231–240 of 316 posts
It's not technology, but it is a super niche technical group of people. Restoring antique and vintage woodworking equipment. Like pre-1920's if possible. There are no manuals, most of the companies are out of business, and there are very few resources available. There are websites like oldwoodworkingmachines and oldwoodworkersforum but, mostly it's trial and error. It requires a super keen eye for detail, and when yo…
I love retro gaming on CRT. People tend to misjudge how retro games are supposed to look (visible pixels or mismatch between 2d backgrounds and 3d models). I'm not opposed to people playing on LCD screens, I just think it's important to remember how those games were supposed to look. Some people are dedicated to show that, which is great: CRTpixels: https://twitter.com/CRTpixels Standard Definition Gaming: https://ww…
I've recently ordered a GBS-Control in the hopes I'd find a VGA 31khz monitor by the time it arrived (no luck), and am now struggling with making it work with a LCD monitor. I've run into many issues so far:
- Increasing the GBS-C's width too far results in display corruption.
- The on-screen width of the picture depends both on GBS-C settings and monitor "Auto Adjust".
- The web UI places form over function. You have to enable developer mode in the web UI to even see the current settings and know what thresholds cause video corruption or cause the monitor Auto Adjust to stretch the image to full width. And the same button shape can mean either a momentary action (most buttons), a toggle checkbox action (auto gain), a radio button that takes 1.5 seconds to check when clicked (profile picker), and when you lose Wi-Fi connection with the ESP8266, the buttons do nothing and do not become checked when pressed (and may produce an on-screen and web UI response seconds later)!
- 240p Test Suite GX's grid and linearity tests have different aspect ratios, and I don't know which one to adjust to be square/circular.
- Prior to my clock generator board arriving, sync lock mode 0 resulted in the image shifting vertically by 1 scanline every 10 seconds or so on my LCD. Sync lock mode 1 worked better.
- It appears that each named slot's profiles are saved independently for each video input mode (240p=480i vs 480p). I don't know what happens when you switch modes but haven't saved a preset profile for the other video mode in your current slot. And "Reset Defaults" in the GBS-C keeps profile names but wipes the underlying settings files. I'm not aware of any way to erase slot names, and may need to dig into the firmware source code to find out.
- Tuning the GBS-C to perfectly show the full overscan region in both 240p and 480i/p modes of my Wii (generated by 240p Test Suite GX) was tricky to get right. At one point, the two modes would display 1 scanline offset vertically from each other. I don't know if this is still a problem.
- Switching video modes behaves oddly:
- Sometimes in 240p Test Suite GX, the image first displays glitched lines scrolling down the image (as if the GBS-C misdetects vblank as 1/3 Hz), before my monitor goes black and reappears even though it's receiving 960p from the GBS-C before and after the input mode changes. (Presumably this is 1280x960, but I have no clue if the dot clock is actually synced between the GBS converter and monitor, and the Wii component video signal is nowhere near 1280 dots per row of bandwidth)
- Sometimes after changing modes (IIRC both in synthetic 240p Test Suite and real Nintendont usage), the image shows up again horizontally squashed and offset on-screen, until I power-cycle the monitor.
- Sometimes the full image would be shifted downwards vertically by around 10 scanlines, until I power-cycle the GBS-C or reapply 1280x960 resolution (resync onto incoming video? IDK).
Again I'd have to dig into the GBS-C source code to find out why mode changing behaves oddly. There will be a lot of learning to do, understand the software state and chip registers and how they correlate to profile settings and input/output behavior. I suppose I could file a bug at https://github.com/ramapcsx2/gbs-control/issues, but somehow I feel reluctant to do so, partly because I didn't fully understand the setup and don't know if many of these bugs wouldn't happen on a VGA CRT, partly just learned helplessness and not knowing if my bug report is detailed enough or will be ignored or attacked, partly because I'd prefer to chat with the developers in Discord/Matrix outside of a higher-stakes formal bug report or a forum I've never posted at before.
Right now I'm actually working on a new esolang that combines an almost-reasonable stack-based programming language with Malbolge-inspired (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malbolge) obfuscation.
Disclaimer: I am in no way encouraging or advocating for software piracy. The warez scene in 90s and early 00s was fun to follow. I consider the NFO files a legitimate form of art, not to mention the skills for unpacking and keygen-ing or cracking of the protected software. https://scenelist.org/
> I consider the NFO files a legitimate form of art I still install DAMN NFO Viewer on my main PC just so I can appreciate some of the .nfo files I still have.
"files.associations": {
"*.msg": "plaintext",
"*.ans": "plaintext",
"*.asc": "plaintext",
"*.rip": "plaintext",
"*.nfo": "plaintext",
...
},
...
"[plaintext]": {
"files.encoding": "cp437",
"files.eol": "\r\n",
"editor.renderControlCharacters": true
},Databending. Which is applying random noise to a file in order to generate something that still decodes well, but has some weird/cool glitch. I went to a workshop about this in some underground club that no longer operates; still thinking about it and toying around from time to time. This was waaaay before Dall-E et al. were cool ways to generate quasi-crappy images. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Databending
Try taking a 1MB compressed text file (with some interesting text), cutting it in half, and replacing the second half with random numbers, then uncompress it.
Synths I was building synthesizers for a time, most of them used chips from old computers like Commodore 64 or some FM chip from an old PC audio card that I can't quite remember. I haven't had time for that in a long while. http://www.midibox.org/ Coffee I guess some things around coffee and espresso machines specifically. Depth-wise I had rebuilt some commercial machines but also just being in the forum and seeing o…
Where I am in Europe diesels are king, and usually people import 2nd or 3rd hand cars from Germany. I'm from the UK originally, but it's kind of funny that I see a couple of magnitudes more BMWs here, which is much poorer country.
Once your engine has done two or three hundred thousand kilometers the original tuning doesn't really work that great, so you probably want to remap it. This is not only to increase performance, it is also done to decrease fuel consumption and burn cleaner (the technical inspection here is very strict about CO) or makes it start easier when cold.
This is done using software that lets you change how much fuel is injected across different RPMs and throttle levels. If you car has an Eco mode, this is how that works. The thing that there are only really 5 manufacturers of diesel engines for cars in Europe: Volkswagen (VW, Seat, Skoda, Audi, Porsche), PSA (Pegeuot, Citreon, Fiat, Opel, Ford), Mercedes (Mercedes, Nissan, Renault), BMW and Volvo; and the way they work under the hood is all pretty similar.
The fuel injection system and control equipment is not developed in house, but made by someone like Bosch, so if you have two engines made by differnet manufacturers but using an ECU from the same supplier, as you can understand there will be similarities.
To be able to tune engines properly you not only need to know how to edit the map, but also all the perculiarities of that particular engine. A lot of it is trial and error and reading Russian forums (where most the scene is developed).
As you can probably guess it's also used to work around emissions control devices, which are usually no longer functional when you're engine has done a few hundred thousand kilometers, and at this point can actually increase fuel consumption and can damage the engine. For some reason manufacturers do not sell replacement parts, so if you want to keep the engine running your only option is to disable it in software and have it physically removed. Because of all this it's common to see 20 year old cars still driving that have done over half a million kilometers.
- Pure HTML / CSS / vanilla JS sites. It's a shame that it's turned into a niche scene, but I'm always a fan of inspecting sites that don't bloat themselves with unnecessary frameworks. - Sites that work without JavaScript. Even better than the first, it's always a pleasure to see when a site is made properly for a change, without the toxicity of JavaScript that pervades the world wide web (WWW) as we know it.
To expand on this, I like thinking about how standard browser APIs can act as the framework without using third-party libraries. An early example was document.querySelectorAll obviating the need for jQuery’s wonderful $. More recently, I’ve waited eagerly for Web Components to come into their prime, which has been just a year or two away for a decade now.
I run a 22yo online competition for a 32yo DOS racing game: Stunts, or 4D Sports Driving in some countries. The competition has spawned a long-lived community which includes reverse engineering, game patches, new cars, alternative engines, a few world meetings, and multiple other competitions. - https://zak.stunts.hu - https://wiki.stunts.hu/wiki/Custom_cars - https://forum.stunts.hu/index.php?board=90.0&label=stunts…
Oh the memories!