPEAKERThere's no digital release.
56:51SPEAKERSo you literally can't even buy the ROM
56:53SPEAKERfrom them if you want to.
56:54SPEAKER- Is this that Genesis, is this a Genesis game?
56:56SPEAKERIs that what it is?
56:57SPEAKER- No, it's an NES game.
56:58SPEAKERThe name is very esoteric and I cannot remember at all
57:01SPEAKERwhat it is right now.
57:02SPEAKERLike it is completely escaping me.
57:04SPEAKER- I saw a Genesis game that's like this yesterday too.
57:06SPEAKERIt's like a Metroidvania.
57:08SPEAKER- Yeah, I would believe that that is also in progress.
57:10SPEAKERI mean, I think there are a lot of, like there are, you know,
57:12SPEAKERthere are new GBA games being made all the time now.
57:15SPEAKERTrying to find the name of the game just to fill it in here.
57:17SPEAKERBut anyway, like the point is when I found that demo ROM
57:22SPEAKERof it, I just threw it on the right folder on the NAS
57:24SPEAKERand swiveled my chair around and turned the MiSTer on
57:26SPEAKERand there it was just ready to play, right?
57:27SPEAKER- Yeah, it's really nice.
57:28SPEAKERIt takes a minute for the NAS to mount the Samba share,
57:32SPEAKERbut the MiSTer to mount the Samba share.
57:34SPEAKER- Yes, I have been finding that.
57:35SPEAKERSo that's the other thing I was gonna say is on the subject
57:37SPEAKERof having your MiSTer on wifi.
57:39SPEAKERThis might have been better than finding that bracket error
57:43SPEAKERand fixing it.
57:44SPEAKER- Which is?
57:45SPEAKER- I pulled a router that I've had in the box
57:47SPEAKERfor eight years out and put it back into service.
57:50SPEAKER- Oh, and you're using it as a bridge?
57:51SPEAKER- Yeah, so we're gonna set up my oldest new SARTI N66.
57:54SPEAKERYou remember that one?
57:55SPEAKER- Yeah.
57:56SPEAKER- The classic. - It's a classic, yeah.
57:57SPEAKER- The classic N router that everybody bought.
57:59SPEAKER- I used that one until it actually died.
58:01SPEAKER- Yeah.
58:02SPEAKER- Mine conked out eventually.
58:03SPEAKER- Yeah, so I've like, you know, holding on to old stuff
58:06SPEAKERI know is kind of fraught and perhaps some of us,
58:10SPEAKERperhaps some of us do it a little bit to access.
58:11SPEAKERI get it.
58:12SPEAKER- Sometimes hoarding is good, Brad.
58:13SPEAKER- Like I do think that maybe keeping your previous
58:16SPEAKERwifi router around just in case is actually not the worst
58:19SPEAKERthing to do because A, router is critical infrastructure.
58:22SPEAKERSo if yours dies, it's nice to have something
58:24SPEAKERto plug in on the spot.
58:26SPEAKERBut B, you know, like it's getting wired internet
58:28SPEAKERin a corner of a room where it's not feasible
58:30SPEAKERto run a cable is, I mean, it's not actual wired internet,
58:34SPEAKERbut like what I mean is like I could get a wifi adapter
58:37SPEAKERfor the mister and set it up on there,
58:39SPEAKERwhich is probably gonna be not great
58:40SPEAKERbecause it's tiny little USB dongle
58:41SPEAKERwith a tiny antenna in it.
58:44SPEAKEROr I can use this dedicated box
58:45SPEAKERthat's got multiple big antennas and turn that into.
58:48SPEAKER- So I'll tell you, I use the wifi, the little tiny dongle
58:51SPEAKERand it's fine.
58:52SPEAKER- I'm sure it's fine.
58:53SPEAKERIt's the problem, I was having a problem with it briefly
58:57SPEAKERwhen I first started setting this up where it was hooking up
58:59SPEAKERto the wrong access point because I have access points
59:02SPEAKERon either side of the house.
59:04SPEAKERAnd it was hooking up to the one that was far away
59:06SPEAKERfrom where I was sitting just because I think signal
59:08SPEAKERwas too high where it was.
59:10SPEAKERAnd once I fixed that, it's been really good.
59:14SPEAKERLike I load PlayStation games and everything across it.
59:16SPEAKERIt's fine.
59:17SPEAKERI played Parappa for the first time.
59:19SPEAKER- Wow.
59:20SPEAKER- I never played Parappa because it doesn't really play
59:21SPEAKERon LCDs.
59:22SPEAKER- Oh yeah, right.
59:24SPEAKERSpeaking of games that are not latency tolerant.
59:27SPEAKER- No.
59:28SPEAKER- Parappa is not forgiving about missed inputs.
59:30SPEAKER- So the problem with Parappa on my TV is that I have,
59:33SPEAKERit has like a frame around the edges of the tube
59:35SPEAKERthat almost vignette it.
59:37SPEAKERAnd all the UI that you need to play the game
59:39SPEAKERis covered up by that thing.
59:40SPEAKER- Sure.
59:41SPEAKER- I'll have to get the other TV out to play that I guess.
59:43SPEAKER- But the other thing I was gonna say real quick
59:45SPEAKERabout the wifi is that.
59:46SPEAKER- Yeah, I absolutely believe like a normal dongle
59:48SPEAKERwould be just fine.
59:49SPEAKERI also am going to plug in my PS2 though.
59:52SPEAKER- Oh, okay.
59:53SPEAKER- 'Cause I've got another project brewing there.
59:56SPEAKER- Playing Tony Hawk 3?
59:57SPEAKER- Mess around with maybe trying to load some PS2 games
1:00:00SPEAKERover the network.
1:00:01SPEAKER- Ooh.
1:00:01SPEAKER- From a Samba share.
1:00:02SPEAKER- Okay.
1:00:03SPEAKER- Which I have not started on yet,
1:00:05SPEAKERbut getting wifi on a PS2 is way, way trickier
1:00:08SPEAKERthan getting wifi on a mister.
1:00:10SPEAKERSo I figured why not just set up the bridge
1:00:12SPEAKERwith the router and just plug everything into that instead.
1:00:16SPEAKERI also pulled out my classic ASCII AV selector.
1:00:19SPEAKERAnybody knows?
1:00:20SPEAKER- What's an ASCII AV selector?
1:00:22SPEAKER- ASCII is like the classic Japanese peripheral maker.
1:00:25SPEAKER- Oh.
1:00:26SPEAKER- Like made a lot of Nintendo and Super Nintendo controllers.
1:00:29SPEAKERI think, if I'm not mistaken,
1:00:32SPEAKERI want to say they were the actual manufacturer
1:00:34SPEAKERof the NES advantage.
1:00:36SPEAKER- Really?
1:00:37SPEAKER- Not ASCII branded, obviously.
1:00:38SPEAKERNintendo put their own name on that, but they.
1:00:40SPEAKER- The two button joystick with turbo buttons.
1:00:43SPEAKERI had both of those.
1:00:44SPEAKER- Yes, yes.
1:00:44SPEAKERAnyway, the ASCII selector is just a nice little
1:00:47SPEAKERlike five or six way analog audio video changer, switcher,
1:00:52SPEAKERselector kind of thing, which I imported, I believe.
1:00:54SPEAKERIt's Japanese made, got Japanese text on the back.
1:00:57SPEAKERI think the point I'm trying to make is that I was the kind
1:01:00SPEAKERof nerd who had to import the best AV selector.
1:01:03SPEAKER- Right, I don't, I'm not surprised.
1:01:05SPEAKER- And not just buy whatever crap was at Walmart at the time
1:01:07SPEAKERin the late nineties.
1:01:09SPEAKER- I was gonna say the other thing that I saw
1:01:11SPEAKERat the flea market last week is, or last month is the,
1:01:15SPEAKERis one of those things that sits underneath your monitor
1:01:16SPEAKERon your desk with like power.
1:01:18SPEAKERIt's a power strip with individual buttons for the computer,
1:01:21SPEAKERthe monitor, the printer, your modem, and then other.
1:01:25SPEAKERI kind of wish I had bought that, useless.
1:01:29SPEAKERBut it would look real good underneath the,
1:01:30SPEAKERunderneath the TV and would replicate the exact setup
1:01:33SPEAKERthat I had as a youth.
1:01:35SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.
1:01:36SPEAKERAnyway, it's been, it's been fun pulling old stuff out
1:01:37SPEAKERand plugging it in.
1:01:38SPEAKERI've been going through old PS2 and GameCube memory cards
1:01:41SPEAKERto see if my save games are still on there.
1:01:43SPEAKERThey are.
1:01:44SPEAKER- It's amazing.
1:01:44SPEAKER- And I have to find a way to dump those soon.
1:01:46SPEAKERMy Xbox does not power on.
1:01:48SPEAKER- Oh no.
1:01:49SPEAKER- My original Xbox does not turn on.
1:01:50SPEAKER- Did you crack it open and had you clipped the clock?
1:01:52SPEAKER- Yeah, I took the clock capacitor and one other
1:01:55SPEAKER'cause I put them in a little Ziploc baggie
1:01:57SPEAKERand taped it to the console just for reference, I guess.
1:01:59SPEAKERWas probably my thinking there.
1:02:01SPEAKERSo I know that I pulled two capacitors out of that thing.
1:02:04SPEAKERLike three or four years ago, maybe three years ago.
1:02:06SPEAKER- It was around the time we started the podcast,
1:02:08SPEAKERif I recall.
1:02:09SPEAKER- Anyway, that thing's still faster or not, does not,
1:02:13SPEAKERoh, actually maybe the other capacitor I took out
1:02:15SPEAKERwas load bearing perhaps.
1:02:16SPEAKERI didn't consider that.
1:02:18SPEAKERNow that I think about it, the clock capacitor,
1:02:20SPEAKERthe system-
1:02:21SPEAKER- It just won't keep real-time clock, right?
1:02:23SPEAKER- Unless I think it's the last revision of Xbox,
1:02:25SPEAKERactually needs it in to boot,
1:02:26SPEAKERbut all the previous ones, which mine is,
1:02:29SPEAKERwork fine without it.
1:02:30SPEAKERBut maybe that other capacitor I took out actually
1:02:33SPEAKERprobably need to open that thing back up
1:02:35SPEAKERand try to service it.
1:02:35SPEAKER- It's got this ASCII-
1:02:36SPEAKER- At some point.
1:02:37SPEAKER- This ASCII, the video switcher is incredible.
1:02:41SPEAKER- The one I have?
1:02:42SPEAKER- Yeah, the one you have.
1:02:42SPEAKERI found it on surugayaha.com.
1:02:47SPEAKER- The selector?
1:02:48SPEAKER- The selector, yeah.
1:02:49SPEAKER- The AV selector, it's nice.
1:02:50SPEAKER- Another hard ASCII AV selector.
1:02:52SPEAKER- You wanna talk about chunky, chunky buttons.
1:02:54SPEAKERThose buttons make a very good thunk when you click them.
1:02:57SPEAKER- They look pretty good.
1:02:59SPEAKERYeah, so it's been fun getting into the analog stuff.
1:03:02SPEAKERThe big surprise for me was how excited
1:03:05SPEAKERmy daughter was about it.
1:03:06SPEAKERI didn't expect her to get into it at all.
1:03:08SPEAKER- Of course, I mean, we've talked a little bit.
1:03:09SPEAKERI think like the youth are kind of having a moment
1:03:11SPEAKERwith analog technology, right?
1:03:12SPEAKERWith film cameras and stuff like that as well.
1:03:15SPEAKER- Yeah, maybe.
1:03:16SPEAKER- Because that tapes.
1:03:17SPEAKER- For her, it's like, I don't know, she's,
1:03:21SPEAKERit's been fun 'cause we'll play Mario to get,
1:03:23SPEAKERshe'll take a turn in Mario and she'll be like,
1:03:24SPEAKER"Hey dad, I got to the fourth world."
1:03:26SPEAKERAnd I'll then play and have a hell of a time
1:03:31SPEAKER'cause the game's way harder than I remember it being.
1:03:34SPEAKERI finally can do the thing where you run and slide
1:03:36SPEAKERunderneath a one height brick when you're big Mario again,
1:03:39SPEAKERwhich I wasn't sure that those 8BitDo controllers
1:03:43SPEAKERwere capable of, but they are.
1:03:46SPEAKERI was just old and couldn't do it anymore.
1:03:48SPEAKERThe next thing I want to look at is getting a snack
1:03:50SPEAKERso I can plug in my old controllers maybe.
1:03:53SPEAKER- Or that ultra low latency.
1:03:55SPEAKER- Well, and I have a zapper here too.
1:03:57SPEAKERSo I can play light gun games.
1:03:59SPEAKER- Yeah, sure.
1:04:00SPEAKERIt's the final frontier of Mr. Stuff
1:04:02SPEAKERis playing light gun games.
1:04:04SPEAKER- Look, I did the thing with a retro pie years ago
1:04:08SPEAKERwhere I set up a Wiimote, I set up two candles
1:04:10SPEAKERon the side of the TV and used a Wiimote as a light gun.
1:04:13SPEAKERThat was fun, and it worked surprisingly well
1:04:17SPEAKERfor like House of the Dead and stuff like that.
1:04:20SPEAKERBut yeah, I haven't played,
1:04:22SPEAKERlike I haven't played Hogan's Alley in 30 years.
1:04:24SPEAKERI don't think Hogan's Alley is very good, but who knows?
1:04:27SPEAKERMaybe it is, maybe it's fun.
1:04:28SPEAKER- You might've been missing something back then.
1:04:30SPEAKER- Yeah, look, all I wanted was a copy of Hogan's Alley
1:04:34SPEAKERand they got me Gumshoe 'cause they were like,
1:04:35SPEAKERthis is gonna be, this is an adventure game
1:04:37SPEAKERabout a private detective.
1:04:38SPEAKERYou love detectives.
1:04:39SPEAKERI was like, well, I do love detectives, that is correct.
1:04:41SPEAKER- Is Gumshoe good?
1:04:42SPEAKERI've never played Gumshoe.
1:04:43SPEAKER- So I thought Gumshoe was bad for a long time.
1:04:47SPEAKERAnd then a friend of the show, Jeff Gershman,
1:04:49SPEAKERdid as part of his ranking of Nintendo games,
1:04:53SPEAKERhe got to Gumshoe a few weeks ago.
1:04:55SPEAKERAnd because I've talked so much shit
1:04:56SPEAKERabout Gumshoe over the years, everybody like dumped it to me
1:05:00SPEAKERand watching him play Gumshoe made me think
1:05:02SPEAKERmaybe I'm wrong about Gumshoe.
1:05:04SPEAKER- Oh, okay.
1:05:05SPEAKER- Yeah, so if you wanna play Gumshoe sometime, let me know.
1:05:08SPEAKERI can set it up.
1:05:10SPEAKERI think maybe, look, it's like Top Gun.
1:05:13SPEAKERMaybe I just wasn't enough of a gamer back then
1:05:15SPEAKERto land on the aircraft carrier successfully.
1:05:18SPEAKERBut now I can do it one or two out of five times, so.
1:05:22SPEAKER- For a game about a hard-boiled detective in a trench coat,
1:05:24SPEAKERthere sure are a lot of like balloons and tropical,
1:05:26SPEAKERlike palm trees and stuff.
1:05:28SPEAKER- Well, look, you go where the case takes you, man.
1:05:31SPEAKER- Fair, that's true.
1:05:32SPEAKER- And I think you had to shoot the pink balloons
1:05:35SPEAKERor you had to jump into the pink balloon.
1:05:37SPEAKERThe way it worked was you made the guy jump.
1:05:39SPEAKERIt was kind of like one of those endless runner games
1:05:44SPEAKER'cause you can't stop him.
1:05:45SPEAKERHe's just always going right.
1:05:47SPEAKERAnd you make him jump by shooting him,
1:05:49SPEAKERbut also you can shoot other stuff
1:05:50SPEAKERlike bottles that people hug at you.
1:05:52SPEAKER- I didn't realize Gumshoe was an endless runner.
1:05:55SPEAKER- Well, we didn't have endless runners then, right?
1:05:57SPEAKER- That's true.
1:05:57SPEAKER- Gumshoe was just a platformer.
1:05:59SPEAKER- Way ahead of its time.
1:06:00SPEAKER- Light gun platformer.
1:06:02SPEAKER- But the last thing I was gonna say,
1:06:03SPEAKERI guess my biggest revelation in messing with all this stuff
1:06:07SPEAKERis how much my brain has been poisoned
1:06:08SPEAKERin the intervening decades
1:06:10SPEAKERby dealing with modern digital signals.
1:06:14SPEAKERI am so attuned now to like,
1:06:16SPEAKERokay, there's gonna be some kind of handshaking
1:06:17SPEAKERgoing on here.
1:06:18SPEAKERI've gotta make sure things are on the right input.
1:06:19SPEAKERI probably need to turn these on in the right order.
1:06:21SPEAKERIf the console doesn't see a viable input on the other end,
1:06:25SPEAKERit's probably gonna drop to like a low resolution.
1:06:27SPEAKERYou know what I mean?
1:06:28SPEAKERThere's so many quote-unquote "smart things" going on
1:06:30SPEAKERwith devices talking to each other now
1:06:32SPEAKERthat it's been kind of weirdly retroactively revelatory,
1:06:37SPEAKERI would say, to like go back to a time when it was like,
1:06:40SPEAKERoh, this is just an electrical signal coming out of here.
1:06:42SPEAKERLike I just plugged this connector into this plug
1:06:45SPEAKERand it fits snugly.
1:06:46SPEAKERThere's no retention mechanism.
1:06:48SPEAKERIt's just a plug.
1:06:49SPEAKERIt's just sending electricity.
1:06:50SPEAKERIt's just gonna send the electricity,
1:06:52SPEAKERwhether the TV is on or not,
1:06:54SPEAKERwhether it's on the right input or not.
1:06:55SPEAKERYou know what I mean?
1:06:56SPEAKERLike working with these types of analog signals is like,
1:06:58SPEAKERit's been a weird kind of history lesson
1:07:00SPEAKERto go back to this stuff.
1:07:01SPEAKER- Well, so agreed.
1:07:04SPEAKERAnd the other thing I noticed,
1:07:06SPEAKERso I had a VCR, I mean, I'm using a VCR in my pipeline here,
1:07:10SPEAKERand I had some VHS tapes around
1:07:12SPEAKERthat I'd been doing some archival type stuff on before.
1:07:16SPEAKERAnd it's kind of amazing.
1:07:18SPEAKERI had forgotten what it's like to watch stuff
1:07:20SPEAKERwithout like digital compression artifacts
1:07:23SPEAKERbecause our brains filter out those compression artifacts.
1:07:25SPEAKERNow, like we're so used to seeing a little bit
1:07:27SPEAKERof square shimmeriness and blockiness.
1:07:30SPEAKERAnd like even on the newer codecs, like AB1H265,
1:07:34SPEAKERyou still see different kinds of artifacts.
1:07:36SPEAKERThey're not as bad as like the MPEG-2,
1:07:38SPEAKERthe old MPEG-2 artifacts that were on DVDs,
1:07:40SPEAKERbut you forget how much your brain filters that stuff out.
1:07:44SPEAKERAnd to me, the hardest part of this whole thing has been,
1:07:51SPEAKERso there's, I think there's a vertical
1:07:53SPEAKERand horizontal sync knobs on the back
1:07:55SPEAKERthat you can access with a screw.
1:07:58SPEAKERBut on the front, there's like saturation and color,
1:08:00SPEAKERcolor, which is I think saturation and tint,
1:08:03SPEAKERwhich is like the hue where you can change,
1:08:05SPEAKERlike make blue look green or pink or whatever.
1:08:10SPEAKERGetting the saturation right,
1:08:11SPEAKERI don't remember what it was supposed to look like,
1:08:13SPEAKERand I don't have like a navy essentials to plug into this.
1:08:15SPEAKER- Right. - To calibrate it.
1:08:17SPEAKER- Yeah, I've had a similar experience with this thing.
1:08:18SPEAKER'Cause I mean, in this case,
1:08:20SPEAKERthe settings are digital, not knobs like yours,
1:08:22SPEAKERbut it's the same type of thing of like,
1:08:24SPEAKERhow sharp is the CRT supposed to look?
1:08:26SPEAKERLike, where is the brightness supposed to be?
1:08:28SPEAKERI don't remember what the like perceptually,
1:08:30SPEAKERlike what are the ideal settings on this thing?
1:08:32SPEAKERI don't, I've lost that kind of sense memory.
1:08:35SPEAKER- Well, and then, so the other interesting thing
1:08:37SPEAKERthat came out as I was, so my daughter,
1:08:40SPEAKERwe were talking about how it works, right?
1:08:41SPEAKERVersus like how a flat screen TV works.
1:08:44SPEAKERAnd as I was explaining,
1:08:47SPEAKERI realized that there's a bunch of stuff about this
1:08:49SPEAKERthat I don't actually really understand.
1:08:50SPEAKERLike, I know there's an electron gun in the back
1:08:52SPEAKERand that excites some phosphors in the front of the thing,
1:08:54SPEAKERbut how does that make color?
1:08:56SPEAKERAnd how does one signal coming over the airwaves
1:09:00SPEAKERmake every TV, regardless of how big or small it is,
1:09:03SPEAKERwork the same way?
1:09:04SPEAKERAnd it turns out when you go look for that stuff,
1:09:07SPEAKERthere's a lot of like weirdly esoteric,
1:09:09SPEAKERalmost like approaching lost knowledge.
1:09:12SPEAKERAnd there are YouTube videos about this
1:09:15SPEAKERand there are obviously Wikipedia articles
1:09:16SPEAKERand there's people who've talked about
1:09:18SPEAKERhow the technology works,
1:09:19SPEAKERbut there's a lot of like rubber meets the road of,
1:09:23SPEAKERlike if you wanted to manufacture a new CRT today,
1:09:25SPEAKERI don't, I think we're almost to the point
1:09:27SPEAKERthat there's not enough people left
1:09:29SPEAKERthat understand how to make these,
1:09:30SPEAKERthat we'd be able to recreate this technology now
1:09:34SPEAKERif we wanted to.
1:09:34SPEAKERSo it's kind of cool to own like a,
1:09:36SPEAKERyou know, it's like owning a coelacanth, right?
1:09:40SPEAKERWe got living fossils going here, which I like.
1:09:43SPEAKER- Yeah, and they'll probably outlive us.
1:09:45SPEAKER- I don't know about that.
1:09:46SPEAKER- Actually, this is the last thing before we wrap up here.
1:09:49SPEAKERYou mentioned to me beforehand, you're going to upload,
1:09:52SPEAKERyou're gonna make an entry for your model
1:09:53SPEAKERand upload some photos of it to the CRT database.
1:09:56SPEAKER- I am, yeah.
1:09:56SPEAKER- Are you going to follow through on that?
1:09:57SPEAKER- I don't know, we'll see.
1:09:58SPEAKERNow that you said it on the podcast, I probably have to.
1:10:01SPEAKERI got to get a good place to take pictures.
1:10:02SPEAKER- I think that's always the problem.
1:10:03SPEAKERThat's why I brought it up.
1:10:04SPEAKERI was, the CRT database.com is what I'm talking about.
1:10:07SPEAKERI was able to find that Toshiba on there
1:10:08SPEAKERand got some pretty good information
1:10:10SPEAKERabout what it can do from that site.
1:10:12SPEAKERSo I was pretty bummed to find that your TV is not on there.
1:10:15SPEAKER- Nope.
1:10:16SPEAKER- But you can fix that.
1:10:18SPEAKER- I can make it happen.
1:10:19SPEAKER- Like you can add to the collective share of knowledge
1:10:22SPEAKERin the world by documenting this 40 to 45 year old television.
1:10:27SPEAKER- This is the worst shaming you've ever done to me, Brad.
1:10:30SPEAKER- You need to do this for humanity.
1:10:32SPEAKER- This is my penance for the VIM, all the VIM jokes.
1:10:39SPEAKEROkay, I will find a place to take pictures and do that.
1:10:41SPEAKERI'll make it happen.
1:10:44SPEAKERAnd on that note, you can help us make it happen
1:10:48SPEAKERby signing up for the Patreon.
1:10:49SPEAKERBrad and Will Made a Tech Pod is a listener supported show.
1:10:52SPEAKERWe wouldn't be here without you, true listeners.
1:10:55SPEAKERAnd we appreciate everyone's support.
1:10:59SPEAKERIf you would like to learn how to subscribe to the Patreon
1:11:01SPEAKERand get access to the Discord
1:11:02SPEAKERand get our monthly Patreon exclusive episodes,
1:11:04SPEAKERwhere you heard us talk about the beginnings of this
1:11:07SPEAKERa month ago, a little bit,
1:11:09SPEAKERwhen we came back from the flea market.
1:11:13SPEAKERI don't know if, I may or may not go tomorrow.
1:11:15SPEAKERThe next one is tomorrow.
1:11:16SPEAKERWell, it's the day that you're,
1:11:18SPEAKERif you're listening to this at midnight on Sunday
1:11:21SPEAKERand you live in the Bay Area,
1:11:22SPEAKERyou can get up and be there at six o'clock in the morning.
1:11:25SPEAKER- That's true.
1:11:26SPEAKER- And be there when it happens.
1:11:27SPEAKERI think that there's some listeners coming for this one.
1:11:28SPEAKERSo I should get my ass in gear and get up there,
1:11:31SPEAKERbut it's gonna be a challenge.
1:11:34SPEAKERIf you would like to learn how to subscribe to the show,
1:11:36SPEAKERyou can go to patreon.com/techpod.
1:11:38SPEAKERIt's five bucks a month.
1:11:39SPEAKERIt helps us immeasurably.
1:11:40SPEAKERWe really appreciate every listener.
1:11:42SPEAKER- We certainly do.
1:11:43SPEAKER- And we especially appreciate our executive producer
1:11:46SPEAKERtier patrons, including Jason Lee, Andrew Slosky,
1:11:51SPEAKERJordan Lippett, Bunny Themed, Twinkle Twinkie,
1:11:54SPEAKERDavid Allen, James Kamik, and Pantheon,
1:11:57SPEAKERmakers of the HS3 high-speed 3D printer.
1:12:00SPEAKERThank you all so, so much.
1:12:01SPEAKER- Thank you.
1:12:02SPEAKER- And on that note, we will be back next week
1:12:04SPEAKERwith another edition of the tech pod.
1:12:08SPEAKERAlways a pleasure, Brad.
1:12:09SPEAKER- Thank you, same to you.
1:12:10SPEAKER- And remember, please consider the environment
1:12:11SPEAKERbefore printing this podcast.
1:12:12SPEAKERBye.