I got a handheld emulator console as a Christmas gift. Configuring shaders that emulate crt TVs, I realized I had no mental model of how those TVs worked at all.
I’m used to “pixels are three little lights combining rgb colors”, which doesn’t work here, so I went on a rabbit hole and let me tell you, analog TVs are extremely impressive tech.
Getting an electron beam to hit a glass, making the chemicals on it spark, covering it in a “reading motion” for hundreds of lines, and doing that 60 times a second! And the beam is oriented by just careful usage of magnets. It sounds super sci-fi for an already dead, 130 years old technology.
I also learned that my childhood was a lie. Turns out that the logic in consoles of the time was tied to the speed of the beam, which in turn used alternating current’s frequency as a clock. This means that since European current changes 50 times per second rather than 60, our games played in slowmo (about 0.8x). American sonic was so much faster! And the music was so much more upbeat!