@darkrat That idea is cursed, evil, and I'd love to see what happens when someone tries to use it. I guess it could work okay if there was some kind of order to the randomness. meanwhile I'll just sit here tapping away on my MX Blues and annoy you with the clicking!
@foone oh heck yeah. I had a brief look at videocipher and figured there wasn't enough info out there to make a scrambler. I guess you found more than I did!
@foone aha! I knew someone had done this. I was more curious if it was a thing people did back in the day - like swapping the alphanumerics for OCR A/B.
Does anyone know if there were alternative character generator ROMs available for the IBM MDA/Hercules adapter? I have a Paradise Color/Mono Card [1] with a socketed 27C64, it'd be fun to have some switch-selectable alternative fonts.
@foone better way to do what? the character overlays, or document it? it took a hell of a lot of archive.org digging (and mirroring Chyron's FTP locally) just to get enough to make it work!
I think I mentioned the #Chyron Lantern64 card I bought... Well this is it working! At the moment it's set to Free Run, I need to provide a video source to try out the overlay features.
I just noticed something about the Chyron card. There's a power/reset LED on the back of the PCB. That's a bit weird (in the sense you can't see it) ... except you can. The LED shines through the middle of the lantern, masked by the solder mask. Someone put some real effort into that.
Best part is, the host PC doesn't have to do anything. It's controlled with text commands. All these graphics are running completely in the background.
@foone The water would provide a pretty low-impedance path to ground, so I'd expect very little signal to get through. Submarine communications is through frequencies in the kilohertz range, so I doubt 900, 1800 or 2700 megs would get through.
@foone@kiwa far as how many people have them ... around 2013-14 it was something like 20-30% - that's based on number of people in the photoshoot against total attendees. these days it's more like 50-60% and at some cons nearly 100%.
@foone@kiwa it varies depending on area, really. US cons - if you don't take a fursuit, maybe take something related to another hobby like a camera? people will start random conversations with you about that. I left MFF2014 knowing a bunch of new people, still talk to some of them. UK and Europe - if you go without a fursuit, you'll be ignored, talked about negatively behind your back, and shunned. I hear a few cons are trying to turn that around, but the OGs have entrenched mean-girls culture.
@foone this is cursed and I expect i would end the same way as the Post Office's Horizon system. "yeah uh, the code was written without Option Explicit and now we can't fix it"
@foone There's no FLEX logo so it's almost certainly POCSAG. The labels on the back would confirm - need to look up the model number or 3-digit product code (usually 89A or similar)
Software preservation, electronics, software and ham radio guy!https://pronoun.is/he/himI'm an avid #Maker, #HamRadio geek, and have a website at https://www.philpem.me.uk . Currently reverse-engineering the discontinued #Datatrak LF navigation system and working on the #HackTV TV signal generator for the #HackRF.tags: #electronics #HamRadio, #Machining #Metalworking, with a side of #RetroComputing, #HardwareHacking and #ReverseEngineering.