[HN Gopher] Revisiting the "Cansole", because my TV doesn't have...
___________________________________________________________________
Revisiting the "Cansole", because my TV doesn't have the right
connectors
Author : jgrahamc
Score : 68 points
Date : 2023-07-19 07:20 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.jgc.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.jgc.org)
| jonhohle wrote:
| While a cheap composite to HDMI adapter _can_ work, it likely
| adds several frames of latency which may or may not affect
| gameplay. This isn't because of the composite to HDMI conversion,
| but because cheap boxes like this scale the PAL signal from 576i
| to 720p or 1080p. It may not matter for pong, but this can be up
| to several hundred milliseconds compared to original discrete
| pong which would have had around 17ms latency from controller to
| display. It's also possible that the arduino is outputting a 288p
| signal, like a lot of game consoles used to use, which the
| converter probably misinterprets as 576i which can lead to
| interlacing artifacts that most CRTs, for example, wouldn't have.
|
| There are several high end converters/scalers (Framemeister,
| RetroTink-5X, Koryuu Transcoder to OSSC) that introduce very
| little latency, but obviously cost significantly more.
|
| For anyone interested in the messiness of PAL & NTSC signals and
| conversion to modern or even old displays, RetroRGB[0] is an
| amazing resource. It's amazing to see how good old consoles can
| look, not only on current displays, but on CRTs with S-video or
| component inputs.
|
| 0 - https://www.retrorgb.com/
| jgrahamc wrote:
| Good point. Doesn't really matter for my rubbish Pong game but
| I have proper converter/scaler on order.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| If anyone is interested in how a tiny game can be developed on a
| really small shitty, cheap and low-performance) chip, here's a
| nice video from Bean Heck:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZsWqOuJFKI (part 1)
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aq30EdgSpOY (part 2, result at
| ~1:18:00)
| relwin wrote:
| Typo - Ben Heck. (he's a well-known maker)
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| yeah, just noticed the typo, i was typing on my phone and
| yeah, thick fingers
| jgrahamc wrote:
| That's so nice. I've played around with ATtiny84a before. You
| can choose the perfect chip from the Atmel line up for your
| application.
|
| https://blog.jgc.org/2022/12/the-rogers-watch-retro-display-...
| dools wrote:
| This is a fun project.
|
| It reminds me of a little console of sorts my brother and I had
| when I was around the age of 4. I remember it only as "TV Games"
| and I'm pretty sure it only had pong on it.
|
| It's funny to think about how much computer power went into
| producing the "Cansole" versus "TV Games". I'm sure it probably
| didn't even have a CPU, it was probably just all done in
| hardware.
| blincoln wrote:
| Most of the dedicated Pong-style game consoles used a chip (or
| chipset) designed for a specific set of related games.[1]
|
| The Wikipedia photo of the TV Master[2] is a great example of
| switches that correspond to most of the pins on the AY-3-8500.
|
| [1] http://pong-story.com/gi.htm [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Binatone_TV_Master_Mk_IV....
| misnome wrote:
| One of these "TV Master"?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binatone - identifiable by the
| distinctive orange/black casing.
|
| I had a Mk.8 in the early 90's picked up from a junk sale, and
| it had an interesting set of pong-a-likes.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-07-21 23:01 UTC)