
Cool-retro-term: A terminal emulator which mimics the old cathode display - tasoeur
https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term
======
SG-
Reminds of "Cathode" app for OSX:

[http://www.secretgeometry.com/apps/cathode/](http://www.secretgeometry.com/apps/cathode/)

it seems they have an iOS version now too that lets you SSH to your servers.
Also I believe the demo version would appear as tho the cathode screen was
about to fail and get worse and worse.

~~~
Sami_Lehtinen
Great, except not authentic. They forget that image on the screen, affects the
image on the screen. So basically same dim image looks different than same
bright image. Geometry often also changed when brightnes was changed. It's
complex thing to receate authentic CRT.

Also many emulations fail with phosphor decay in very obvious ways. So it's
not being done in a correctly at all. This cathode project is good, but many
of these are clearly done by people, who haven't ever used the authentic thing
and do not know what it should be like.

I remember that I laughed when people were talking about 25 ms TFT being slow.
From good green / amber display you could still read text after 5 seconds
since powering it off. ;)

I had one of these, lovely.
[http://sales.hansotten.nl/uploads/msx/monitoren/IMG_6798.JPG](http://sales.hansotten.nl/uploads/msx/monitoren/IMG_6798.JPG)
And this beauty is pretty modern one, because it's color display. With many
older CRTs you had to use 40 chars per line, because image was so fuzzy that
80x25 would have been unreadable.

About noise, I have seen some extremely cheap and old VGA adapters generate so
much noise and timing jitter into signal, that it looks like old TV even with
modern dispalys. I got really baffed by it when I first encountered it.

~~~
teh_klev
That Philips monitor, that's a blast from the past! My parents bought me one
of those back in 1984 for my BBC micro. Then I had it hooked up as a second
monitor on my Opus 286 PC that I bought when I started college in 1985 (1MB
RAM, 12Mhz 286, 37.5MB RLL 3.5" disk) for C debugging. I was a bit fancy back
then and had two video cards in my PC. The C compiler I used (pretty sure it
was the Microsoft C V5 one) knew how to talk to a second video card.

I kept the Philips around for years and years then donated it somewhere along
the way with a couple of CGA and EGA monitors I'd collected over the years.

Just a wee nitpick, that particular Philips monitor wasn't "colour" as such,
it had amber phosphor instead of green or white. That said it was a really
nice display, very crisp and sharp and a bargain at around 99 quid in the day.

Getting back on topic, the best displays (in their day) I ever used were the
Data General Dasher 2 and D200's. Sadly the later Dashers (the model 20's with
the cream and brown cases) shipped with crappier CRT's that would wobble when
sat next to any switched mode power supply.

------
peatmoss
In a modern world where we backlight semiconductors to produce high dpi
screens, it almost feels weird to think we used to fire electron guns towards
our eyes. I was always partial to the amber screen.

Has anyone recently played with an old Asteroids cabinet? The screen is a
black and white CRT. When you fire a missile, the screen effect is insanely
bright. I'd forgotten just how intense that was.

I can't wait until someone pieces together an art piece that makes use of all
the crazy analog video effects that we used to take for granted, but now look
like alien technology.

~~~
digisign
Asteroids was a vector game, interesting technology:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroids_%28video_game%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroids_%28video_game%29)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_monitor](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_monitor)

~~~
kubiiii
Better resolution and frames per second than modern games :)

~~~
john-waterwood
Like a plotter, effectively infinite resolution (not really infinite because
of the phosphor elements being finite, but still).

The limitation shifted elsewhere of course, and that's in the complexity of
the scene, specifically the number of objects.

Still, interesting tech and can even be adapted to control a laser unit that
renders on say a big building or even the clouds (the real ones).

~~~
rbanffy
Playing Asteroids on a building would be kind of neat. Has anybody tried that?

~~~
joezydeco
Yup. There were some laser enthusiasts that connected their projection systems
to MAME and created Laser MAME.

Laser galvo speed is a big factor in making it work effectively but there have
been some great demos, like John Knoll (from ILM) playing Atari Star Wars on a
theatre screen:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4REBVgm4Nc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4REBVgm4Nc)

------
teddyh
See also “Phosphor”¹, a screen saver part of XScreenSaver², but _also usable
as a terminal_ :

    
    
        /usr/lib/xscreensaver/phosphor -scale 2 -delay 0 $SHELL
    

①
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6ZWTrl7pV0](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6ZWTrl7pV0)

② [http://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/](http://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/)

~~~
g047f4c3
Also xscreensaver-data-extra,

    
    
      /usr/lib/xscreensaver/apple2 -text -fast -program $SHELL

------
zura
As an old cathode display user, I'd really like to have a terminal emulator
which mimics the modern LCD display.

------
shiven
In my X-ray crystallography/structural biology lab we still use CRTs from over
a decade old Silicon Graphics systems. They are the only displays that can do
a 120Hz horizontal scan, which is darn critical when you are looking at
protein and drug structures in quad-buffered stereo!

Sadly, the CRTs are dying off over time and it gets harder to find
replacements that can work as well as they do. There are LCD alternatives,
like Zalman, but they never impressed me much :-(

~~~
raverbashing
Care to explain what the issue is? Delay? Blurriness?

~~~
shiven
Flicker. Anything less than 120Hz can give severe eye strain and headaches
over long (30-60 min) work sessions.

As to the LCD replacements, the anti-aliasing is just not as _smooth_ (yes,
I'm being subjective) as on the CRTs. Perhaps, a "retina" level resolution
display with 100+Hz refresh-rate will be a real solution. But those are
probably still at the R&D stage and will be ridiculously expensive at launch!
And the graphics cards to drive them as well!

~~~
neftaly
I'm probably misinterpreting your requirements, but you should look into
Korean IPS monitors. They're generally very cheap, are far better at
reproducing colours than standard LCD monitors, have higher pixel densities
(1440p@27") and can often be overclocked (90-120hz). The best deals are
usually on ebay, shipped from Korea.

[http://www.blurbusters.com/overclock/120hz-1440p-ips-
monitor...](http://www.blurbusters.com/overclock/120hz-1440p-ips-monitors/)

~~~
shiven
I'd gladly try that out for personal use!

But it is an entirely different manner when your purchase has to be approved
by a pyramid of bureaucrats and more importantly, buying things at online
auctions (eBay, gasp!) or even otherwise (amazon) takes weeks to be approved.
And oh!, we need five of those monitors to start with (and they better work!).

------
kator
Check out the nice collection of fonts too. :-)

[https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-
term/tree/master/a...](https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-
term/tree/master/app/qml/fonts)

I've been playing with them in iTerm2 and having flashbacks.

------
goldfeld
I've been developing a Clojure on Node.js curses terminal UI library[1] for
some months, and though development has been going stronger than ever lately,
I feel my motivation doubled up in seeing my interfaces displayed in this
glorious orange glow. I should start working on a text game about being alone
in a spaceship or a war-ravaged post-apocalypse right now. Suddenly my brother
will go from joking that my computer must crash a lot because all he ever sees
is terminals to being in awe.

I had tried Cathode for OSX but it didn't work, and now you come and tell me I
can have it for free on my linux dev box and that it works flawlessly? Thank
you.

[1]: [https://github.com/goldfeld/i9n](https://github.com/goldfeld/i9n)

------
Gracana
Looks pretty good! In reality[1] the "CRT effect" isn't quite so intense, but
I think that's just down to settings. This definitely has the right glowy and
slightly-fuzzy feel to it.

[1] My Wyse-55:
[http://i.imgur.com/7x2JdmV.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/7x2JdmV.jpg)

~~~
pjc50
That's a remarkably sharp display and clean keyboard you've got there, it
looks like it was unboxed yesterday!

~~~
Gracana
Thanks! Yeah, I bought it as a refurbished unit and the company that did it
does a nice job.

------
lwh
Does it accurately emulate the burning eyes and headaches after a long day?
Burn-in artefacts and simulated line noise would be nice additions ;)

------
Zardoz84
I should take a look to their shaders and tune up more Trillek CRT shader :

[https://plus.google.com/118048310717476799717/posts/4CSV9LHq...](https://plus.google.com/118048310717476799717/posts/4CSV9LHqq41)

[https://plus.google.com/118048310717476799717/posts/diBzDKJ2...](https://plus.google.com/118048310717476799717/posts/diBzDKJ2gYY)

~~~
corysama
You might also appreciate
[http://timothylottes.blogspot.com/2014/08/scanlines.html](http://timothylottes.blogspot.com/2014/08/scanlines.html)

------
konradb
This reminds me that I have two Wyse WY-85 green screen terminals in the
attic. I got them when they were being thrown out by a university in 1997 or
1998. They've been sitting there getting more and more depressed and dusty. At
some point I really need to grab a Pi and a USB<->serial adapter and get them
up and running. I've seen some blog pages from a couple of other folks who
have managed to get them working in a similar way.

At this rate my wife will throw them out with the perfectly valid excuse that
if I haven't set them up in the last fifteen years, I'm unlikely to do so in
the next fifteen.

------
hudibras
Just a quick glance at those screenshots and I'm instantly transported twenty
years into the past, sitting in the campus computer lab printing out a report
at 3 a.m. the day it's due.

It's weird how the brain works.

------
thomasfl
Someone™ posted an issue last july that this exquisite piece of software retro
art did not compile on OS X. After a while someone™ actually managed to
compile it on OSX, and the original author is working on a port, but until
then we have to make do with the Cathode app.

Only problem with the Cathode app is that it flickers more and more till you
get an epileptic fit if you don't upgrade to the paid version.

~~~
pervycreeper
Well, on the Mac, you pay for stuff, that's just the way it is. If you care
about gratis & libre software, start dogfooding a free OS.

~~~
osxrand
That's complete recycled bovine waste my friend.

Just because I choose to use OS X does not mean I'm ignoring the bsd base its
built on, nor not enjoying using / contributing to open projects.

------
k2enemy
It packages up a nice collection of vintage fonts for use in other
applications: [https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-
term/tree/master/a...](https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-
term/tree/master/app/qml/fonts)

------
mercurial
Looks like something out of Fallout. Awesome. Just the kind of thing you need
on your Pip Boy.

~~~
kelvin0
Yeah, the only thing missing is the cathode ray 'desync' effect which occurs
when you first switch on the Pip-boy. That level of 'polish' on the Pip boy is
fairly amazing in trying to emulate a good ole cathode ray tube ...

------
VikingCoder
I would really like to do something like this in HTML5 + WebGL for some retro
game ideas I have. Like, even doing this with a Z-Machine interpreter (Zork,
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, etc.) would be fun.

------
coldcode
Funny how being around in the days when this was common I couldn't wait to see
the future. Now I am in the future and people get excited about recreating the
past. I can't win.

~~~
sklogic
Back in those days, sitting behind a WY-85 connected to a VAXstation 3540, I
was terrified by a thought that these awful, ugly, clumsy x86 PCs are possibly
the future. And now, the future turned out to be even worse than I imagined.

------
chowyuncat
Here's an fork that works for OS X. [https://github.com/chowyuncat/cool-retro-
term/tree/osx-hacks](https://github.com/chowyuncat/cool-retro-term/tree/osx-
hacks) Swordfish's osx branch is broken.

------
safeaim
Awesome terminal, but too bad it's so cpu hungry. My laptop heated up in like
5 minutes.

------
bbunix
Well done... down to getting to color of an old vt220 right... (that's the
orange one)

------
hadoukenio
$ ./cool-retro-term

loadAllColorSchemes

<blank window opens>

There's a menu, but nothing clickable. It's interesting though. If I "touch
/tmp/asdf", then the file gets written. So it is actually executing what I
type, it's just not displaying anything?

Debian Wheezy

------
kelvin0
Has someone tried getting it to compile/run under Windows?

~~~
rbanffy
There is something, I am not sure what, wrong with the 3278 font on Windows.

------
faizmokhtar
Is the borders around it necessary? Because personally I think that it would
look great without the borders. Or is it to simulate the roundness of the
monitor?

~~~
nkuttler
You can remove the border (and change everything else) in the settings.

~~~
seszett
My build (installed with yaourt on Arch, just like it says on the page)
crashes when I try to.

------
tdicola
Awesome! I remember seeing this on reddit earlier in the year when it was in
much earlier stages. Looks really great now!

------
techrat
While neat, the cpu consumption this is insane. It's not even as bad when I
play unaccelerated HD video.

~~~
nkuttler
Interesting. I couldn't get it to go over maybe 5% on one core. Maybe it
offloads some of the graphics work to the GPU.

------
thirdtruck
Can't wait to use this in video projects. I already have a Kickstarter in
mind.

------
aceperry
LOL, very cool. But I think my eyes would hurt if I looked at it for too long.

------
no_future
thats metal as fuck

------
jnaglick
markdown file, so old school.

------
mrmondo
This has been reposted many times both here and on reddit.

~~~
icebraining
[https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2FSwordfi...](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2FSwordfish90%2Fcool-
retro-term)

~~~
sanqui
It used to be called cool-old-term.

[https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2FSwordfi...](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2FSwordfish90%2Fcool-
old-term)

I don't mind seeing it again, though.

