Birbla

Join the discussion

Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.

Sign in
  • Hacker News
  • Oh him. Is the loser still appearing on camera with his gun? What a douche.
    by gfdgfdff
  • I'm so confused.
    by ddtaylor
  • hi
    by zahidullah
  • hiiiii
    by zahidullah
  • Thanks for sharing. I have been enjoying Davids content for many years and hope he keeps making awesome stuff. The Time Rift Arcade has been neat too.
    by ddtaylor
  • Could you accomplish something similar with just colored foil? Like, red foil makes red and white look the same.
    by econ
  • It is unclear what you are asking. What you are asking sounds more like using something to add color to the monochrome on the screen, like the Magnavox Odyssey [1] or the Vectrex [2]. But that would be orthogonal to what this is doing.

    [1]: https://youtu.be/Lc8swrtGer4?t=211

    [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uz3QAj7I3MQ

    by jerf
  • You could generate sweet stereoscopic images with two differently colored foils placed in an eyeglasses frame: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaglyph_3D
    by rzzzt
  • You could use the hot lines from RBG as the binary id (2^3) of the monitor and then average up the RBG intensity from the hot lines as the result. This would give you 8 monitor support.

    Or you could limit it to 3 monitors but two hot lines pick the monitor and then you can sum the intensity on those two hot lines two double your fidelity.

    If you do the two line color system you could have a YC signal of luminance (Y) and chrominance (C) and thus you have a color signal.

    by bhouston
  • I started seeing LED displays on store fronts in the late 80s (the ones that scroll text horizontally).

    This would have been quite the product then. TVs were expensive, but B&W TVs not so much.

    by forinti
  • Hmm, some clarity would be lost going through the TV tuner, but probably worth the price difference.
    by mixmastamyk
  • Spoilers:

    The trick was pretty easy to guess but still a lot of fun to see put into practice. The EGA monitor bits, and more broadly just the idea of trading color bit depth to multiplex signals for multiple monitors into a single framebuffer and physical output is pretty cool. The Windows display driver idea actually implemented on real hardware would be tons of fun. I could have seen products actually doing this "back in the day" to do multi-head setups. I'm kinda surprised examples don't exist.

    by EvanAnderson
  • "Every mathematician wants to discover a mathematician's lemma."

    It might have been easy to guess, but you didn't really think of it in the past 51 years since the Commodore 128 was introduced, did you?

    by utopcell
  • I think it's just that monitors were so much more expensive then, especially those capable of the 350-line EGA mode.
    by badc0ffee
  • Would be the kind of product you see demoed on The Computer chronicles from Eagle New Global Tech corporation, you gander at it thinking "Wow, one day I will get that" and then you never hear from the company again as they only sold 4,000 units.

    So like most of the gadgets from the 90s.

    by HerbManic
  • Since everyone is vibe coding everything anyway I fully expect there to be a Windows 3.x display driver that works this way soon. I'm sure people in the retro computing hobby feel a certain way about this, but it's definitely also hard to deny the amount of "Project Structure" in README and "// ---- Input Handling ---------------------------------------------" snippets I've been seeing lately in a lot of new homebrew and other projects. (Another fun one: comments that are justified to a specific column but off by one in only one of them. I'm sure humans do this too, but AI does it more.) I don't really care that much personally although it's silly that people kind of have to be wink-wink-nudge-nudge about it for the foreseeable future.
    by jchw
  • Back in the VGA days, I worked for a video card maker, and one of them supported a multi-head configuration. You could stick as many as 16 into one machine, if it had enough slots. Thus driving 16 monitors at once. I was responsible for taking the stock Windows 3.1 display driver for the chipset and modifying it for multi-head support. That was a really fun and challenging project, and ultimately very satisfying. I am pretty sure there were a few customers who needed the full 16-card setup.

    BTW this was done in the day when drawing pixels on a screen was all done via the CPU telling the card "draw /this/ pixel with /this/ color". Good times!

    by twh270