Did you know you can run your own firmware on Kindles now? I just weirdly the other day got a YouTube recommendation along the lines of it's time to Amazon your Kindle. So I guess I did know that. Yeah, people were talking about in the discord this morning and I was I. When they first figured out how to jailbreak them years and years ago, I looked at what you could do with a jailbroken Kindle. And it was basically like you can put Linux on it and you can run a Sudoku app and.
uh there was some there was like a version of snake or something and that was pretty much it Yeah, I also have been of the mind that it never really seemed worth it. But when you mentioned the snake is on there, I might. well so i was curious to see because there's this whole there's a whole interface for like your drm free audio audiobooks and ebooks that you buy from places now yeah because that was the big thing you know the big um
What do you want to call it? The DRM kerfuffle of a couple months ago, the way they change your ability to get your stuff off of there. Well, and and there's tools now kind of like Plex, but for e-books and books and comics in an audio bookshelf. Um, and, uh, I, so I was looking at it and I was like, oh, is this a thing? Is this a thing I can do?
And then the answer, it turns out, is no. But your model is not capable? No, no, no. My model's capable. There's no interface with any kind of external. What I want is a thing that I can put books on my NAS and then pull them over onto the Kindle. And all the stuff that they have are like. yo, you can use Calibri and plug it into USB on your computer. I'm like, I'm no, I'm uninterested in this as a, as a concept. You want to use your device to consume media like a normal person.
Yeah, I want I want I want something that is painless, easy, fast and cheap and free and not free as in like. I'm not going to use the free as in beer thing here, but I don't mean free as in no money. I mean, free as in like liberating, right? Exactly. You want to freely be able to put documents onto your device and consume them. Exactly. So anyway, so here we are. It's bad news on the Kindle hacking front, it seems like.
But maybe things will change. Who knows? Well, first of all, I feel like I have got a laundry list of like six to eight different hacking. I use hacking and kind of... not sneer quotes but goofy quotes here like I'm not actually hacking things but you know what I mean like I'm constantly looking at like
Did I put OpenWRT on my Unify access points? It's the old Linksys custom firmware disease, right? Carried over to every device you own. I'm constantly looking around at things and thinking like... What if that ran an open source thing that's made by three people instead of whatever the company put on there? But Kendall is on that list. And I had been thinking since I saw that video.
Once I set Portainer up on my little server guy so that running Docker containers is like a web-based interface instead of me having to remember some esoteric commands that I'm never going to remember three months from now. I've started asking all sorts of questions like, hey, can I run PyHole in a Docker on my Linux box?
And the answer is yes. Yes, you can. The real answer is probably it's better to have it just on a dedicated machine for something that both doles out all the IP addresses in my house. Check this out. Yeah. What if your second pie hole ran in the Docker container? Okay. So I'm going to go tell you.
I did. I did get to that point. I was like, what if I just run the exact same configuration pie hole on an x86 box in this Docker container? And then I have redundancy. So I have two DNS servers instead of just one. But then I realized what would happen, though, is what would happen is I wouldn't realize that the first DNS server has gone down because it doesn't like it's like maybe once a year I need to reboot the thing.
And what would happen then is I wouldn't notice that it went down until the second one went down a year in. And so realistically, I'd always have checking the first DNS, the DNS is down and DNS would get real slow for inexplicable reasons. And nobody would complain about it. I'd just be like, man, the internet's really slow. But I wouldn't look at it. You've uncovered a use case where redundancy is somehow a net negative.
Welcome to Brad and Will made a tech bot. I'm Will. I'm Brad. Brad. It's time. I'm for. I did a pregnant pause there. Did you catch that? I did. It's time. The anticipation is building here. It's time to talk about. I don't want to say ill-advised purchases, but, you know. We try not to fetishize old technology here. Yeah, well, maybe you do. Or we try unsuccessfully, perhaps. Like, I dream of a world where I don't fetishize old type of technology. Okay, yes, it's good to have goals.
Yeah. And and a couple about a month ago, I failed. We were at the electronics flea market and I bought a I saw my childhood TV. We talked about this. Yes. I've since plugged it in, hooked up to the mister. We're going to talk about that today. Yes, we're here to talk about CRTs. I did a minor repair on it. Okay.
It turns out I like the CRT a lot. The colors are real good. It's real bright. And like, I forgot what video games used to look like. I want to, I want to draw a line here. Yeah. Hi. In the context of fetishizing old technology around the things you grew up with. Yeah, I think I think it is perfectly fine to fetishize the things that you that were formative for you. Like maybe not.
CRTs writ large or you don't need to own every tape deck ever made, but like you might want to own the tape deck that you had as a child, right? Which is exactly what you've done here. I've gone the other direction, which we'll also get to, but I think like. As a subcategory of being into old stuff, like being into the old stuff that was yours is perfectly fine and even good.
So you're saying if I go to eBay right now and I search for 1981 Kenner at at Walker and I look at this and I'm like, oh, this is only the yellow ones that are classic are only 200 bucks. Acceptable use of funds. Oh, I have to talk to my wife about this. I bet she has different feelings. Possibly. How big are those things? Like two feet tall. They're not that big. That's decent. I had a friend that had the Millennium Falcon, and that thing was large.
I had, so my, the Star Wars toys that I like, I had a bunch of, I had a TIE fighter and an X-wing and an A-wing and all that, B-wing, all these spaceships, right? The fighters. But then the big one that I had was the Millennium Falcon, and I wanted desperately to get an ad at. I think I've told this before, but my parents bought me the Ewok Village instead because I thought it was cooler. They were like, look, it has an elevator. There's an escape hatch.
That ad ad, all it does is stand there. It's like the ad ad is the coolest thing that Star Wars has ever made. Mom, dad, greet your teeth and say thank you. I said thank you. And I played with the like, look, I'll tell you, the Transformers had some real adventures in the Ewok village as a child. Like Transformers, Star Wars, everybody, big fights there. But I always wanted that Kenner ad ad. Okay, another hard swerve here, but...
These adats are all yellow, just like SNES's get. Oh, that's yeah. I've been sifting. We'll get into this. I've been sifting through old consoles all week and that yellowed plastic is a particular form of ick for me. It's like a trigger something.
Wes Fanlin, back in the tested days, did a thing about how to fix this. It has to do with... debrominating or something yeah i think isn't the process colloquially called retrobriting i think if you want to look it up although although i think that's like spelled with zero and b-r-i-t-e if if you're googling this it's not how you would normally expect it to be spelled only look retrobrite But it also tends to make the plastic a little more brittle.
probably doesn't matter for your snes but on something as thin as these old kenner toys it might yeah my super nintendo's got it really bad the front of my dreamcast not the back for whatever reason which weird normally normally the entire panel you know or you know the entire yeah plastic kind of yellows consistently but on my dreamcast the entire top which again is one piece of plastic is like on the front is is yellow it might have been like a sun exposure thing yeah maybe maybe that's weird
But we're not here to talk about plastic and yellowing and all that stuff today. Although we are going to talk about old stuff. We're going to talk about CRTs. Yeah. Cathode ray tubes. Yeah. Not broadly. This is not going to be like your one-stop shop for all things CRT. I think this is going to be much more hands-on. Like you and I both obtained CRTs recently. And have been messing with them, although CRT is from very different eras.
This is more of like a, I think this will be more of a hands-on reports. Just kind of like, here's all the goofy stuff we've had to get into to work with these. Yeah. A trip report. So I, um, I was at the flea market. I bought this, I bought the CRT. It's the one it's literally.
the same tv i had as a as a kid right like the one that my nintendo and my ti 99 4a and later my snes were all hooked up to um i replay i got a different tv when i went to college i got a like a 19 inch sharp that's in store deep storage in the in the city um That I kind of want to go dig out now, actually, after this whole experience. Wait, you have a storage unit here? Yeah, I have a storage unit. Really?
Well, I lived in a 400 square foot apartment when I first moved here. So I've had a storage unit for 20 years now, which I don't let's not talk about that too much. How often do you visit your storage unit twice a year? Really? Just to check in? We just just keep on things or. So for a long time, we kept like Christmas decorations and stuff there.
And then not so much that, but but of late, it's been going to like we're trying to clear out the one in the city, honestly, because it's a pain to get to. It's pretty small. It's in an ancient building. And like. like I'd rather have one that's closer to the house that I don't have to drive for 30 minutes to get to.
So we've been gradually emptying it out is the kind of TLDR. But it's mostly stuff that was like when I moved from a four bedroom house into a 400 square foot apartment didn't fit anymore. which is an incredibly stupid thing to store for an extended period of time. So anyway, we don't need to talk about that too, too much. So the TV is a GE. It's an 11 inch GE RF only set, which means it does not have an RCA plug or even a coaxial plug. It has four screws on the back.
two leads for VHF and two leads for UHF. Sorry, can I stop you and have you read the model number? Yeah, you want the model number? It's the General Electric 1-0 Alpha Beta 3406. Whiskey Foxtrot O2 rolls off the top. Yeah, it's it's let me tell you, the nice thing is very searchable. There was one page on the Internet with information about it and it had no no.
Nothing of value. The GE page recognized it as a GE part number, like the GE part number lookup recognized it as a GE serial number or model number format. but didn't have any information about it. Cause it's from like 1984, 85. That recent. I was thinking like mid seventies or something. No. So I think, so I could for $22 buy a, um, photo fact original manual, which complains contains schematics, voltages, waveforms, component location guides, parts list.
and adjustments covering this particular model of TV. But I didn't want to pay $22 for that. Kind of pricey for a manual. It really is crazy, though. This is one of those rare Google searches where you put that... uh, into Google for results, for results, come back like literally four pages and that's it on the entire, on the entirety of Google. Yeah, it's, it's, well, I mean, it is a random series of letters and numbers.
But but yeah, so it's an 11 inch TV. It's got real good clicky volume knob that turns it on. It's got a VHF and UHF knob, but it's got one of those. I don't know. I did. I had forgotten this, but it has a two stage knob. So it has one that is like. Well, a big chunky knob that clonks and goes from channel to channel. So for like from you to two to three to four to up to 13 or whatever.
And then inside that knob, there's a little dial that you can use to like fine tune the tuning to get it on exactly the frequency that you want. So you get a real nice, clean picture if there was any analog TV anymore. Yeah, we had a TV with that exact same knob. It may have also been a GE, but I don't know how common that was generally for analog TVs of that era. That specific, that little kind of knob within a knob for fine-tuning.
This is the only TV we had that had that art. Well, actually, you know what? That's not true. Because I think our Philco set in the living room, the 19 inch, that was the family TV. had a big chunky knob. And then I think you had another little dial on the outside of the knob that you could turn.
to tune it in. Maybe this is what all pre-digital click TVs had. Maybe. I'm sorry. Philco still to me just sounds like a fake company from Ren and Stimpy or something. Isn't Philco Phillips company? Is it? Philco is an American electronics manufacturer headquartered in, it's short for the Philadelphia Battery Company. Okay, sure. Pioneer in battery radio and television production. It was purchased by Ford, renamed Philco Ford, sold to GTE in 1974 and was purchased by Philips in 1981.
which became a subsidiary of the Dutch company Phillips in 1987. In North America, the Philco brand is owned by Philips and other markets. It's owned by Electrolux. Electrolux also sounds like a fake company name. Electrolux is one of the great, like that was a thing that happened in the, in the sixties, right? They started jamming. If you had like a, if you had like standard oil company was your name, you'd rename it to SO because it would, it's short for, but you spell it out.
Electrolux is one of those. I believe it's a Swedish company originally. Do they make vacuums? I want to say we might have had an Electrolux vacuum when I was a kid. Electrolux was famous for bag vacuums specifically. Sure. Does this TV also have the combination power on and volume knob?
Yeah, it makes the best click just like you like it's a little knob and it's got an extremely meaty click when you turn it to the right to turn the TV on. But then you keep turning it to turn the volume up. In fact. I'm actually going to drag it in here after we record and I'll record some samples of the clocks and the clicks so that I can put them in because it's unlike anything. I had forgotten. Like, I think I talked about this before on either here or one of the other podcasts.
When my daughter was exposed to the knob the first time, she was like, this is the best thing I've ever seen in my life. This is the best feeling control I've ever touched in my life. It's got very good knob feel, although maybe I shouldn't look. It's nevermind. You can't contest the knob feel brand. No, I suppose not. I'm just, I'm going to put a call out right here. This is where I'm going to put the click sounds that you send me. Okay. Just to add, just for any, an easy venue in this edit.
Behold the glory of the clicks. Yeah, right. It's like, and I'll be like, hey, it's a click. And then it's a chunk. And let you know which ones which the UHF knob also makes a good turn. No reason to use any of that anymore because it's all cell phone. It's all 5G now or 4G LTE, whatever. I think the inputs on this thing are the interesting part to me or the lack thereof because I don't.
Think I remember ever having a TV that didn't at least have a coaxial input for RF on it. So what does this have exactly? This has two screws. for UHF and two screws for VHF. So in order to convert the coaxial, you have to have a transformer. And that transformer is a 75 ohm to 300 ohm adapter. that converts the coaxial to the two, to like two U shaped hooks that go on the, on the, on the, into those screws. And I just took, normally you'd put those on in addition to the antenna in the old days.
But I just took the antenna off because there's there's no signal. So it doesn't matter. We're channel three only here, baby. And when you say screws, I mean, like these are literally screws that you can screw in and out on the set. Like you're just kind of. They are. standard flat screws with a little square metal pad underneath that has a connection. I'll take a picture. You can use this for show art if you want. And you just insert the wire and almost like, I mean, there's a similar like.
screw in terminal on the back of a lot of like av receivers for speaker wire right like same same kind of deal um it's no it's it's that's a that's a those are banana those have a specific name this is this is literally just a flat screw with a metal pad underneath it and you want to mash the u-shaped connector on this transformer into that so then uh because i have to be able to get the analog out the analog out from the mr uh the we'll talk about that in a minute but
analog out from the mister i'm using rca just because it's the easiest thing i can get in and to convert the rca into the rf signal that this tv needs to generate picture I'm using an old VCR. Of course, the classic. Yeah. The classic maneuver. Just shove an old VCR in the chain. Yep. Hit that TV VCR button. It all works. And it's funny because.
My kid's been playing the playing games on this and I don't think she still knows how to turn it on because it's like, first you got to turn on the TV. You got to make sure it's on channel three. Then you got to turn the VCR, make sure it's on TV slash VCR. Make sure the channel on the VCR is set to AV because the AV comes in the RCA ports. And then you got to turn on the Mr. and navigate.
with all the weird Mr. Controls to get into the thing. Most of that sounds doable for a kid. I mean, even turning the TV on, like the knob stuff is tactile and you can figure that out. I bet it's the channel requirements that are what would throw a child who was born in the 21st century because like... Who today has experience of TVs needing to be on the right channel for signals to work or, you know what I mean?
Yeah. Now, when you turn on like when you put your switch into the dock and hit the button, it just everything gets set up for you. You don't need a Harmony remote now. You know, it just it just works. Well, and also. Like, I think I've done a bad with my Mr. Configuration in terms of how I open the Mr. Menus using the game pads.
Cause I hit like up and start on the game pad in order to open the Mr. Menu. I don't remember where I set that at this point. That is, that's rough. Yeah. You can, you can put that just on a. single button press if you have enough buttons on your controller so i don't have enough buttons on my controller is the problem yeah yeah so it has to be a cord
That's kind of the kind of the Mr. I guess the Mr. Control recommendation I've always found is like you kind of always want like nice controller plus one in terms of number of buttons like you need all the buttons you need for the games plus at least one or two extras for menu type stuff. Well, we're mostly playing SNES and NES stuff right now, so it's all...
Like I'm using those 8BitDo SN30, like the ones that don't have the analog sticks. It's just like a SNES controller shaped gamepad. Yeah, that does put you at kind of a disadvantage. I use a DualShock 4 mainly for mine, which has the little PS. little playstation button is my menu button because it's an extra works well that makes sense So yeah, anyway, so that's that. I ended up upgrading the mister in order to get this to work because I had a digital output on it before.
And I didn't want to do, I didn't want to add the latency of an HDMI to analog. Like I don't have a retro tank or one of those, you know, one of the fancy DHDMI-ers. And I didn't want to buy a cheap one because they had latency. And the cables I needed to do it the cheap way were $8 less than just replacing the IO board on my mister with one of the fancy new ones.
I don't know if you've seen it, but Mr. Add-ons has added two new IO board options. There's an analog one and a digital one. The digital one also does analog. Which is important to note. The analog one is really cool, especially for you, because you can hook it. You can have the analog going simultaneously with the digital.
so like if you wanted to stream an old game you could put hdmi out into your capture card but but play the game on your tv which is like i remember when when dan reicher tried to do that with punch out at giant bomb uh 10 years ago And poor Jason had to do like some heavy duty video engineering work to get that to happen. We ran into the same thing when I was streaming Super Mario Brothers to the Japanese version, like the original.
brutally punishing the lost levels yes the lost levels we had to pull that out of the studio big matrix switcher chain because that was adding enough latency that i was just like missing very obvious jumps in that game and stuff because those games are have zero tolerance for for latency as an aside on that there's a really good i think the celeste developers did a hey here's why
some platforms feel hard and some feel easy and they showed all the ways that like modern platformers cheat to make sure that you land the jumps that you should by rights miss yeah that's like a if it's the same twitter thread i'm thinking of that you're talking about that's like a canonical thread of game development twitter where they they went through like a bunch of like
There needs to be a term for this because games have been doing this since time immemorial, right? But the little like invisible sort of like usability tweaks, I guess I would say, or like fudging things, like you said, it's like. Oh, you know, if you're within six pixels of making a jump, we just have you make the jump, even though you technically would have missed it by rules. Yeah. And when you play, when you like, that's the big thing for her. She's been playing Super Mario Brothers.
It doesn't fudge jumps. You miss, you just straighten the hole. NES games definitely were by the book. Yeah, I did look at those Mr. Add-ons boards that he has come out with, actually, for reasons I'll get into. But the IO direct board is the one you're talking about. It's like a digital IO board, but it also can do analog out because it uses a little bridge.
Like literally uses, I guess that's the one you got, right? It's the little HDMI bridge from, from the HDMI out on the mister to an HDMI in on this thing. And then it converts it to the Saturn plug. So that's, that's exactly it. Yeah. It uses the Saturn 10 pin mini din, which I believe we rated as a D in our rating of connectors. Um, but it's, uh, and you can get a bunch of different tails for it. I just bought the, like they sell one that has like.
VGA and component and the whole deal. I just bought the $10 RCA only one because that's what I had the option for. Yeah, I priced out this whole setup too. I thought about... I ended up going a much cheaper route because I turned out to have basically 90% of what I needed already. But yeah, I was looking at like a, it's like 50 bucks for that board.
The Saturn plug to every connector you would ever need. The cable is like 35 bucks. You need a new power supply to run the whole thing on. So it was going to be like 100 bucks, which is like not nothing. So I'm just running it on a normal USB. I have a... 25-watt Anker power brick that's plugged into and it's running fine. But yeah, so I ended up going to the digital one also because it lets you keep both memory sticks in. I ended up through because of when we did the original Mr. Episode.
I bought my Mr. Card from a guy in Portugal who had a really hard time shipping. And the shipping during the pandemic was slow. So I'd given up on it. I just ordered a new memory stick. And then like two days after the new one arrived, the first one finally got here. I remember the saga. I, too, am an owner of Portuguese Ram. Yeah. I think that's Ultimate Mister is the vendor in Portugal. I think so, yeah. I found his stuff to be quite good.
But the upshot was I ended up with two ram sticks. And when we got to cores that could use two ram sticks, I was good to go. So I just jammed them in there. And I decided like the ability to run analog and the main difference that I could tell on these was that on the analog board, you can only run one memory stick. but you can simultaneously pipe video out the analog outputs and HDMI. Yes, that's correct. Which is really cool for people like you that stream old games. Yeah.
Less useful for me, who's mostly just going to sit in front of a TV and play old games. Right. To be clear, the ability to get analog and digital video out at the same time is way more useful day to day than two RAM sticks. Yeah. Like for people who don't know. Like the most you're getting out of dual RAM at this point is like slightly higher accuracy in a couple of cores. Actually, I think the Saturn core still does work. They're fairly substantially better with two.
32X Core. I haven't looked in a while, but last time I looked, the 32X Core was one of those ones that was weirdly complicated and needed more RAM, too. because of the way they composite stuff between the Saturn and the 32X bits. Yeah, we should say there have been some arcade cores, and I believe the Jaguar core that is forthcoming, where they are talking like it's going to require two RAM. Why does the Jaguar core require two ram sticks? Look, man, it's...
It's the only 64-bit game in town at the time, right? God, that thing is so OK. Well, anyway, we don't have to get out of that. But yeah, so the extra RAM requirement is just a latency thing. It's just they need more memory bandwidth to work with than one stick can provide. So maybe maybe the Jaguar was doing some. Who knows? Yeah, it had some really fast SD RAM.
So, yeah, so a couple of things that I had while I was going. One is that I love that they ship the service manual on this TV. It's just. It's like it's in a little plastic cubby that's built into the frame of the TV on the back. It has a note that says this is the service manual. It's only accessible for inside the case. Do not open if you're an end user. What?
Yeah. Wait, so can you see it in there? So you can see it, but the hole is too small to pull it out. So what is there some specialized tool you need to get it open? Well, no, you just unscrew it. But like people knew not to unscrew TVs because there's shit in there that would kill you. Oh, OK. This was right. This was an honor system thing.
Yeah, this isn't this is a straight up. Hey, the repair tech isn't going to have the manual for every TV. So we're just shipping our TV with the manual built in. That's smart. It's like it's really clever. And the fact that it's there in a window that you can see, it says, hey, you know, if I'm the repair tech, I know what to do without having to like phase one, open the back of this thing. Right. And it actually was useful in a world where independent third party TV repair actually existed.
Isn't so much a thing anymore. And you couldn't just type 10 0 a B 3 4 0 6 W F O 2 into Google. And get a $22 manual for the TV, which just to be clear is half of what I paid for the TV. Yeah. You're just reminding me though, of driving around town as a kid in the eighties and just seeing like TV repair shops all over the place. Cause that used to be a thing. Yeah, you had to, the appliance repair guy would come out.
Now the appliance preparer guy comes out and he charges you 500 bucks. He looks at the dishwasher. It's like, yeah, you should just replace that dishwasher. Like, thank you for the five. That was an incredible use of my money in time. Thank you. Seems to be the universal advice these days is just buy a new one.
So the picture was a little jumpy, though, out of the box. So I talked to a friend of the show, Steve Lin, and was like, hey, this feels like I should just take the knob off and blast some contact cleaner salute situation. And he's like, yeah, that's exactly what I would do first. He's like, if you have to replace the knob switch, the switch inside the knob, it's going to be complicated and end up in that pain in the butt.
But usually contact cleaner just does this. And so I took it off. I got a can of contact cleaner. I blasted it right on the switch. Turn the switch around a few times. Turn the tuning dial around a few times. Works like a charm. Great. Yeah. Love a quick fix. Yeah, it's the easiest thing I've fixed in like in years.
So I think that's it. I think that's the whole thing. I've got a question about maintaining your TV and also my TV, which is, let's say, at least 20 years newer than yours, if not 25. But I don't know if the question is relevant to both TVs or not. Okay. I guess I'll just ask now, since we're still talking about your TV, this could be like highly electrically ignorant.
Yes. Are there capacitors in that TV? There are, right? It's like they were using like normal modern style of capacitors and TVs at that time, right? I don't know if they're huge capacitors, but there will absolutely be scary capacitors inside. Like the reason you don't take TVs apart if you don't know what you're doing is that there are scary capacitors in almost everything with a cathode ray tube. Right.
Yeah, I don't know this. I'm way out over my skis on asking questions like this because I barely understand this stuff. But like you're getting you're getting into territory with CRT is now where they're old enough that you see a lot of people talk about replacing the capacitors because.
yeah as they age and give out it affects the quality of the of the image right like yeah causes actual issues with the video output or display and there's all for popular tvs for like the pvts and stuff like that that people use for a lot of classic game stuff And for arcade monitors, there's a lot of guidance about how to how to do that. Right. That's what I was wondering. But again, that question is.
You know, your TV is a quarter of a century older than mine, probably. So they're in different categories or phases of their lifespan. But I'm just wondering, like, when do you know it's time to start replacing capacitors? So fundamentally, the capacitor should last a really long time unless there was some sort of mechanical or chemical defect in them when they were manufacturing them, right? It's like you don't have to replace.
We we think about capacitor failures because there have been multiple famous failures of of. noteworthy capacitors yes i am sitting here laughing because my tv came out in 2002 which i think is right around that territory yeah the bad capacitor plague took place yeah microsoft um or nvidia or microsoft Put a bunch of bad capacitors on Enforce motherboards because they were a little bit cheaper than the other ones.
The clock capacitor on the original Xbox is another classic example. There's a bunch. What happens generally is they get swollen and then leak. And then the shit that they leak is real bad for motherboards. and causes cascading failures so you want to like if you have an original xbox you want to clip that clock capacitor off now even if you're not going to put a new one on
If you have an Enforce motherboard, just upgrade your computer and put that in eWaste at this point. Yeah, I was just holding my Enforce motherboard three days ago, as a matter of fact. Oh my God. I've had, we were off at next lander this week. My dual projects have been a, I went and bought eight big, new, nice. plastic storage bins and have been unloading closets and boxes and kind of reorganizing and consolidating old stuff.
I do. I can't help but notice that there is an arcade stick with a green ball top behind you. Hang on. Are we just going to do a live hand this camera? Oh, wow. I didn't realize you could do this. Ooh, that's a nice cable coils. A lot of the stuff is in bins already. I love it. Clear bins are the best. Do those seal those top seal on those? They're not they're not waterproof.
But they're like the air won't get in. I think I think we might have talked about this back with the hurricane business a few months ago because I went and bought. In fact, I bought the same type of bins here that I bought back home a few months ago because I wanted them all to be stack compatible. Oh, yeah, that's important. You know, at some future date when all of these bins live in the same place, but...
When I was picking out those bins a few months ago, I did find waterproof ones. What's the industry standard waterproof rating? It's like IPV or whatever. IP something something. Yeah, like they had a literal numerical rating on these bins at the store that were in fact.
airtight and fully sealed but they were way more expensive well so i don't know if you want like where we live where i live i don't know that you want airtight just because you don't if you do that then you have to put in like silica gel or something to suck the moisture out Because it's wet. I don't know if these were actually fully airtight, but they were supposed to be waterproof at least. Okay. Okay.
Anyway. Did I see a Nintendo 64 over there underneath your TV, Brad? Well, not under the TV. There is an N64 in one of these bins behind me. You did not see it on the floor, though. On the floor, there's a GameCube and a PS2 Slim. And my Mr. Rat's Nest. So, yeah, my two projects this week were a start going through all these bins, which is.
necessarily had me handling things like an Enforce motherboard and my original Xbox and GameCube and stuff. And the other project was get the CRT working finally with the Mr. Uren. Some of this other stuff. So I guess I'll talk about my TV a little bit. Yeah. It's a Toshiba 14 AF 42. Oh, yeah. The 14 AF 42. That's a classic. Nice and pronounceable, you know, like a good modern TV model number. Is it a 14? Is it 14 AF?
You jest, but the 42 actually turns out to have been a highly desirable model because they made... 43 through 46 after this. They made 41 through 46 total. for this line apparently the 43s and on they switched to a different um jungle chip i want to say is that the right term is this dota business again are we getting back into jungling no it's not i think it's like an rgb thing it's like a
Okay, I have now just Googled jungle chip, and in fact, an integrated circuit found in most analog TVs in the 1990s, it takes a composite video signal from the radio frequency receiver electronics and turns it into separate RGB outputs. Okay. Okay, so this is the big difference between your TV and my TV because my TV is designed to take signals from the airwaves, radio waves, and it uses those signals with analog circuits.
to change the position of the electron gun in such a way that colors and pictures come out of the tube. Yes. It is directly reading the airwaves. Yours is doing some magic with computers. Some slightly more advanced video processing going on inside this TV. So this thing is a highly desirable TV. It's only 14 inches. but it has composite, S-video, and component on it.
which is like component on a tv from that era is impressive yeah or a tv that size is the main thing like you did not see component on tvs probably smaller than like 27 inches back then or maybe 20 i don't know but like i think The first TV I had component on was that 36 inch Panasonic tube. And that was so you could do the anamorphic squeeze on that bad boy. Anamorphic squeeze.
the first time about the anamorphic squeeze for a sec. I never, I never quite understood what was going on electronically inside the TV when you did this, but it was basically like, like late era CRTs. had higher resolution than you explain it. Okay. So what, what, what you were doing was you were using the entire resolution of the TV for the rendered picture on a wide, on a letterbox image. So on a standard DVD, 480p resolution. they would have a square picture. And if it was widescreen,
the top third or top eighth and bottom eighth, whatever, the black bars would be burned into the video, right? They'd be baked into the video. On anamorphic disks, they used all of the lines for the picture. So you got more image data. um but your tv had to know what to do with it or your dvd player had to know what to do with it and either because otherwise it came out looking vertically stretched like cone heads because it was in fact stretched on the disc yeah
See, pixels weren't square. So on a TV that knew what to do, it would take all of those pixels, all that image, and scrunch it in and put the black bars in just by not aiming the electron gun there. And you'd get a higher quality picture, imperceptibly higher quality picture. I thought it was pretty perceptible. I will tell you. On all the other TVs I saw it on, I was unimpressed until I got that.
36 inch panasonic and i was like okay i kind of get it yeah like at that size it makes a difference my roommate in college in the dorm spent like all of his money on an icv at some point like hell yeah like basically just saved and like Look, when went without eating or whatever, like he bent his will toward getting a nice TV for a room. We all were in college at one point and we're like, you know what? If I. I can buy a semester's worth of ramen and Chef Boyardee for $47.
And that means I'll have $550 left for my meal plan. that I can use to buy a new video card or whatever stupid shit we bought at the time. So I think it was a Sony Vega. Anyway, that was right in the heyday of DVDs getting big. And that was the first place I ever saw the anamorphic squeeze. And it was.
a revelatory moment, I will say. Um, so anyway, okay. So your squeers, your, I bet your TV doesn't do the squeeze just because of, uh, I don't, I doubt it. I highly doubt it. Because of the size. Yes. I don't think so. Uh, this was a sidewalk find. As a matter of fact, actually, I hope he doesn't mind me saying Steve Lin was my was my generous benefactor on this TV. He found this TV on the sidewalk.
Wow. We found my TV in a parking lot. Yeah, technically, but it was being... It was at a swap meet, I guess. It was the object of commerce at that point. They wanted money for it. This thing was just sitting there. Wow, that's pretty good. And he's and he is the type of guy to rescue SCRT from the sidewalk when he sees one.
Look, I know that there we have multiple listeners in the audience who will pick up a sidewalk TV, a CRT. Should they see one? No, I so I kind of start Googling around and like reading some Reddit stories after he gave me this, just kind of seeing what other people do and like. It's a thing like you can find these fairly regularly, like especially if you go to e-waste places, but even even just on the sidewalk, there's plenty of.
stories on reddit of people sometimes finding like very valuable old tvs but you'll frequently you'll see things like oh they had cut the power cable off of it so i had to like put a new power cord in why would you do that or stuff like that the heck's wrong you're putting on the sidewalk they're pretty easy to fix for the most part, even if they're broken, right?
Assuming you don't kill yourself on the capacitors. Yes. I mean, I think you definitely like, okay, maybe we should just say anybody listening to this who's never opened a CRT before, please look up what to do if you open a CRT. Yeah. The good news is there's a lot of YouTube videos. I watched a bunch of them before I decided I wasn't going to do it and was going to.
take it over to Steve's house and ask him for help if I wanted to do that. And then the contact cleaner worked, so I don't have to worry about it. I need to learn how to discharge a CRT properly at some point. I watched Vinny do it on a joust machine in the basement of the old Whiskey Media office back in the day.
And it was real scary because like he touched a screwdriver to two things and it made a really loud noise and his arm whammed back into space and it was all he could do to hold onto the screwdriver. And I was like, I don't know. No, thank you. Unsubscribe. Yes. Anyway, he found it on the sidewalk. The infrared sensor did not work on it. Does it have buttons?
Uh, it only has power on channel and volume on the front. So, so you can't change inputs without a remote on this TV. So you can see why you can see why somebody probably junked it when they realized they could no longer switch inputs. Yeah. He sourced a new IR receiver for it, which he said at this point was getting pretty hard to find. Like you can find the part number.
Yeah, for what you need. But finding the actual part is getting tough. So I think he said he bought like five of them just in case. Wow. But so he did replace the IR receiver and had to source a new remote. Obviously, there was no remote on the sidewalk. and got it working.
Is this the one that he replaced with the TV that he bought when I bought my bad TV? He got that PVM when you bought the same day you bought your old TV at the flea market last month. This was his test bench fixing old consoles. test screen. Yeah. So he didn't, he didn't need this one anymore when he got that PVM. So it's, uh,
It very generously found its way to my house. Wow. So I went through the same process you did of once I had the TV ready to go, like staring at the mister, trying to think like, what's the best way to get video out of this thing into this TV? And obviously in my case, I had a lot of options because. Yeah. There's a lot of stuff I could do.
That's a lot. It's a lot. The Mr. Project, like you go to the compatibility site and there's like a giant matrix. I'm sure you've seen this table, right? Of like. Yeah. Connector types, signal types, because like it's not just, you know, like S video is not a signal or S video is a signal type. Sorry. But like over component, for example, or VGA, you've got like. RGB. I think RGSB is another one. There's like multiple flavors of RGB. There's whatever comes out of component, which is.
i've never known how to pronounce this yb ypbpr yeah is how it's the actual it's chroma um luminance and one other i can't remember what the other one is blacks maybe We talked about this on the video episode. I can't. It's just it's gone from my head. I don't know if there's a way to pronounce that. That is not just the letters. Anyway, like figuring out what.
you can get out of a mister over different connection types and what will be accepted by your average TV is kind of complicated. Like, and, and it's not just complicated from a, like you have to. In the old days of analog video, you basically like plug the yellow wire into the yellow wire, the red wire to the red wire, the white wire to the right wire. And it worked. I was like this. Yes. That was the extent of what I did back in the day, basically.
yeah with this you have to like set up the the mister the software and the mister to output the right video using the right output And it was it's fairly intense. Yeah, it makes you realize there was way, way more going on under the hood of. getting video out of stuff back in the day than you realized except also it just kind of worked well sure so so yeah the um the component stuff is chroma is the other thing is is the other output so it's it's luminance chroma and and
why whatever why is anyway so i i like i said i looked at that uh mr add-on stuff and i was like ah this is this is not intended to be my permanent analog mr setup this is just i just want to kind of get a quick and dirty output going to play around with it because i want to get you know there's A lot more interesting Mr. Products coming out these days that have got analog stuff built into them. So I kind of want to get one of those for.
Uh, for my more permanent setup. Uh, so I was just looking for something wicked and cheap here. Do you have a case for your mister or are you just, are you raw dogging it still? Remember, remember you laser cut me some nice little acrylic. kind of plates for the top and bottom like a fan mount yeah yeah so i've still just got the open i've got the open pcb stack still
And do you have an analog? Do you have an input board on top? I don't know. So I've never had an IO board because I never had an EFA one before. You want my old one? Well, sure. If you're looking to get rid of it. Yeah. I don't know if I, well. We'll talk later. I might use it. I'm not sure if I would.
I'll have to think about how that would fit. Decide. It's available if you want. It's just going to age in my garage. You can go take it to the storage locker and then it'll get way better. 20 years from now, people are going to be like, what the hell is this weird thing? The thing will be ripe. Yeah. Ready to go. Yeah. So the Mr. also, they added a feature three, four years ago, like later into the project called direct video that lets you actually get analog video out of the HDMI port.
That's amazing. Which sounds crazy. I have no idea what kind of magic they're doing, sending. signals on different hdmi pins or whatever well so there's an hdmi um there's always been an hdmi to analog option as part of the spec yeah oh i didn't know that because you used to be able to get an hdmi adapter it's it's part of the back back compatibility stuff
So you used to be able to get like HDMI to VGA adapters and stuff like that. That's exactly what I bought here. Yeah. This is what I ended up doing. So in fact, that's how that feature is intended to be used. When you turn on direct video, you need exactly that, an HDMI to VGA adapter. But that ties back into the different signal types that I was talking about earlier, where I think all you're getting out of VGA at that point is RGB, so you need something that can take RGB, which this TV cannot.
Does that make sense? Yeah. Like what I'm saying is I couldn't just get this VGA adapter. Oh, cause you need Y, Y, PB, P. That's exactly it. So you couldn't, you couldn't just get a dumb, like passive. VGA or DB9 to component adapter and feed that into the TV because it's a signal that the TV can't understand. So you would need yet another converter box to convert that into component coming out of the VGA, right? What I ended up doing is I have I actually have a little.
a little less video converter VGA to S video that was made by Mr. Addons that Steve let me have when he was offloading some of this stuff. So, but that thing takes power. Like I don't get any image out of it unless I, I have to power that off a USB brick because it is doing some active. It's something that is happening. Comb filter. I don't know. Some kind of encoding is turning the RGB VGA signal into S video somehow as it passes through that thing. Weird. Anyway, it is a.
Fairly ugly Frankenstein's mess of HDMI to VGA, VGA to little box box to S video. You know, it's a lot. OK, so. The cables are a problem, right? Because I have power, I have the multiple audio, the audio... The yellow, red, white RCA is going into the VCR. And then I have a big, giant, long coax cable going from the VCR to the TV.
But I also have a bunch of USB cables going to the controllers because I'm not using wireless on any of those because wireless is kind of a pain in the butt in all of these contexts. And also, it feels weird to stand there and use a SNES controller and not have it be plugged into the thing that you're talking to, even though I realize that we're past that in the 21st century. I don't know that there's a solve for the wire problem. I don't think so.
The solve is carve out some space behind the TV where you can tuck it away and not have to see it. And then you can press buttons and stuff. Sure. If you need to interact with it, that's a bigger problem. Just as a point of clarification, the HDMI legacy analog compatibility requires devices that know how to export. VGA analog signals out through HDMI. So they're not.
Like all HDMI ports aren't good with the HDMI to VGA adapter. This was the part I wanted to look up to make sure I got right. OK, I had no idea that was part of the spec. I thought I thought that was just some kind of like ground up witchcraft that the Mr. Developers had.
I didn't realize that was something they were piggybacking on. No, in the early days of HDMI and when you'd get video cards that had HDMI, often you'd have either a DVI, which like DVI does have that built into the spec, right? Like you can get a. a passive DVI to VGA cable because there are analog pins inside the DVI cable. In this case, though, your adapter has to go with a device that knows how to use the adapter. And the adapters may be specific to devices that I don't know. Anyway.
Um, so, so how is it? How are you enjoying it? It looks great. Yeah. It's like, I mean, I've had, I've, it's been God, almost five years since I put my mister together right around five years. So it's not like a new thing or whatever, but like.
There's something there's something more transportive about playing it on the type of screen that it was made to be played on. Right. Or the games were made to be played on. Like I can play old arcade games all I want on these nice modern digital LCD screens. There's something there's something that enhances the feeling of getting away with something illicit. You know, when I'm playing like I'm playing like Ninja Turtles or The Simpsons or.
You name it, like any game that you pumped quarters into back in the day, like playing it on an actual CRT in your house feels like, oh, wow, like my. You know, my 10-year-old dream of owning a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles machine is like kind of being realized here. Well, I mean, you're not wrong. There's a... The thing I noticed before I did anything else was how even when the dial was kind of janky still, like the colors are intense.
Like really, really bright, even compared to like my nice OLED. a 4k monitor and all that. And, and as I was setting up the mister to work on the TV, I had it plugged into the capture card on my computer and I was running it on the, on the screen on the, on this nice OLED. And I put that screen view. The screen window that we talked about a couple weeks ago up on top of it. It looks really nice. It looks good. It has good scan lines, the whole thing, everything you want.
But damn, when you plug it into the real TV, it's it's pretty amazing. Now, one of the things that's interesting on mine is when I hooked up, I aimed the high speed camera on my phone at it just to see what see if I can see scan lines to show the kiddo how it works. And they're diagonal. So there's like a diagonal bar, which I assume is the blanking is the blank.
Is the blank screen the blank passes that you're seeing or something? I don't know. It's really weird. It's not like anything I've seen before. It's also only 240 hertz camera. So it might be that it's not fast enough to.
pick it up reliably but yeah one thing i found is that i had most most of the cores that i turned on a bunch of the fake you know scan line and shadow mask type stuff like a lot of the video processing yeah it's supposed to replicate the look of a crt and i had forgotten about that so as i was playing all these things on this tv for the first time
I had to remind myself like, oh, wait, I'm overlaying a bunch of fake scan lines and fake shadow mask patterns on top of a real TV that has real physical versions of that stuff. So. I had to turn all that stuff off. I went through and made sure I had the right audio chip for the ARNS and Genesis that I had.
I declared Mr. Bankruptcy when I started out on this. My ROM stuff was all organized and right, but I wiped out the settings folder and just started from scratch because it had been long enough. So my mister goes through intense periods of use and then ages for six or eight months at a time? That'll happen.
Um, so like the last time I probably got into it was when the PS one core was new. Okay. Maybe the N64 core. It's been a couple of years and it's been a minute. Um, so like it was nice to come in with a relatively fresh start now. configuring all the cores and having to dig a keyboard and stuff out to make it all work was a little bit of a hassle. Yes. Actually, that brings me to, I can't believe I was about to forget this, the troubleshooting phase of getting this thing working.
Yeah. So mine just worked. Yeah. Because because you you did the sensible thing and got the all in one board that kind of just does all this for you. Well, no, I still had to set up in the mystery. Any I had to set up the resolution and all that stuff. Right. But but in that but like. I did that on the computer and then I moved it into the other room with the TV. And when I plugged it in, it just I was really shocked. I was expecting.
to have a real back and forth and a pain in the ass well what i mean is you know i went the direct video route where i just had to go buy a i bought just a ten dollar ugreen hdmi vga adapter but there's all kinds of conflicting info out there about which adapters work and which don't and then when i was going through this extra kind of little encoder dongle to turn it into s-video like it just introduced all kinds of extra variables that might or might not work based on like exactly what
ship is in this vga adapter i got so this is literally i was reading these how to's because you had recommended that you had said hey you can do this and steve pointed me to a couple things and the mr jan helped me And I looked at it all and I was like, if I end up buying three VGA HDMI adapters, I might as well have just bought the Mr. Add-ons board. That was my fear. That was exactly it. And even, you know, you can return stuff. It's not.
Yeah, the world of doesn't work, but it's a hassle. But that was the thing. It was just like, oh, man, I like I've got some time off this week. I really just want to play with this thing. I don't want to cycle through three or four adapters trying to find one that works.
All of this is a preamble for me saying when I finally got all this stuff hooked up and started trying to make it work. What I was getting, it's kind of hard to actually post a video on the discord if you want to go look at it, but it's kind of hard to describe. I was getting like.
sort of three images of the image side by side, all scrolling or is our vertically very rapidly. Yeah, that seems bad. It was okay. Well, maybe I just got a bad adapter or like one that is not compatible with whatever the mister is doing.
I spent like most of a morning trying to troubleshoot stuff. Do you have to just switch the component cables? Trying to figure out what was going on with this thing. It finally got to the point where I could not find help anywhere else. So I ended up on the actual Mr. Discord in the help channel. posting a video there. People were going like, Oh, I've got that same equipment. Like I haven't seen that. That's weird. Can you post your I and I file? Yeah. And I was like, sure. I drag it in there.
The person who's helping me, the very top of the INI file, it's like kind of a classic INI where it's arranged into sections. Yeah. Each section name goes in brackets. Can you add a bracket at the beginning of the first line? Oh my God. Really? And I was like, are you fucking kidding me? Are you actually serious right now? Somehow in, in tweaking and going and changing the settings to turn on all the analog video stuff I had. And yes, I was using them for this.
I had somehow deleted the first bracket at the literally the first character of the file. Well, look, Vim does all sorts of things for you. It'll mess up your mystery. No problem. That's amazing. Anyway, it was basically failing to parse the entire INI file because the first section name did not have the proper brackets and closing.
It's like we always say here, Brad and Will made a tech pod. If something's broken, it's probably Vim. I was like over the moon when I saw this. I can tell you exactly what happened also because X is the delete character key in Vim. And control X is save and quit. And at some point, I'm quite positive I had tried to save and quit a file and it had not registered command load with the colon for whatever reason. And instead, it just took the X and diluted.
Which Vim user has not suffered this exact same indignity, Brad? You just need to put a couple extra brackets to the front so you're good to go now. As embarrassing as that was, I was over the moon that they had caught that, though, because I had just been banging my head on this thing for... most of a morning and it probably would have taken me forever to discover that myself like i mean it like but you know it's interesting because if you'd like when i was editing my mr any
I opened it up. I just opened up the Samba share on my Mr. from my Windows machine, opened Notepad++, which has this syntax highlighting stuff. so when you have a missing bracket it just highlights everything after that bracket no that's not uh that's not working i'm just going to take a screenshot of your face right now here yeah yep that's that's going in the file I'm sorry about your VIM problem. It's fine. It was not. Look, VIM's fine.
It honestly felt pretty good when they caught that, and I SSH'd into the thing, added the bracket, saved it, turned the mister, or rebooted the mister, and it just worked. I was like, okay, that actually felt very good to go change one character and have it solve all of these problems.
That's really funny. It was really funny. Yes. Anyway, so so I went through as part of the Mr. I had at one point mounted, I made some choices when I first stepped to Mr. And I think when I was, cause I, I mount my ROMs are for the most part stored on the NAS. uh so that i don't have i have like a small ssd a small sd card in the in the mister And I think I, at one point had mounted.
I'd mounted the ROMs in like a subfolder of the subfolder they were supposed to be in instead of the subfolder they were supposed to be in. So they were like. I had multiple ghost Mr. Boulder hierarchies on my SD card. And I had to go through and clean up all that stuff. But the nice thing is, as a result of cleaning all that stuff up and getting the biases in the places where they're expected to be and getting the config files for the different cores.
where they're supposed to be is that now stuff is just really easy to manage and I can flip it on and remote into it and do it from a PC or laptop. So I can sit there with my laptop. In another room with the mister just connected over Wi-Fi and it works pretty good for the most part. The Wi-Fi connection is not stable enough to do like. But also I can just put those on on the NAS and it turns out that that works fine. Yeah. Two things here on the storing all your games on the NAS thing.
That really proved its worth like the next day when I found there, you know, like a lot of people are making old games or sorry, new games for old consoles. You know, you're like developers making like, hey, we made a shoot them up for the Genesis or whatever. A Japanese developer has put out a new side-scrolling shooter, side-scrolling shooter. Ooh. Like similar to like Gradius, Life Force, that style of shooter.
Oh, wow. Not the vertically scrolling one, like 1943 or whatever. Or Xevious or whatever, yeah. I found a demo ROM of it. Like, they're only selling physical carts. There is no digital release. So you literally can't even buy the ROM from them if you want to. Is this that Genesis? Is this a Genesis game? No, it's an NES game. I cannot. The name is very esoteric and I cannot remember at all what it is right now. Like it is completely.
I saw a Genesis game that's like this yesterday, too. It's like a Metroidvania. Yeah, I would believe that that is also in progress. I mean, I think there are a lot of like there are new GBA games being made all the time now. I'm trying to find the name of the game just to fill it in here. But anyway, like the. The point is when I found that demo ROM of it, I just...
threw it on the right folder on the NAS and swiveled my chair around and turned the mister on and there it was just ready to play, right? Yeah, it's really nice. It takes a minute for the NAS to mount the Samba share, but the mister to mount the Samba share. I have been finding that. So that's the other thing I was going to say is on the subject of having your Mr. On Wi-Fi.
This might have been better than finding that bracket error and fixing it. Which is? I pulled a router that I've had in the box for eight years out and put it back into service. Oh, and you're using it as a bridge? Yeah, I set up my old Asus RT-N66U. Remember that one? Yeah. It's a classic. Like the classic in-router that everybody bought. I used that one until it actually died. Yeah. Mine conked out eventually. Yeah. So I like, I, you know,
Holding on to old stuff I know is kind of fraught and perhaps some of us do it a little bit to excess. I get it. Sometimes hoarding is good, Brad. I do think that maybe keeping your previous Wi-Fi router around just in case is actually not the worst thing to do because...
A, router is critical infrastructure, so if yours dies, it's nice to have something to plug in on the spot. But B, getting wired internet in a corner of a room where it's not feasible to run a cable is... I mean, it's not actual wired internet, but like what I mean is like I could get a wifi adapter for the mister and set it up on there, which is probably going to be not great because it's tiny little USB dongle with a tiny antenna in it.
Or I can use this dedicated box that's got multiple big antennas and turn that into. So I'll tell you, I use the Wi-Fi, the little tiny dongle, and it's fine. I'm sure it's fine. The problem, I was having a problem with it briefly when I first started setting this up where it was hooking up to the wrong access point because I have access points on either side of the house.
And it was hooking up to the one that was far away from where I was sitting just because I think signal was too high where it was. And once I fixed that, it's been really good. Like I load PlayStation games and everything across it. It's fine. I played Parappa for the first time. Wow. I never played Parappa because it doesn't really play on LCDs. Oh, yeah, right. Speaking of games that are not latency tolerant. No. Parappa is not forgiving about missed inputs.
So the problem with Parappa on my TV is that I have, it has like a frame around the edges of the tube that almost vignette it. And all the UI that you need to play the game is covered up by that thing. Sure. I'll have to get the other TV out to play that, I guess. The other thing I was going to say real quick about the Wi-Fi is that, yeah, I absolutely believe like a normal dongle would be just fine. I also am going to plug in my PS2 though. Okay. Because I've got another project brewing there.
Playing Tony Hawk three mess around with maybe trying to load some PSU games over the network. Ooh. Okay. Which I have not started on yet, but, uh, but getting wifi on a PS2 is way, way trickier than getting wifi on a. on a mister, so I figured why not just set up the bridge with the router and just plug everything into that instead.
I also pulled out my, um, my classic ASCII AV selector. Anybody knows what's an ASCII AV selector? ASCII is like the classic Japanese peripheral maker. Oh, like made a lot of super Nintendo and super Nintendo controllers. I think. If I'm not mistaken, I want to say they were the actual manufacturer of the NES Advantage.
Really? Not ASCII branded, obviously. Nintendo put their own name on that. The two-button joystick with turbo buttons? I had about those. Yes. Anyway, the ASCII selector is just a nice little five or six-way. analog audio video changer switcher. collector kind of thing, which I imported. I believe it's Japanese made Japanese text on the back.
the point i'm trying to make is that i was the kind of nerd who had to import the best av selector right i don't i i'm not surprised and not just buy whatever crap was at walmart at the time in the late 90s I was going to say the other thing that I saw at the flea market last week.
is or last month is the is one of those things that sits underneath your monitor on your desk with like power it's a power strip with individual buttons for the computer the monitor the printer your modem and then other i kind of wish i had bought that useless yeah but it would look real good underneath the uh underneath the tv and would replicate the exact setup that i had as a as a youth yeah
Yeah. Anyway, it's been it's been fun pulling old stuff out and plugging it in. I've been going through old PS2 and GameCube memory cards to see if my save games are still on there. They are. It's amazing. And I have to find a way to dump those soon. My Xbox does not power on.
Oh, no. My original Xbox does not turn on. Did you crack it open and had you clipped the clock capacitor? Yeah, I took the clock capacitor and one other because I put them in a little Ziploc baggie and taped it to the console just for reference, I guess. was probably my thinking there. So I know that I pulled two capacitors out of that thing like three or four years ago, maybe three years ago. It was around the time we started the podcast, if I recall. Anyway.
That thing still capacitor or not does not pass. Oh, actually, maybe the other capacitor I took out was load bearing. Perhaps I didn't consider that. Now that I think about it, the clock capacitor, the system... It just won't keep real-time clock, right? Yeah, unless I think it's the last revision of Xbox actually needs it in to boot, but all the previous ones, which mine is, work fine without it, but maybe that other capacitor I took out actually...
Probably need to open that thing back up and try to service it at some point. This ASCII video switcher is incredible. The one I have? Yeah, the one you have. I found it on surugaya.com. The selector? The selector. Yeah. The selector. It's a hard ASCII AB selector. You want to talk about chunky, chonky buttons. Those buttons make a very good thunk when you click them. They look pretty good.
Yeah. So it's been, it's been fun getting into the analog stuff. I'm the, the big surprise for me was how excited my daughter was about it. I didn't expect her to get into it at all. Of course. I mean, we've talked a little bit, I think like the youth are kind of having a moment with analog technology, right? With. film cameras and stuff like that as well yeah maybe but because that tapes for her it's like
I don't know. It's been fun because we'll play Mario together. She'll take a turn at Mario and she'll be like, hey, dad, I got to the fourth world. And I'll then play and have a hell of a time because the game's way harder than I remember it being. um i finally can do the thing where you run and slide underneath a one height brick when you're big mario again which i wasn't sure that those that those uh
that those 8-bit dough controllers were capable of. But they are. I was just old and couldn't do it anymore. The next thing I want to look at is getting a snack so I can plug in my old controllers, maybe. Or that ultra low latency. Well, and I have a zapper here too. So I can play light gun games. Yeah, sure. It's the final frontier of Mr. Stuff is playing like on games. Look, I did the thing with a retro pie years ago where I set up a Wemo. I set up two candles on the side of the TV.
and you used a wiimote as a light gun that was a that was fun yeah because and it worked surprisingly well for like house of the dead and stuff like that But, um, but yeah, I haven't played like there's, I kind of played Hogan's alley in 30 years. I don't think Hogan's alley is very good, but who knows? Maybe it is. Maybe it's fun. You might've been missing something back then.
Yeah, like I look, all I wanted was a copy of Hogan's Alley and they got me gumshoe because they were like, this is going to be this is an adventure game about a private detective. You love detectives. I was like, well, I do love detectives. That is correct. It's gumshoe. Good. I've never played gumshoe. So. I thought Gumshoe was bad for a long time. And then a friend of the show, Jeff Gerstmann, did as part of his ranking of Nintendo games.
He got to gumshoe a few weeks ago. And because I've talked so much shit about gumshoe over the years, everybody like dumped it to me. And watching him play gumshoe made me think maybe I'm wrong about gumshoe. Oh, OK. Yeah. So if you want to play gumshoe sometime, let me know. I can set it up. I think maybe I it's look, it's like Top Gun. Maybe I just wasn't enough of a gamer back then to land on the aircraft carrier successfully. But now I can do it one or two out of five times.
For a game about a hard-boiled detective in a trench coat, there sure are a lot of balloons and tropical... like palm trees and stuff. Well, like, you know, you go where the case takes you, man. Fair. That's true. And I think the, I think you have to, I think you have to shoot the pink balloons or you have to jump into the pink blue. The way it worked was you made the guy jump.
It was kind of like it was kind of like one of those runner endless runner games because you can't you can't stop him. He's just always going right. And you make him jump by shooting him. But also you can shoot other stuff like bottles that people hug at you. I didn't realize gumshoe was an endless runner. Well, we didn't have endless runners then, right? It was just a platformer way ahead of its time. Light gun platformer. The last thing I was going to say.
I guess my biggest revelation in messing with all this stuff is how much my brain has been poisoned in the intervening decades by dealing with modern digital signals. It was like, I am so attuned now to like, okay, there's going to be some kind of handshaking going on here. I've got to make sure things are on the right input. I probably need to turn these on in the right order if the console...
doesn't see a viable input on the other end, it's probably going to drop to like a low resolution. You know what I mean? There's so many quote unquote smart things going on with devices talking to each other now that like. It's been kind of weirdly retroactively revelatory, I guess I would say, to like go back to a time when it was like, oh, this is just an electrical signal coming out of here. Like I just plugged this.
There's no retention mechanism. It's just a plug. It's just sending electricity. It's just going to send the electricity, whether the TV is on or not, whether it's on the right input or not. You know what I mean? Like working with these types of analog signals is like it's been a weird kind of history lesson to go back to this stuff.
Well, so agreed. And the other thing I noticed, so I had a VCR. I mean, I'm using a VCR in my pipeline here. And I had some VHS tapes around that I'd been doing some archival type stuff on before. And it's kind of amazing. I had forgotten what it's like to watch stuff without.
like digital compression artifacts because our brains filter out those compression artifacts. Now, like we're so used to seeing a little bit of square shiveriness and blockiness and like even on the newer codecs, like AB1 and H265. you still see different kinds of artifacts. They're not as bad as like the MPEG-2, the old MPEG-2 artifacts that were on DVDs, but you forget how much your brain filters that stuff out. And to me...
The hardest part of this whole thing has been, you know, so there's I think there's vertical and horizontal sync knobs on the back that you can access with a screw. But on the front, there's like saturation and color color, which is, I think, saturation and tint, which is like the hue where you can change, like make blue look green or pink or whatever.
Getting the saturation right, I don't remember what it was supposed to look like, and I don't have like an AV Essentials to plug into this to calibrate it. Yeah, I've had a similar experience with this thing because, I mean, in this case, the settings are digital, not knobs like yours, but it's the same type of thing of like... How sharp is a CRT supposed to look? Like, where is the brightness supposed to be? I don't remember what, like, perceptually, like, what...
What are the ideal settings on this thing? I don't, I've lost that kind of sense memory. Well, and then, so the other interesting thing that came out as I, as I was, so my daughter, we were talking about how it works, right? Versus like how a flat screen TV works.
And as I was explaining, I realized that there's a bunch of stuff about this that I don't actually really understand. Like, I know there's an electron gun in the back and that excites some phosphors in the front of the thing, but how does that make color and how does. How does one signal coming over the airwaves make every TV, regardless of how big or small it is, work the same way? And it turns out when you go look for that stuff.
There's a lot of like weird, weirdly esoteric, almost like approaching lost knowledge. And there are there are YouTube videos about this and there is there are obviously Wikipedia articles and there's people who've talked about how the technology works. rubber meets the road of like, if you wanted to manufacture a new CRT today, I think we're almost to the point that there's not enough people left that understand how to make these.
that, that we'd be able to recreate this technology now if we wanted to. So it's kind of cool to own like a, like a, like a, you know, it's like owning a coelacanth, right? We got living fossils going here, which I like. Yeah. And they'll probably outlive us. I don't know about that. Actually, this is the last thing before we wrap up here.
You mentioned to me beforehand, you're going to upload, you're going to make an entry for your model and upload some photos of it to the CRT database. Are you going to follow through on that? I don't know. We'll see. Now that you said it on the podcast, I probably have to.
I got to get a good place to take pictures. I think that's always the problem. That's why I brought it up. I was the CRT database dot com is what I'm talking about. I was able to find that Toshiba on there and got some pretty good information about what it can do from. from that site. So I was pretty bummed to find that your TV is not on there. Nope.
But you can fix that. I can make it happen. Like you can, you can add to the collective share of knowledge in the world by documenting this 40 to 45 year old television. This is the worst shaming you've ever done to me, Brad. You need to do this for humanity. This is my penance for all the Vim jokes. Okay, I will find a place to take pictures and do that. I'll make it happen.
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Uh, when we came back from the, when we came back from the flea market, uh, I don't know if I may or may not go tomorrow. The next one is tomorrow. Well, it's, it's the day that you're. If you're listening to this at midnight on Sunday,
And you live in the Bay Area. You can get up and be there at six o'clock in the morning. It's true. And be there when it happens. I think that there's some listeners coming for this one. So I should get my ass in gear and get up there. But it's going to be a challenge. If you would like to learn how to subscribe to the show, you can go to patreon.com slash techpod. It's five bucks a month. It helps us immeasurably. We really appreciate every listener. We certainly do.
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