494: TV Evolution- CRTs, Aspect Ratios, and Beyond

Frank

Not happening. So what you get is sometimes constructive interference and sometimes destructive interference. And it's really all over the place because the phases are are mismatched, so it could be either. Or if you're at a a harmonic of one or the other, so one's at 30 hertz, 60 hertz, 120 hertz, think powers of two, powers of 10. That's where the harmonics show up. Basically, they're just out of phase with each other. um And so you're going to get bright spots and dark spots, and people give it all sorts of names in engineering. It's just called aliasing. Whenever you're putting two two waves on top of each other, you get constructive and destructive interference.

James 01:20

is ah with this Is this same principle applied to CRT monitors? Because in CRT monitor world, like you know if we CRTs, cathode ray tubes,

Frank 01:33

Cathode ray tube.

James 01:33

kath catoid rate ray tubes

Frank 01:35

You nailed it. That's good enough, man. I mean, more than most people know.

James 01:38

there was like consumer CRTs and also like pro CRTs, which also like handled them better.

Frank 01:44

Yeah.

James 01:45

But often you would see this in older news reporting or on TV or like home videos where you'd take a ah video and then you'd see this band. You couldn't even see anything that was on CRTs or i think even like early monitors as well.

Frank 01:53

Yeah.

James 01:55

Is this the same exact thing?

Frank 01:58

Yes, it is. um But there's different things going on with a catheter ray tube. So ah CRT's TV was usually sent something like at 60 hertz, but interlaced. So it'd send the even scan lines and then the odd scan lines. And then on top of that, it's drawing from the top to the bottom with interlacing. So that's why you would get the moving interference pattern.

James 02:16

Ah.

Frank 02:20

Because if it's out of phase and you have something like a digital rolling shutter camera taking pictures of it, they're always going to be out of phase with each other. But that out of phaseness shifts over time too. And that's why you get the fun like band slowly scrolling through CRT. Basically, I mean, it's it's a fundamental problem in all electronics where digital didn't solve anything because you're still taking something at an instance in time and not doing something at another instance in time, thus setting up a frequency. thus requiring perfect phase matching. So to get rid of it, and you totally can do this, you just match the phases.

So you can match your camera's capture phase to the TV's refresh phrase. So when the TV, the CRT is going back to the top scan line, you know not to take a picture and then you wait for the TV to get through a full set of scan lines, which is weird because it's interlaced, then you take a picture.

James 03:07

Hmm.

Frank 03:20

And so you could actually, with good electronics, synchronize your camera to the TV. And you do that with a wire. And that's what the professionals did. So it was possible, and it still is today, possible to synchronize all this stuff. But honestly, no one buys that equipment anymore. The other trick you can do is just minimize the a phase and out of phaseness. And I was mentioning that to you. You just do something that's not a harmonic of each other. So if you have 60 hertz you're recording at, ah flicker your LEDs at 97 hertz or something weird.

James 03:57

Hmm.

Frank 03:57

So the constructive and destructive interference are just... more random looking basically and therefore just the problem is it sets up a pattern and people are really good at noticing patterns so when you have the interference at the same rate all the time it just looks weird but if you like go high go slow and you can do that for leds or go super fast go to 250 hertz refresh rate you just wouldn't see it

James 04:03

Hmm. That makes sense. That makes a lot of sense. You talked about something we're going to do almost like a crash course in 80s and 90s technology because it's just unknown anymore.

Frank 04:29

ah

James 04:30

So talk about CRTs, talk about scanlines. You also talked about something very fascinating, which is interlaced a monitors and and and and and and at TVs.

Frank 04:37

h classic.

James 04:43

Now, when I used to go look for a TV back in my day, there was this distinguishing factor. was like a lot of TVs were like 720, like early on. Well, most of them were 480. But... um

Frank 04:53

It's actually higher.

James 04:53

but

Frank 04:55

It's more like 530, but yeah.

James 04:56

530. Yeah. Um, and the original TVs weren't, you know, so they weren't 16 by nine ratio. They were a four by three ratio as well. Or they weren't were they, I think they were four by three

Frank 05:05

Yes, they they were. You're about broadcast TV. So the signal is broadcast at 4x3.

James 05:11

broadcast.

Frank 05:11

Something cool about CRTs that a lot of people don't think about, it's an analog system. You can drive that ray at all sorts of different ways. There's nothing saying that ray has to go across the screen, down a little bit, across the screen, down a little bit.

James 05:21

Hmm.

Frank 05:26

That's just convention. The broadcast signal is actually commanding the little ray gun. There's a little ray gun in there. Go pew, pew, pew. And it's telling it yeah it's telling it what to do, like move down, draw this image, move down.

James 05:34

Doo doo doo.

Frank 05:40

So you could actually broadcast. You could broadcast any aspect ratio. You could broadcast different densities. That's why I said it's closer to 530 than 480, because it was really what was the broadcaster doing. Now there are standards in broadcast. NTSC is a broadcast standard. PAL is a broadcast standard. So There's a difference between what the technology can do and what the standard says to do.

James 06:06

That makes a lot of sense. and And interestingly enough, I do think that a lot of ah television, normal television, broadcast television drives a lot of like why we have TVs a certain size and the certain ratios they are. And as a reason why we don't have, you know, 22 by nine or 21 by nine, which would be like a, what a lot of, uh, um, um, film, film and movies do right.

Frank 06:27

Movies.

James 06:29

Um, different mm-hmm.

Frank 06:30

Anamorphic.

James 06:32

that's why my dad would always get upset.

Frank 06:32

That's the lens.

James 06:35

He would just buy this big, nice, you know, brand new TV. It's beautiful.

Frank 06:40

Ah, yeah.

James 06:40

And then you play back a Blu-ray, right? And those are physical things you'd put into thing and a playback. And then there'd be these bars on the top and bottom.

Frank 06:47

Oh.

James 06:48

He's like, I didn't pay to put these bars. And he'd be like, I'm going to zoom in. And there's like a fit.

Frank 06:52

Yeah.

James 06:52

You're like no, don't do that. What are you doing? Right. And then, you know, it's this whole thing.

Frank 06:54

Well, To really age myself, i really wrote I remember when the HD standard came out and I was rolling my eyes back because they didn't adopt the film standard. The film standard is a lot more widescreen than...

James 07:07

Mm-hmm.

Frank 07:07

um whatever you want to call it 1080p or whatever the hd standard ended up being that aspect ratio 16 by 9 uh anamorphic is way wider than that and it wasn't four by three which is what computers are it was just this new made-up aspect ratio that was chosen for god knows what reason a bunch of standards people decided that's the new stupid aspect ratio and it was frustrating because you go out and buy this expensive TV and you still get the black bars.

You still can't watch your anamorphic movie on a standard TV.

James 07:38

Oh, yeah.

Frank 07:39

Now, the dirty, the actual, something a lot people don't know, even anamorphic, even movie, they're all over the place. It could be two to one. It could be 2.1 to one. It could be 2.2 to one. It's all over the place. It really depends on the lens and the actual film stock that ah touch director of photography chose.

James 07:59

Yeah, that director has a lot of power there, and that's why i actually like a lot of movies that are filmed with IMAX film, which is a very expensive film, but they're also shot in 16x9, so if you watch The Dark Knight, they are, yeah.

Frank 08:10

Is that right? i didn't know that.

James 08:12

So you...

Frank 08:13

Okay, cool.

James 08:14

if If you watch The Dark Knight, because it has to do something with the IMAX scale, like how they do the IMAX.

Frank 08:19

m

James 08:19

If you watch The Dark Knight, the IMAX scenes fill your TV, and then it goes back to the 21 by 9 or whatever that ah that he wanted.

Frank 08:25

That's funny. Yeah.

James 08:29

Yeah.

Frank 08:30

Oh, I didn't know that, actually. um Yeah, IMAX is cool. like It's a physically larger film, too. So like talk about resolution. It's an analog world, but there's still resolution. There's a number of little silver particles that can jam onto a piece of film. And that actually dictates the resolution of film. So I know IMAX is a higher-density film, and it's a physically larger plate.

James 08:51

Yeah.

Frank 08:52

Yeah, it's pretty cool. IMAX is cool, but I guess there's a reason it's more expensive.

James 08:56

It's very expensive, but it's very, very beautiful. That's why they're usually shorter movies because they're very, very expensive and they're usually nature documentaries because sucking in the natural surroundings with that high resolution that it can pull in gives you such a vibrant and if you're, if you're there, right.

Frank 09:02

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

James 09:12

And you, you, uh, combine that with like Adobe Atmos or something like that. It's just like stunning. But I want to bring back to the interlaced because back in my day when I was buying TVs, there was a there was something you had to pick between. You had to pick between a standard set, which was 1080i compatible, or a little bit more expensive set, which was 1080p compatible.

Frank 09:32

P-P-P.

James 09:32

ah Progressive. Progressive scans versus interlaced scanning. So...

Frank 09:37

I like how that's just become like a standard now and just what we call the vertical resolution. We just put a P at the end. like that There will be a future where absolutely no one knows what that P ever stood for. And it's just what we say for the vertical resolution of the image. I do it myself.

James 09:50

That's

Frank 09:51

I say like 820p. Because you're just trying to tell people that's the vertical resolution.

James 09:56

that No, that is true. i mean Actually, like you know when you do 2K, 4K, all these other things, right like they've just gone that big because it's like two... it's I think that 2048 doesn't... i think that's what it is. doesn't like ring enough you know or whatever it is. are But people do say like when when people are talking about like video games a lot, they'll be like, oh, this that nine nine sixty pure this is at one or is another very

Frank 10:13

Yeah.

James 10:21

common common one as as well i mean my my monitor right now

Frank 10:21

Yeah.

James 10:26

I have the ability I'm doing, ah do weird, weird resolution. So my monitor is 3440 by 1440. So it's like a, don't know, the or it's the ultra wide.

Frank 10:37

1440, okay. A lot of monitors. I mean, nowadays, they're they're fewer, but 1440 became quite the standard there for a while.

James 10:44

And it is a 12.5 to nine ratio. And then I'm currently running it though at a, uh, still 21.5. five to nine ratio, but I run it at a high DPI, which is 2048 by eight 58. For some reason that's because for some reason I like things big because I'm, I'm old and I need, I need to close captions for everything and I need everything to be big Frank, but can you describe also interlaced versus progressive?

Frank 11:01

Yeah. Yeah.

James 11:10

You described interlaced very good, but let's remind the folks one more time. Um, just for here.

Frank 11:13

Yeah, sure. OK, so but let's start with the opposite. Let's let's start with a perfectly progressive system.

James 11:19

Hmm.

Frank 11:20

Film. Film is the perfect medium because what all you're doing is you're putting an image in front of a light source and you're blasting a lot of light through it so that it shows up on a wall far away. And naturally, physically, if you don't count the time it takes to actually move the slide down, you're getting a frame all at once. So your little eyeballs are registering an entire frame all at once. so that's progressive. Interlace is quite different. um You are drawing the even and odd scan lines at two totally different times.

So on the first pass, you might draw the even scan line. So row 0, row 2, row 4, row 6. You do that. And you leave a gap. You actually leave the old image up there. And so if you've ever seen like a VCR that's out of tune or a bad Netflix rip of something, you can sometimes see scan line mismatches where you're getting a part of the old frame and a part of the new frame together. at The trick being when all that system is working right and you draw the odd scan lines and then you draw the even scan lines, the human brain is so mushy and so flexible and so good at just doing its own little interpolation algorithm that it's fine with just blurring all that together.

The benefit being um you get to show frames a lot faster. So like I said, broadcast TV is actually 60 hertz. Now we record the video at 30 hertz because because it's coming in at a scan line, you're only getting half of the frame in 1 60th of a second, then the second half of the frame in 1 60th of a second. Therefore, it takes 1 30th of a second, 30 frames per second to get the whole frame. So you'll often hear like VHS and all that stuff is 30 frames per second. It's not 60 frames per second interlaced.

30 frames per second, progressive. Progressive just means it's going to wait until all the scan lines came up using a little thing we call memory. It's going to put that into a graphics memory region. And this ah this is a lot easier easier, obviously, with digital systems. I'm not even sure how to do it with an analog system. It's probably possible. Let's not talk about it. But you store the first half of the frame in memory, and then you blurt it all out in the second half of the frame. Thus, you are reducing it. You're reducing the frame rate to 30 hertz.

James 13:51

that's cool yeah i think that uh it's fun growing up in this era because you know i progressed with video games as they went from think my original nes if i remember had it hooked up to a old crt monitor but it didn't have any like red white inputs at all on it.

Frank 14:15

Okay, yeah.

James 14:15

It only had an ah RF input. So ah RF for like antenna.

Frank 14:18

Sweet.

James 14:19

So I actually got a um, it's like an adapter. That's an ah RF adapter that converts one signal to an RF signal to go into the TV. And it's like a little prongs. That's my earliest memory of doing that.

Frank 14:29

Yeah.

James 14:30

Um, in general, uh, I assume it's radio frequencies for ah RF. Is that correct?

Frank 14:35

Yeah.

James 14:35

Yeah.

Frank 14:35

And most specifically, it's broadcast frequencies. So that little device is just pretending to be the airwaves out there.

James 14:39

Uh,

Frank 14:43

it's It's literally pretending to be an antenna and broadcast TV. And I want to be clear, when I'm saying broadcast, I mean literally like they are blurting this stuff out into the ether. And all you got to do is stick up a metal rod and you can get TV.

James 14:53

Yeah.

Frank 14:56

Yeah. Who knows if that'll exist in the future. But so that little device was it was it's it's kind of backwards, right? Because it's coming out of an Atari, which is a perfect, perfect little digital signal. All it wants to do is control a monitor, but it can't. So it actually has to encode it. um It's almost a modem. It's basically a modem. encode it into a broadcast packaging where color channel separated from the brightness channel. They can multiplex some audio onto that too.

And then it's sent at the standards NTSC or PAL. And then the TV receives it. It has to decode it then to drive the little ray guy and to drive the speakers and to present an image to the person. So that little ah RF box was basically a modem, but for video stuff and not for raw data communications.

James 15:55

Yeah. And they had it. So I'm pretty sure like the little prongs that you'd be basically do like TV antennas, but they also had like ones, the most common one would be like a co-actual that comes out, which has been around with us forever, by the way, the little coax cable is doing its own thing.

Frank 16:09

And the reason for that is Cable decided to mimic the broadcast encoding also. So there really wasn't much of a difference between Cable and broadcast, or then you are physically using a Cable instead of yanking it out of the atmosphere. um I'm pretty sure, at least for quite a while, Cable just used standard broadcast encoding.

James 16:33

Yeah, that's so super fascinating. And because, yeah, just like going through this era, like I just figured it out not knowing exactly what it was doing, but now reflecting back, like it's crazy to think like that little tiny like gray box.

Frank 16:40

I love him.

James 16:46

was doing like pure magic and like the magic, like it was magic to me, but I didn't realize it was magic.

Frank 16:50

Yeah.

James 16:51

So i'm like, oh, this is just a plug. I plug in. Right. But actually like the complexity of the situation is like really advanced.

Frank 16:54

Yeah.

James 16:58

It's really doing cool technology that like we don't need anymore. Well, maybe we need for some things, but if you're plugging in old stuff, but it's crazy to even think that you can't even really get a CRT monitor anymore to even try this stuff.

Frank 17:01

Yeah. Do you remember?

James 17:08

You know what i mean So hard.

Frank 17:09

But it's fun.

James 17:09

Yeah.

Frank 17:10

It's fun. i want to get that back to that, but I have to ask the standard question. Were you channel two, channel three, or channel four person? Because you could choose that on that little but

James 17:16

What was channel two?

Frank 17:18

Oh, you're weirdo.

James 17:18

Two.

Frank 17:19

oh Always three. Three for life.

James 17:21

Right in the middle. Yeah.

Frank 17:22

ah

James 17:23

Uh, I was channeled. I was channeled too. remember one of them having yeah toggles on as well. as like crazy. and And it's really cool too, because you know I went through the era of, and I'm sure you did, which is like, Hey, we have this ah RF adapter. Okay. Now we have coaxial cables. Now we have component cables, right? And then we have HDMI cables. Now we have these like super high speed, but that's even just for just the video and obviously the audio as well.

But then there's also optical cables. We're literally shooting like light.

Frank 17:48

Yeah.

James 17:51

through a cable.

Frank 17:51

To make a light.

James 17:53

What's that?

Frank 17:54

We're shooting light to make light. It's it's really weird.

James 17:57

Exactly. And then to make sound, you know, because coaxial, you know, for the for the optical, it's like, boom.

Frank 18:01

Yeah. Yeah.

James 18:03

It's like wild that this stuff comes together.

Frank 18:07

I want to go back to CRTs, though, because I think there there there was always going to be a use for these puppies because in so many ways they are so simple and fun.

James 18:09

Hmm.

Frank 18:17

um Because anyone who's got into electronics a little bit, you learn how to actually control a CRT yourself. So there's a little magnetic coupler, little electromagnet on the side that handles the lefty righty. There's a little electromagnet on the top that handles the upy downy. And when you learn how to control the lefty righty upy downy, you realize all you're doing is moving this array electron beam ray beam. It's a catho cathode cathode. Cathode just means it's the direction of travel of the electrons ray, meaning we're shooting array of electrons tube because the whole thing needs to be in a vacuum so that it basically doesn't catch fire and burn your house down.

Don't break that tube, OK? It's a cathode ray tube. um Electrical engineers learn how to control those two electromagnets, and then you can start doing something called vector graphics. Instead of doing everything by the scan line, let's say you want to draw a triangle. triangle You can start at one at our vertex, move the ray continuously to the next vertex, move the ray to the next vertex, move the ray to the next vertex.

James 19:24

Yeah. Yeah.

Frank 19:26

And in that case, going back to the beginning of this, you get no aliasing because we are not going scan line by scan line by scan line, anything like that. We're not doing frames per second anymore. We are drawing a perfect, perfect little triangle on that screen. And electrical engineers learn how to do this because that's how oscilloscopes work. And electrical engineers learn how to control their oscilloscope. And that's how actually the first video games were made. They were drawing the graphics directly, vctor proper vector graphics.

And sorry, um I could talk about this stuff forever. The neat thing about, and if you go look at um old Soviet...

James 20:03

Like asteroid. Look at asteroid.

Frank 20:05

Yeah, exactly. Asteroid Space War. ah The Soviets did this beautifully with their arcade machines. A lot of their old arcade games were actually vector graphics. A few in the US also, but at some point we switched over to Scanline and broadcast kind of stuff using these ah RF adapters.

James 20:14

Hmm.

Frank 20:22

But super cool old Soviet stuff used to do all the vector. And they're gorgeous. Absolutely ah beautiful to look at.

James 20:28

Oh, yeah.

Frank 20:30

The original Star Wars game. If you've never seen an actual video game done in vector graphics on a CRT, you are missing out.

James 20:38

Yeah.

Frank 20:38

You got to find one.

James 20:39

And was it TIE Fighter? I think it was 3D vector graphics, if I'm correct, right? the Like the original, original one?

Frank 20:46

ah Yeah, but no, that's, you know, it was just called Star Wars, as far as I know, and it was a Death Star trench run.

James 20:47

Was that what was that the original one Maybe it was just Star Wars.

Frank 20:53

i think maybe you got to shoot down some TIE Fighters initially, but the trench run was the big coup de grace in that game.

James 20:59

Yeah.

Frank 21:00

um TIE Fighter, the video game, was a full, that was a 3D engine scanline based on a real digital monitor. You have to look up

James 21:07

I might be thinking of my Star Wars. Yeah.

Frank 21:10

Yeah, the original Star Wars game. But look up one called Space Wars. It's usually regarded as the very first video game. And you'll see if you can find good screenshots of it.

James 21:19

Yes.

Frank 21:22

They don't even do it justice. Like, you need to see one running someday.

James 21:25

Yeah. Well, and that's why like, you know, we used to be able to go down to the Living Computer Museum in Seattle, which doesn't exist anymore, unfortunately.

Frank 21:30

h

James 21:32

And they had some of that old tech there.

Frank 21:33

I didn't know that.

James 21:33

And I'm sorry.

Frank 21:33

You're breaking my heart, James. Right now, you're breaking my heart.

James 21:35

oh

Frank 21:36

That was a great museum.

James 21:36

Well, Well, you know, RIP Paul Allen, but one of his things that he did want to do when he passed was like kind of give back and do all this stuff. But I do think it's like a, definitely a shame when it closed under in the pandemic. It was one of the coolest museums ever where they had like old supercomputer.

Frank 21:49

Okay. Yeah.

James 21:52

We talked about it in the podcast. We've talked about it on this podcast and 500 episodes.

Frank 21:55

I love it.

James 21:55

We've definitely done.

Frank 21:56

They had an old Cray.

James 21:56

You could actually that a Cray, you could teletype in, you could teletype remotely through their, well, you got like log in, like through the computer, like you'd spend on their supercomputer.

Frank 21:58

They had a PDP-11. Oh. Sweet. ah

James 22:06

Anyways, Super cool, been there many times. um Absolutely. I mean, you should just pay people to like keep these things running, which is like hard.

Frank 22:16

Yeah.

James 22:17

Yeah. Old tech.

Frank 22:17

And some of the old engineers, the best part of going to hang out, sorry, we're just reminiscing, but it was fun to go back into that old computer room and just talk to the old engineers working on it and just, yeah, just talking about old tech, talking about old tech forever.

James 22:32

ah attack Talking about old tech. I like that. um That's what we do here.

Frank 22:35

Yeah.

James 22:36

Well, ah I find this all very fascinating because um I've just kind of, you know, been reliving some of that retro stuff over the last few years.

Frank 22:46

Yeah.

James 22:47

We've talked about with different retro video games. I think about, you know, have a little game and watch. I was just at the Nintendo Museum in Japan and just reliving some of that early stuff. It's like so cool to kind of go back on. and i think that I feel really humbled to live through this era of TVs and games and some of this technology that's obviously standardized now. We have like these huge crazy TVs everywhere and it just kind of is what it is and he's super confused in our pocket. But we have to live through this generational, multi-generational shift, right? You think about like the NES coming out the you know, before I was born.

Yeah, right, right around when I was born. And, um, Living up to those eras is like, it's it's so cool to kind of see that technology change. And we get to see cell phones change too. We lived through that era. I think it's, I mean, now we're living through a new era that's hyper accelerated. I think what's fascinating to bring it back to AI is like, we're in this very fascinating, you know, hyper, but I think there's like, it's cool to remember some of this stuff.

Frank 23:45

Oh, no.

James 23:53

Cause I was just watching digital foundry shots of digital foundry. And they were talking about somebody this year, they put it in their top 10. The reason why this came to topic, it was a master system, which is like pre Genesis, um, Sega, they released like a new game this year, uh, for someone did.

Frank 24:09

crazy love it love it

James 24:09

And it's just like absolutely stunning and beautiful runs at super high frameworks and doing crazy Sprite stuff. And just, I think you just obviously run on your computer, but like, I think they like actually made the cartridge you could put into original master system. Cause you can do that.

Frank 24:21

totally doable totally doable yeah i know it's like

James 24:22

And it's like, It's wonderful. and they're like, it's all looks beautiful. But if you run on a CRT, even more beautiful. You know what i mean? like you you have you Like you were saying, can experience it, right?

Frank 24:33

Yeah, and and it's funny because um i recently got into a little bit of emulation myself, and i knew in the back of my head that people had been doing a bunch of pixel shaders to try to emulate old CRT systems.

James 24:45

Yes.

Frank 24:47

um

James 24:48

Yep.

Frank 24:49

I have to say, was a little I was so excited for it. I'm like, because I know what those looked like. you know i I might even have a CRT left around because I love them. um I definitely have an old oscilloscope. And I was so excited for it. I have to tell you, James, I was a little bit disappointed. i don't think any of the pixel shaders I had that came with the emulator that I was using did it justice. There's like a bloom that happens.

There's a misalignment that happens.

James 25:12

yeah

Frank 25:13

And I think they were all kind of missing it. What they were doing was exaggerating the interlacing, which... I felt was very cruddy because the whole point is if you're emulating a CRT correctly, the interlacing should not be that profound. It should all blurry blur together because what happens is the ray comes by, it hits that phosphorus screen in the front, it glows when those electrons hit it, and then that glow falls off.

James 25:29

yeah Yeah. Yeah.

Frank 25:42

But it takes time for that glow to fall off.

James 25:43

Yeah. yeah

Frank 25:44

And so there's an after image on those alternating lines that are being drawn. And that's what the pixel shaders are trying to do, but i just they're they're not nailing it. They're not nailing it because there's there's bleed. If the ray is slightly misaligned, it might be hitting one of the other scan lines. Or what it really is, there's a lensing effect. Like toward the top, it hits more scan lines.

At the bottom, it and hits more scan lines. Usually the horizontal is fine. um And then there's the after image that has to be represented. The after image is different, whether it's hitting the red, the green, or the blue part of that phosphorus tube. And so I would love for anyone listening who's super into emulation, let me know what what are the best best pixel shaders out there? What's the best CRT emulator that you've seen out there?

James 26:33

Yeah.

Frank 26:33

Because Although I love this stuff, i I stop myself every day from writing my own CRT pixel shader, but oh god, what in these times it's going to happen? I'm just going to have to sit down and write like a physics simulator of a ray beam hitting a phosphorus screen.

James 26:47

That'd be cool. I, my favorite part was you're describing the turn on experience. Also the turn off experience is the same, but in reverse, right? You get like this. You know, and it's like you you see this very, you know, an iconic scene where like the the thing turns right and then I kind of it slowly like it's like the life is very slowly being drained from it.

Frank 27:03

Yeah.

James 27:07

It's just got this aura.

Frank 27:07

oh

James 27:08

It's almost got a hue to it. Yeah.

Frank 27:11

Yeah.

James 27:11

so

Frank 27:12

Hmm.

James 27:12

um

Frank 27:12

Okay.

James 27:13

yeah

Frank 27:14

Well, I reckon so you were saying CRTs are dying and you're probably right. You're probably right. If you go out and buy digital oscilloscope right now, it's going to come with an LCD screen. But if you go to junkyards, if you go to garage sales and you happen across a little CRT, I don't recommend getting a big one because they get big and heavy and ugly and terrible. But if you find a little black and white TV or a little color screen, just pick it up and put something fun on it. You know, like pipe pipe your HDMI cable through 30 different dongles until you get to a yellow composite cable and then jam that in.

James 27:39

Yeah.

Frank 27:47

Or if you want the real terrible stuff, go through the ah RF modulator. And encode that puppy to broadcast, decode it back from broadcast on that TV, because that introduces its own artifacts, its own bleeding and its own stuff. So like, not only do you need the CRT pixel shader, you need the ah RF modulation in there to really distort and the whole image to look as beautiful as it did in the 80s.

James 28:11

I totally agree. All right. Well, that's going to call it for this one. James and Frank, look at old technology. Well, catch us next week. Next week will be our last podcast of the year, 2025, because this will come out with one before Christmas. that will come out the one before the New Year's. So catch us for our 2025 year in review. We'll we'll break down our... Biggest wins, biggest lose losers, biggest in-between mids, whatever they are. We'll see what they are. I don't probably just be fun stuff. And we may even talk a little bit about holiday hacks, but I've shipped so much code.

i don't know if I need a holiday hack anymore. i Actually, maybe I need to put the trim Trimly app.

Frank 28:47

You're all hacked out.

James 28:48

The Trimly app is going up to the app store, people.

Frank 28:51

wo Track your weight.

James 28:51

My goal is get it. Track your weight. It's ready. I've i've mostly been...

Frank 28:56

New icon.

James 28:57

Ooh, great progress. 10 entries long. i' just got an award. Nice. um I've mostly been figuring out, this is the last thing here. we got a little award. lot of user feedback from one person, Scott Hanselman. Mostly been figuring out notifications.

Frank 29:09

Nice.

James 29:13

Um, so the, I want to do daily reminders. So there's a little holiday hack. I've been mostly figuring out the default that they implemented them. Copilot implemented was just using the repeatable. So you set it, it repeats it. Good to go. Problem is that if you log your wait for the day and you have an eight o'clock and you have reminder for nine you like for it to not set it.

Frank 29:30

Mmm. Mmm.

James 29:37

In that case, you can't reuse repeatable because you can't just like cancel the one in for today. You got do it later. um So I've been using Opus to try to figure out the best mechanism to track this out. And it is mostly like saying like, let's schedule the next two weeks of notifications. And then if they, if they cancel it or if they and add their weight, then cancel all of them, add one that starts the next day and then go from there. So it's kind of what I've added it to do, but it's a little, and then ideally what I would do is like the last one would be like, don't forget like last reminder.

Frank 30:03

Interesting.

James 30:09

You know what I mean? Like, would that be ideal?

Frank 30:10

Yeah.

James 30:11

But that's the only thing i can think Yeah.

Frank 30:12

There's an alternative way, but yeah, okay.

James 30:14

yeah But anyways, that's been my one struggle, but I think it's pretty close and you know, things like that.

Frank 30:19

Cool.

James 30:19

We'll see, but all those Swift data, all the stuff seems to be working. So I'm excited about it. So, uh, it'd be nice to get it up on the apps. so I got new i icons, everything like that. So we'll give a final update and see if we do it by the new years, but that is going to do it for this week's merge complex.

Frank 30:27

Yeah.

James 30:33

So until next time I'm James Montemagno.

Frank 30:36

And I'm Frank Kruger. Thanks for watching and listening.

James 30:39

Peace.