Absolute mad lad renders Doom in teletext It is time once again to reset the "days since someone ran Doom on something quirky" calendar. Last we heard from the seminal first-person shooter source code, it had appeared as a farmer-themed mod running on jailbroken tractor hardware from John Deere as part of a demonstration on security (or lack thereof). "Turns out our …
The rendering is surprisingly fluid on the demo video, but the poor resolution and black&white display would make it very difficult to play once you've passed the first levels, unless you're so familiar with the game that you could play with your eyes closed. Monsters are only visible in close range and items such as locks and keys hardly at all.
Still, as a wise man said: 'Completely useless, so absolutely necessary!'
The monsters would be easier to see if they were in colour. The main problem there would be that- if my ancient memories of the BBC Micro's Teletext mode are correct- the colour attribute changes would gobble up a single character space on either side (i.e. one "to" the monster's colour and one back "to" wall colour).
The Oric 1 had Teletext-style attributes more so than the Spectrum, a colour change takes up a space and the colour continues until the next colour change or the end of the line, so attribute clash could affect up to the rest of the line.
Yes, while the Spectrum had the widely-known limitation of only two colours within any 8x8 square (as Martin-73 noted, a limitation many programmers tried to work around or hide with varying levels of success) it didn't implement Teletext-style attributes and didn't suffer from the dead space that- and presumably the Oric- suffered from.
Mine didn't have a Teletext set either, I learned this from programming the BBC Micros at school in the late 80s and early 90s which had a Teletext-compatible display mode (I found out later this was generated by a dedicated chip in hardware which explains why it looked noticeably different to the other modes).
It may have been driven to extinction in the UK but it still exists in parts of Europe, even on DTT (which has specific provision for compatibility) and even for the purpose of providing subtitles as well as news and information. It's most likely to finally die as a result of RF broadcasting ceasing - which is probably closer than we expect.
However, full marks for ingenuity and persistence here! You can transmit up to 16 lines of data per TV frame (in theory) which, given only 17 lines are being used for the display would mean a maximum frame rate of close to 47FPS. Early teletext models predated cheap microprocessors and so operated directly on the incoming data in real time (there was a family of Philips/Mullard ICs which became ubiquitous for this purpose) so are likely to perform rather better than modern sets which likely rely on the same overstretched MCU that's being used for all the other "intelligent" functions.
Indeed, RF broadcasting is already having its channels gobbled for xG (solve for x) ... but such is progress I just hope a small segment of VHF or maybe low band UHF (maybe channel E21/22) is made available for experimenters who want to try low power stuff with bygone tech. This kinda informally already happens on LW in Eire as there is no official broadcasting on that band, so low powered stuff provided it doesn't cause interference, is ...turned a blind eye to by the Garda (from chatting to radio type peeps on the tube of you)
Icon because this thread makes me feel like it :) Long live Atlantic 252
... family of Philips/Mullard ICs
SAA 5040 etc
Many countries carried on offering Teletext when they went digital with DVB-TXT, if it ain't broke don't fix it.
I think it was a result of that questionnaire a while back asking what types of articles do you like the most and there was a choice of four answers. That turned out as well as Mozilla changing Firefox's UI according to telemetry... the mix was what made El Reg what it was.
If that was the case, i think they need to look over the data they were collecting. NO one, and i mean NO one among my colleagues has a positive thing to say over the changes.
Even my long retired parents : Where the f*k has this gone?
Mostly running along the lines of one thing: Firefox ain't Chrome.
-a result of that questionnaire
I think it was a result of collapse of advertising revenue, leading to a cut-back in the staff and in the number of articles presented.
The questionnaire was another result of the collapse of advertising revenue: the results are used to sell advertising.
The old British computer company ICL in the 1980s had an internal information text system, which was nearly identical to teletext. This was a kind of fore-runner to an Intranet containing company announcements. It ran on series 39 mainframe. There was even a lonely hearts page, which I thought was hilarious because all the women in the office would try to work out who was looking for a date. You would see the pages scroll through on monitors in offices. I can't remember if you could log into it, too long ago now.
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