Live data from Hacker News

Raster CRT Typography According to DEC

masswerk.at

11–20 of 55 posts

Re: Raster CRT Typography According to DEC

#13
post #5

Interesting post. From my work on 1980s micros that used CRT TVs for display, the phosphor response described here seems to be a bit oversimplified. In my purely subjective experience, rise time seems to be shorter than fall time - pixels will usually be visibly blurred on the trailing (right) edge, but sharper on the leading (left) edge. Another thing I noticed is that a longer horizontal row of pixels will leave a…

TVs had their sub-pixels arranged differently to the CRTs on many computer displays. This lead to a lot of “fuzzing” beyond that phosphor response when computers were hooked up to TVs.

A classic example of this is when you play retro consoles on an authentic household TV verses VGA.

Some systems actually used this technique as an additional rendering trick. For example having a foreground sprite where every other pixel was invisible and those pixels would be blurred by the TV to give a more authentic looking transparency effect.

Re: Raster CRT Typography According to DEC

#15
post #2

Similar project is cool-retro-term [1] although I think the defaults are a little over the top. [1] https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term

I love cool-retro-term! I'd say the defaults are way over the top and probably hurt the projects adoption. Once I turned everything down, it has become the most readable modern terminal I've ever used!

Re: Raster CRT Typography According to DEC

#16
Reminds me a bit of a weekend project I did a few years back: When I was about 6, my dad went out and bought what would be the family computer for half a decade, a TI-99/4a. The thing that stuck in my craw was that even though Apple and Commodore had mastered the lowercase Latin font, the lowercase letters on the TI were just tiny uppercase ones. So flash forward 25 years or so, and I'd downloaded a TI-99 emulator to play with, and decided to see if I could put an Apple II font on it. It was relatively easy to find the font in the ROM, and I found a donor font through Google. Kludged them together, and it worked beautifully. Lowercase letters on a TI-99! No idea WTF they were thinking with the original font.

Re: Raster CRT Typography According to DEC

#17
post #6
post #5

Interesting post. From my work on 1980s micros that used CRT TVs for display, the phosphor response described here seems to be a bit oversimplified. In my purely subjective experience, rise time seems to be shorter than fall time - pixels will usually be visibly blurred on the trailing (right) edge, but sharper on the leading (left) edge. Another thing I noticed is that a longer horizontal row of pixels will leave a…

Without disagreeing with you, the diagrams from the linked page are pretty much reproductions of the ones from an official VT100 technical manual, https://vt100.net/docs/vt100-tm/ It appears to me that the rise/fall graphs are just graphs of ideal RC networks, while the whole true CRT system will have lots of other factors such as inductance going on. When it comes to comparing what you might recall of CRT TVs and 80…

What does the long decay times of forbidden transition lines have to do with analogue circuits?

Re: Raster CRT Typography According to DEC

#18

We need the VT52 experience: relay clicks as you type.

My favorite VT52 experience was at a science fiction convention with Doug Humphrey (DIGEX).

In the middle of a party in a hotel room, DIGEX announced: "OK, it's time to go down to the garage and bringing up all the VT52's from my car!" Trusting Doug unconditionally, several of us volunteered to help.

After we hauled a bunch of VT52's from the parking garage, through the hotel lobby, up the elevator, and back to the room, and set them down, Doug opened up one of the cases and announced:

"The great thing about VT52's is that if you take the printer module out, there's just enough room for a 6 pack of Guinness Stout bottles inside!"

https://vt100.net/docs/vt52-mm/chapter7.html

https://vt100.net/docs/vt52-mm/figure7-2.html

Re: Raster CRT Typography According to DEC

#20
DEC Terminal Modern, fitting the old character shapes but having smooth outlines, is rather nice. It's almost like the new Chicago font, which Apple remade as a vector font that would produce the original bitmaps if rendered at the original size.

I'd like to see that for the "fixed" font used as the xterm default. I got addicted to this font, but pixels are getting smaller and my eyes are getting worse.

Post reply on HN