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You've just conquered a 100-room dungeon and killed the oppressive red dragon. You see a chest at the far end of it's lair. With anticipation you open it to find a single piece of paper on which is inscribed the following note... "Congratulations! You win! Have a great day!"
If the reciver program was missing code to store the data, that probably means this is the first time the transmitted program has been seen since the transmission 😄
The C64 receiver prog printed in the magazine was indeed missing a few crucial ML instructions, but as I explained on lemon64, I noticed the audio track they transmitted in an earlier episode of '4 computer buffs' actually did include the complete receiver code. So if someone back then recorded that audio to a cassette tape and managed to load it back on a C64, then they might've gotten this to work.
Sir, that was the best, most unexpected, funniest rickroll of my life. And I've been on the internet for quite a while. You earned my respect for that alone.
Nice episodes. And speeding tickets in the US aren’t speedy. The officer in Louisiana took 45 minutes to write me up - he said it was because of the Dutch drivers license. And that was 2008 and I still haven’t gotten that ticket, or did the rental company gave me a surcharge. I think Officer Brown (that was his name) had enjoyed our banter that he never registered the ticket. We both laughed a lot. But the speed limit was 70 and I did 82… So he was right to fine me, although according to him it was safe: “the only thing I could hit was a stray alligator”.
The scary part is we're using the same exact technology today. We're sending flashes of light through fiber optics, but with multiple colors and at much faster speeds.
Several things to comes to mind: This Thames taped broadcast could be used for giving students an example of how to salvage data. One could manually go through the taped broadcast and write the data stream by hand, or attempt to build a device like it was intended. What sort of students, one may ask? Uh, evening classes in cryptography at a local community center, definitely, so anyone who has the time and the interest. Also, this episode gives a much more realistic depiction of a "hacker"; not some guy in a hoodie, wearing leather gloves and sunglasses, but dressed just like the rest in that neighborhood :3
In 1983, the Finnish Broadcasting Company broadcasted C64 programs in a radio show called Kansanmikrokerho (The People’s Microcomputer Club). I recorded them on a cassette tape, and they worked just fine. In 1985, a commercial local radio station in City of Tampere, Radio 957, also broadcasted C64 programs. The broadcast was implemented in such a way that one of the stereo channels transmitted the C64 data stream, while the other transmitted music.
This video is key testament as to why you should not only still have CRT TVs, but also have proper video to digital transfers!!! This dude ROCKS for going the extra mile!
Absolutely! It's frustrating how many analog video converters just throw away half the information. It's additionally tricky with UA-cam as you need to upscale to 720p for it to preserve the deinterlaced 50fps and full PAL resolution. Modern codecs also don't handle SD resolution with analog noise well, so it's tricky to get right.
Yes! And, creator pain is so underrepresented! Swept under the rug. It's good to witness the struggle, to relate to it, to see that folks everywhere are giving something their best shot, not knowing if they'll even conclusively succeed or fail. This story would have felt so different without all those tough moments.
That was one of the most nerve-wracking and at the same time satisfying recipodes ever. Thank you so much for this, Peri. Really took me for a nice stroll down memory lane!
I think the next natural step is to go Full Mythbusters on this. The original criteria did not work, We've proved there is data in the flashes, Now to see what it takes to actually pull it off! (Improved circuit and re-encoded flashes with the fixed code)
the flashes werent broken, the cirquit and Receiver program was, so you need a different cirquit, heck Just slap an mcu on there, change the phyton code to c, then make a serial Receiver program and done.
@@SimonBauer7 How would the Marvel Cinematic Universe help us here? Seriously though, I'm intrigued in building a receiver that would work. If you think you could collab on that feel free to fax or email me peri@perifractic.com +1 747 PERIFAX 👍🕹
@@RetroRecipes The circuit as shown is basically just stretching the light pulses from the phototransistor into a more regularized sequence of pulses that the computer will have an easier time reading. Being able to successfully decode the pulse train would require having zero drift between the pulses coming in from the circuit and the code running on the computer, and that probably would have been achieved by sneakily using the power mains frequency as a shared clock for the original transmission. But in your setup you almost certainly do not have that synchronization between your laptop playing back the video and the computer trying to read it, and so the two would drift out of sync probably fairly quickly unless you were very, very lucky. In order to decode this successfully you'll either need to genlock the playback signal, likely using the computer's video-out as the master, or build a slightly more sophisticated receiver circuit that extracts both a field-clock (probably using a phase-lock loop) and the data pulse train, plus a more sophisticated receiver program that would be able to adjust its timing according to the reconstructed field-clock. You'd probably want to do it by reading the clock bit in a tight loop and waiting for it to transition and using that as the cue for reading the data bit.
I really love your videos. That being said, if we turned every time you said "...so even though we've done everything else correctly, if never would have worked" into a drinking game people would be going to the hospital for alcohol poisoning LOL!
They should have written the original code to allow you to see the 1's and 0's rolling in across the screen in real time. This would have given the user some feedback that a stream of values is being received, and would allow them to tweak the potentiometer to allow them to see how the received binary was looking. I could imagine as a kid reading the first 100 bits with different pot settings to ensure i was getting a constant set of binary. They could have even started the sequence with 100 alternating 1's and 0's as a test header. Such a program could still be created today as a "test program for decoding on screen flashes". After recieving the ones and zeros there should be a menu that says 1) convert to HEX or 2) Convert to ASCII BASIC or 3) Save and Run
Dude you did it. Nice follow thru. I'm awestruck. To be honest when i first discovered your channel i would only use it for background filler something to turn on and watch occasionally while tinkering much like Star Trek TNG. This is much better content than I first thought. I felt like I was in the battle with you. I felt like it was one of those rare moments at work when I saved some rare ancient motion controller. Need to rewatch many of your videos now. Thank you!
Having seen the 4 Computer Buffs programs on UA-cam I had considered trying to build the decoder and give it a go but I was put off when I considered the low quality of the uploaded videos. In a way I'm relieved I didn't as I probably wouldn't have realised the code wasn't complete. There's a fine line between having fun with a project and getting nowhere sometimes. You need to make enough progress to keep you interested or it just feels like an exercise in frustration. I also wondered if making the dot full screen might help! So it was kinda cool to see how that would have turned out. But most of all, it was amazing to finally see what wonders had been hidden behind that little flashing dot after all these years! Well done! 🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉
That is an incredible bit of digital archaeology you have performed, sir! The most impressive part of the whole thing is you being able to acquire a copy of the original broadcast in high quality, and at that point I likely would've done the rest programmatically myself rather than try to continue with the physical circuit.
The Thames TV archive is a commercial enterprise, so they will sell copies to anyone willing to pay. Whether they did a special deal due to the nature of this particular enquiry, who knows?
Congratulations! At least it wasn't an ad for Ovaltine or such. 😆 Your patience and perseverance are phenomenal. Thanks for sharing this awesome journey with us.
In the immortal words of Commander Quincy Taggart, "Never give up - Never Surrender!" This was an amazing journey. I congratulate you on your fortitude. I'm just glad it was you bashing your brains out on this, and not me.
Brilliant work, well done, and a couple of genuine LOLs in there! You're probably one of the only people - maybe the only one - to have got this code running. I'm sure the pipeline from video player to screen was an issue and the only way you could have maybe got it to work as intended is to play an actual analogue tape recording direct to an analogue display. But I've no idea how you'd get their archive file onto tape without affecting it in some way, so you really did come up with the only solution. Whoever made that original program will be very happy I'm sure!
The 80's was really fun. I rented a room in a house.. there was no floor in the bathroom.. just the joists. I went away on tour with a friends band.. was away longer than expected.. about 2 months.. when I got home the whole street was gone. 1983 Bolton.
First time visitor, new subscriber! Great endeavours sometimes lead to meagre rewards except the huge satisfaction of solving a 40 year old enigma code!
WOW you have been tenacious with this project! Maybe you could do your own flashing dot program on one of your future episodes for us to build a device and decode on our original hardware?
I'd guess you are the first person in history to get this to load and save correctly on the Commodore 64 (with some help I gather). Brilliant! I wonder whether anyone ever got any of the other versions to work back in the days or since!
Mate, I truly believe that the quality of these videos - not to mention the inventiveness, care and passion - is unsurpassed on UA-cam. Astonishing production and - most importantly I suppose - HUGELY entertaining. And something I just thought of, I was an Amstrad CPC 464 man back in the day. It came with quite an impressive introduction tape. I wonder if those demos could be played around with in any way by a tenacious genius? Amstrad Demo Tape Redux, if you like?
Hats off to your perseverance sir! It's also good to know that Thames still have these old TV programs archived, maybe they can release them on YT like the BBC computer archive clips.
I need a count of how many times in this video he said "even though we did everything else correctly, it never would have worked" I still hear it after the video is done playing!
@@WarrenGarabrandt I'm sure that they figured that since they are requested for copies of their programs so often that they could recover the costs of the copies and make a hefty profit! They probably get like 0 to 13 requests a month, from throughout their entire archive of programs and episodes, on average!
I thoroughly enjoyed watching this. I loved watching your perseverance throughout your journey you've shared. Thanks for the good memories of the good old UK days.
This was such a good watch and man you sure did get a lot of steps in doing this. Am so glad you got it running after all the work you put in, i bet if you had of did this back in the day and got it to work you would of felt like a secret agent or something like it 🤣😂. Lost my mum friday morning and this is the first smile i have had so i can not thank you enought for the work you guys do. So until the next one you all take care and have a great weekend 🙂🙂
My friend I am so sorry to hear that. We both know what you may be feeling, and please know we and the channel are here for you if you ever want some escapism from the sad reality all of us face at some point. Remember also, to live on in the hearts of loved ones, is not to die.
It was truly a marvel to watch this come back to life. Excellent work by all who contributed to this project. It just goes to show how far we haven't really gotten in the last 50 years! You had me on the edge of my seat throughout this entire ordeal!
That was AMAZING! truly a message received from the past! it was so thrilling, and when it seemed to fail, it was so sad, but then it WORKED ! sooo mindblown about this! awesome!
Well done for sticking with it. I remember the original broadcasts and wished I could have tried decoding, but I was a bit too young. I wonder now that you’ve got the result if you could check that your circuit wasn’t unintentionally inverting the bitstream. I think on one of the clips the presenter acknowledged that was a problem with the bbc circuit. Could be checked in a few different ways. Just a thought. Once again - well done!!
There was a C64 program we used to use on Amateur Radio called "Buddy Term", with the help of an MFJ-1224 RTTY Interface we could download programs over radio at 1100 baud. 1100 is a non-standard rate, but we used this because it worked reliably over the 2 meter radio band. 1200 on 2 meter band on a C64 just didn't work, so we used a non-standard baud rate. It worked quite well, it had error detection and resending bad data. This kind of reminds me of those days. The program also had a chat mode and press F8 it would query a list of stations in range.
Yes... sorry I missed the pin comment, you found the issues I pointed out and congrats sorting it out. I don't think you should consider it cheating as the technology has moved out of reach of the common person, the fact that you could recover it at all is truly an amazing feat... what an adventure that was!
I am so grateful and amazed that thames / fremantle still had this tape and made it available to tou. did you already have a player for it ? I worked in uk for a premium rate chat / competition telephone company late in the 90's, and these tapes were used for storing the calls usually ona recorder that held around 444440 calls, and were bought from the bbc quite cheaply. One of the tapes we received was a dr. who tape, which I retrieved instantly on sight. unfortunately thought it had been loaded earlier that day, and now had "dirty gurty" from manchester on it. Ikept the box though and sold it alone on ebay earlier this year, and it still fetched over £125 . Thank god this tape did not suffer this fate.
Brilliant! :) Nicely done. Analyzing the video for the dot and reading the binary directly from it was my idea from the beginning. But didn't want to spoil the fun od experimenting and probably you've thought of that already so I was patiently waiting for the next episode. :) And I'm glad - the nostalgia factor went high up. Cheers! :)
In case anyone is wondering, vacuum cleaners produced a lot of visual noise on a broadcast analog TV in the form of "snow".and lines. Same with blenders.
@@plateshutoverlock Old PTSD triggered from comments. New PTSD triggered from car ignition systems, wind and rain killing digital signal. Best of both formats.
I freaking love this guy! I could feel his repeated disappointment just as when it happens to me. He did exactly what I would have done when he asked Themes for a copy of the video. BRAVO. You sparked a moment when I stood from my chair, yelling, ‘Are you kidding me right now?!’ when you played that ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ song. For a moment, I actually believed it was that song that you downloaded. I have also been haunted by project staring me in the face like it did to you. I recall small, weird pieces of my childhood from back in the ‘80s-Mister Wizard’s World, Beyond 2000… I don’t remember ever seeing the show that you got that project from; maybe it was a UK thing. But I’ve seen this experiment somewhere else, and I recall thinking, ‘Huh, I wish I had a computer.’ We had one kid in our school who had a Commodore PC, and I hung out with him as a little kid because he was the only kid in the school with a computer. My parents eventually got a TANDY 1000, but that was lame because they didn’t let me do anything but play Oregon Trail… and there’s only so many times I can handle dying of dysentery, whatever that was… lol. I’m gonna try to look at my old journal to figure out who else did that stupid dot on the TV project. I swear I've seen it Somewhere else. I was born in ‘77, so we’re not that far apart. But watching your video, I see my ‘80s nerdy self in you. I just want to give you a BIG HUG for hanging in there and making it happen. I do nerdy projects like that, and often times they blow up, or I get discouraged and forget about them. YOU ARE MY HERO for sticking with it. BTW… I saw the red plaid PJs with the hat… yeah… mine is a onesie that’s shaped like a blue dragon with purple dots-looks a lot like Sully from Monsters, Inc. So much alike, bro!
awww that was lovely!!! Was riveted all the way through watching and discussing with a friend as if different things would work etc. Really fun watch thanks so much!
That was super cool! The actual content of the program wasn't the important bit, it was the adventure to get there! You are probably the only person to get that working.
This was defently for the hardcore hobbyist and computer science crowd. For the more mainstream crowd that mostly just wanted games, this was typically done through screechy audio (modem/tape drive data) that could be recorded directly on to a cassette tape. I wonder how many people actually built this light modem back in the day? 🤔
@RetroRecipes what a fantastic video - really entertaining. Thanks for this. Wish it were possible to show the original presenters of the show how it worked all these years later. Especially given that, as we've now learned, it would've never worked for anyone back in the 80s! Granted, some of them might not care, but some may.
Would be interesting to debug your setup, and see exactly where it went wrong. (the circuit signal, the monitor refresh rate, the recording software etc)
So awesome, you even got original format of video from owner! So glad someone figured out decoding direct from the video too, I think you could still do it from the screen if everything is tweeked right (which could also still need tweaks in receiving assembly code)
I just thought of this when he mentioned the filter. A Nintendo NES Blaster was built to pick up light from a CRT so that had a good chance of working.
It would be great to build a transmit circuit with white led. To confirm if it is the tv/recording pal/ntsc transmission... just to verify the receiver circuit does work.. transmit a "hello world" to the c64. Thanks for sharing, great video!!
Congratulations on decoding that old mystery. Like all projects of this kind, the fun is in the way getting there no matter the struggle, although I would likely have cheated by first disassembling the decoder program to figure out what it actually did with the data and then just split the video into frames and reading the dot like your python program. But as you indicate the original youtube footage would likely not work either, so it was awesome that you got sent the original footage. Again, you win, even though the price is somewhat of a lackluster. :)
When I saw the "congratulations" message initially, I thought that was it 😂 The payoff was worth it when you consider its flashes of light for a binary digit of 1 or 0 over a CRT monitor (I assume, im not well versed in IT). How modern operating systems run on essentially binary always fascinates me. Anyway I found the channel through part 1 and have been anticipating this episode since! Thank you for this incredible journey
8:30 for those who don’t know, making a peace sign with the back of your hand facing the person it’s directed to, in the UK that’s equivalent to the middle finger.
Программа для расчета матричного квадрата переданная через ТВ. Интересные времена были. Жаль что эксперимент как я понял провалился( Прекрасно что вы раскрыли тайну, отличная работа! 👍
I was afraid the MP4 compression would be a problem, as I mentioned in the last video - this flashing is great to be compressed. I don’t even think about the deinterlacing. But great Freemantle send you the tape! And isn’t it amazing how our community comes together?!
You should speed up the driving footage with an audio overlay like the original show used to do to simulate turbo speed LOL I will never forget that first emersion breaking scene where a car going over an overpass at the same speed as KITT as he drove under it at "turbo speed", I was so glad I recorded it on VHS, I kept watching it over and over laughing my teenage ass off, god I loved that show
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Nowadays they could encode that entire C64 program into a single 3D bar-code... crazy stuff.
@@BillAnt 3d bar code sounds wild
"Be sure to drink your Ovaltine"
Pity that within the files you put on google drive, there is no this 50i video. :( I wouldn't mind to try to make this circuit by myself.
@@f2lo2 I had to sign a contract not to share the copyrighted content in full
You've just conquered a 100-room dungeon and killed the oppressive red dragon. You see a chest at the far end of it's lair. With anticipation you open it to find a single piece of paper on which is inscribed the following note... "Congratulations! You win! Have a great day!"
That is better than Hellfire Warrior's ending. I would have taken that :(
To be era accurate, you have to make a spelling error in "Conglarutation"
You've beatent Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Conglatulation!
Some big "Be sure to drink your Ovaltine" vibes
Luigi: After this quest, I HOPE THE PRINCESS MADE LOTS OF SPAGHETTI!
If the reciver program was missing code to store the data, that probably means this is the first time the transmitted program has been seen since the transmission 😄
The C64 receiver prog printed in the magazine was indeed missing a few crucial ML instructions, but as I explained on lemon64, I noticed the audio track they transmitted in an earlier episode of '4 computer buffs' actually did include the complete receiver code. So if someone back then recorded that audio to a cassette tape and managed to load it back on a C64, then they might've gotten this to work.
@@_nc513_ amazing. Thanks for the info!
@@_nc513_ Maybe but who did?
"so join me in part 3..." -- I was about to flip my desk over
Same, he really got me!
I checked the run time at that moment lol.
I was about to close the video lol
the suspense was killing me even long after that! Then I always look how many minutes remain and say oh it will be solved somehow
Sir, that was the best, most unexpected, funniest rickroll of my life. And I've been on the internet for quite a while.
You earned my respect for that alone.
We've known this software for so long... We are never gonna give it up.
@@rubenvd3913 It had to be done.
You know the rules, and so do I.
💚🐇🐴💚
It was fun to be able to contribute to this. 🙂 The thread on lemon64 turned into quite an adventure. 😀
Thanks so much for all your help nc513!
Thanks for the help for me and a lot of others ;)
Nice episodes. And speeding tickets in the US aren’t speedy. The officer in Louisiana took 45 minutes to write me up - he said it was because of the Dutch drivers license. And that was 2008 and I still haven’t gotten that ticket, or did the rental company gave me a surcharge.
I think Officer Brown (that was his name) had enjoyed our banter that he never registered the ticket. We both laughed a lot. But the speed limit was 70 and I did 82… So he was right to fine me, although according to him it was safe: “the only thing I could hit was a stray alligator”.
Let this be a lesson to everyone about just how freaking hard it is to build a reliable analog modem.
The scary part is we're using the same exact technology today. We're sending flashes of light through fiber optics, but with multiple colors and at much faster speeds.
@@burkino7046you say scary, I say incredible.
But it’s not hard to build one at all
@@MeppyManyou say incredible I say impossible!
We also have checksums and resends :)
Sir, you have just recovered a piece of history. Congratulations.
Several things to comes to mind:
This Thames taped broadcast could be used for giving students an example of how to salvage data.
One could manually go through the taped broadcast and write the data stream by hand, or attempt to build a device like it was intended.
What sort of students, one may ask? Uh, evening classes in cryptography at a local community center, definitely, so anyone who has the time and the interest.
Also, this episode gives a much more realistic depiction of a "hacker"; not some guy in a hoodie, wearing leather gloves and sunglasses, but dressed just like the rest in that neighborhood :3
In 1983, the Finnish Broadcasting Company broadcasted C64 programs in a radio show called Kansanmikrokerho (The People’s Microcomputer Club). I recorded them on a cassette tape, and they worked just fine. In 1985, a commercial local radio station in City of Tampere, Radio 957, also broadcasted C64 programs. The broadcast was implemented in such a way that one of the stereo channels transmitted the C64 data stream, while the other transmitted music.
That's really cool, do you have the files still preserved?
I lost it when the cat bag's eye starting flashing as to taunt you! I loved this episode so much and I'm glad it had a happy ending.
🙏 And that really happened... at least in my mind...
This video is key testament as to why you should not only still have CRT TVs, but also have proper video to digital transfers!!! This dude ROCKS for going the extra mile!
The other side being that if you want to play a light gun game ever again, you need that frame rate and interlacing for it to work properly.
Absolutely! It's frustrating how many analog video converters just throw away half the information. It's additionally tricky with UA-cam as you need to upscale to 720p for it to preserve the deinterlaced 50fps and full PAL resolution. Modern codecs also don't handle SD resolution with analog noise well, so it's tricky to get right.
exactly, i collect tapes just so i can transfer them in 60 fields and archive the contents because nobody else wants to
I have never, ever, in the history of the interwebs, felt the creator's pain so much. I am literally emotional at the end of this journey..
🤗
Yes! And, creator pain is so underrepresented! Swept under the rug. It's good to witness the struggle, to relate to it, to see that folks everywhere are giving something their best shot, not knowing if they'll even conclusively succeed or fail. This story would have felt so different without all those tough moments.
That was one of the most nerve-wracking and at the same time satisfying recipodes ever. Thank you so much for this, Peri. Really took me for a nice stroll down memory lane!
My congratulations, you have passed the first stage. I am not just saying these words, I am a former employee. BBC Good luck
I think the next natural step is to go Full Mythbusters on this. The original criteria did not work, We've proved there is data in the flashes, Now to see what it takes to actually pull it off!
(Improved circuit and re-encoded flashes with the fixed code)
the flashes werent broken, the cirquit and Receiver program was, so you need a different cirquit, heck Just slap an mcu on there, change the phyton code to c, then make a serial Receiver program and done.
@@SimonBauer7 How would the Marvel Cinematic Universe help us here?
Seriously though, I'm intrigued in building a receiver that would work. If you think you could collab on that feel free to fax or email me peri@perifractic.com +1 747 PERIFAX 👍🕹
Fascinating thing, the circuit was readily commercially available! It's a light pen!
@@RetroRecipes The circuit as shown is basically just stretching the light pulses from the phototransistor into a more regularized sequence of pulses that the computer will have an easier time reading. Being able to successfully decode the pulse train would require having zero drift between the pulses coming in from the circuit and the code running on the computer, and that probably would have been achieved by sneakily using the power mains frequency as a shared clock for the original transmission. But in your setup you almost certainly do not have that synchronization between your laptop playing back the video and the computer trying to read it, and so the two would drift out of sync probably fairly quickly unless you were very, very lucky.
In order to decode this successfully you'll either need to genlock the playback signal, likely using the computer's video-out as the master, or build a slightly more sophisticated receiver circuit that extracts both a field-clock (probably using a phase-lock loop) and the data pulse train, plus a more sophisticated receiver program that would be able to adjust its timing according to the reconstructed field-clock. You'd probably want to do it by reading the clock bit in a tight loop and waiting for it to transition and using that as the cue for reading the data bit.
@@Nicoya I agree, the frequency will be drifting all over the place.
A perfect trip into memory lane. Computing was typing stuff, spending ages debugging and then not much on screen when it finally worked. Pioneering!
Amazing they sent you an actual tape.
I wonder if he has permission to release the file to others. I would love to try and make a circuit that could actually achieve what was intended.
Tech has moved on, it’s not cheating its modern day archeological study in to what was once, simply amazing tech. Well done.
I really love your videos. That being said, if we turned every time you said "...so even though we've done everything else correctly, if never would have worked" into a drinking game people would be going to the hospital for alcohol poisoning LOL!
They should have written the original code to allow you to see the 1's and 0's rolling in across the screen in real time. This would have given the user some feedback that a stream of values is being received, and would allow them to tweak the potentiometer to allow them to see how the received binary was looking. I could imagine as a kid reading the first 100 bits with different pot settings to ensure i was getting a constant set of binary. They could have even started the sequence with 100 alternating 1's and 0's as a test header. Such a program could still be created today as a "test program for decoding on screen flashes".
After recieving the ones and zeros there should be a menu that says 1) convert to HEX or 2) Convert to ASCII BASIC or 3) Save and Run
This is why the ZX81 and Spectrum had loading stripes. (for tape loading).
Dude you did it. Nice follow thru. I'm awestruck. To be honest when i first discovered your channel i would only use it for background filler something to turn on and watch occasionally while tinkering much like Star Trek TNG. This is much better content than I first thought. I felt like I was in the battle with you. I felt like it was one of those rare moments at work when I saved some rare ancient motion controller. Need to rewatch many of your videos now. Thank you!
Having seen the 4 Computer Buffs programs on UA-cam I had considered trying to build the decoder and give it a go but I was put off when I considered the low quality of the uploaded videos. In a way I'm relieved I didn't as I probably wouldn't have realised the code wasn't complete. There's a fine line between having fun with a project and getting nowhere sometimes. You need to make enough progress to keep you interested or it just feels like an exercise in frustration. I also wondered if making the dot full screen might help! So it was kinda cool to see how that would have turned out. But most of all, it was amazing to finally see what wonders had been hidden behind that little flashing dot after all these years! Well done! 🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉
*anticipation intensifies*
Thank you for never giving up or letting down.
I try 🙏
What a rollercoaster of an episode! Absolutely love it!
Your voice, genuine love for nostalgia and hard work take us on a very emotional ride.
Thank you for your kind words! Means a lot 👍🕹
That is an incredible bit of digital archaeology you have performed, sir! The most impressive part of the whole thing is you being able to acquire a copy of the original broadcast in high quality, and at that point I likely would've done the rest programmatically myself rather than try to continue with the physical circuit.
The Thames TV archive is a commercial enterprise, so they will sell copies to anyone willing to pay. Whether they did a special deal due to the nature of this particular enquiry, who knows?
Danke! I have had a super interesting time with those two episodes!
Thank you for your support! Pleased to hear it!
Congratulations! At least it wasn't an ad for Ovaltine or such. 😆 Your patience and perseverance are phenomenal. Thanks for sharing this awesome journey with us.
In the immortal words of Commander Quincy Taggart, "Never give up - Never Surrender!"
This was an amazing journey. I congratulate you on your fortitude. I'm just glad it was you bashing your brains out on this, and not me.
Brilliant work, well done, and a couple of genuine LOLs in there! You're probably one of the only people - maybe the only one - to have got this code running. I'm sure the pipeline from video player to screen was an issue and the only way you could have maybe got it to work as intended is to play an actual analogue tape recording direct to an analogue display. But I've no idea how you'd get their archive file onto tape without affecting it in some way, so you really did come up with the only solution. Whoever made that original program will be very happy I'm sure!
Just got around to watching this. 80s was such a fun time to grow up. Nice troubleshooting and awesome job Peri.
The 80's was really fun. I rented a room in a house.. there was no floor in the bathroom.. just the joists. I went away on tour with a friends band.. was away longer than expected.. about 2 months.. when I got home the whole street was gone. 1983 Bolton.
First time visitor, new subscriber! Great endeavours sometimes lead to meagre rewards except the huge satisfaction of solving a 40 year old enigma code!
WOW you have been tenacious with this project! Maybe you could do your own flashing dot program on one of your future episodes for us to build a device and decode on our original hardware?
These two videos are my favorite ever from this channel!! I was seriously on the emotional roller coaster with Perry!! 🎉🎉
I can't believe they used a single field for each bit and expected it to work.
Good job in getting there in the end though!
One per frame I think. So one messed up vertical-sync...
I'd guess you are the first person in history to get this to load and save correctly on the Commodore 64 (with some help I gather). Brilliant! I wonder whether anyone ever got any of the other versions to work back in the days or since!
One person claimed to get the BBC version working before I released this but when I asked them what the program was... ah dropped call, shame.
These videos have been really amazing both in storytelling and editing :)
Mate, I truly believe that the quality of these videos - not to mention the inventiveness, care and passion - is unsurpassed on UA-cam. Astonishing production and - most importantly I suppose - HUGELY entertaining. And something I just thought of, I was an Amstrad CPC 464 man back in the day. It came with quite an impressive introduction tape. I wonder if those demos could be played around with in any way by a tenacious genius? Amstrad Demo Tape Redux, if you like?
Wow, thank you!
Hats off to your perseverance sir! It's also good to know that Thames still have these old TV programs archived, maybe they can release them on YT like the BBC computer archive clips.
I need a count of how many times in this video he said "even though we did everything else correctly, it never would have worked" I still hear it after the video is done playing!
I'm glad you got there in the end, I was almost crying 3/4 the way through this episode... Can't fault your determination :) A+
Thanks for sharing the entire journey. Really enjoyed it!
This was amazing all the way through. Your tenacity is amazing, Peri. Very well done.
Thanks! I included a bit more of my frustration clips this time just for you ;)
"Can't thank them enough for taking my credit card number in exchange for the footage" 😆
@@WarrenGarabrandt I'm sure that they figured that since they are requested for copies of their programs so often that they could recover the costs of the copies and make a hefty profit! They probably get like 0 to 13 requests a month, from throughout their entire archive of programs and episodes, on average!
I thoroughly enjoyed watching this. I loved watching your perseverance throughout your journey you've shared. Thanks for the good memories of the good old UK days.
This was such a good watch and man you sure did get a lot of steps in doing this. Am so glad you got it running after all the work you put in, i bet if you had of did this back in the day and got it to work you would of felt like a secret agent or something like it 🤣😂. Lost my mum friday morning and this is the first smile i have had so i can not thank you enought for the work you guys do. So until the next one you all take care and have a great weekend 🙂🙂
My friend I am so sorry to hear that. We both know what you may be feeling, and please know we and the channel are here for you if you ever want some escapism from the sad reality all of us face at some point. Remember also, to live on in the hearts of loved ones, is not to die.
One of the absolute best made retro tech videos I've ever seen.
Thank you for your kind words! Means a lot 👍🕹
Impressive, the amount of effort put into this video.
It was truly a marvel to watch this come back to life. Excellent work by all who contributed to this project. It just goes to show how far we haven't really gotten in the last 50 years! You had me on the edge of my seat throughout this entire ordeal!
Very cool you and the forum guys did this! I remember this from wayyyyy back then!
I just watched part 1 two days ago and the cliffhanger left me with a itch under the fingernails. Thx for the relieve.
I'm impressed by your tenacity to and not giving up. Most people would have given up a long time ago, so well done!
I'm watching this at 2 in the morning. I should not have laughed that loud when the software "Worked". Well played.
That was AMAZING! truly a message received from the past! it was so thrilling, and when it seemed to fail, it was so sad, but then it WORKED ! sooo mindblown about this! awesome!
The payoff is great, but your tenacity is greater. Your team of helpers (including all the fractics) did an incredible job!
Well done for sticking with it. I remember the original broadcasts and wished I could have tried decoding, but I was a bit too young. I wonder now that you’ve got the result if you could check that your circuit wasn’t unintentionally inverting the bitstream. I think on one of the clips the presenter acknowledged that was a problem with the bbc circuit. Could be checked in a few different ways. Just a thought. Once again - well done!!
There was a C64 program we used to use on Amateur Radio called "Buddy Term", with the help of an MFJ-1224 RTTY Interface we could download programs over radio at 1100 baud. 1100 is a non-standard rate, but we used this because it worked reliably over the 2 meter radio band. 1200 on 2 meter band on a C64 just didn't work, so we used a non-standard baud rate. It worked quite well, it had error detection and resending bad data. This kind of reminds me of those days. The program also had a chat mode and press F8 it would query a list of stations in range.
Your patience is utterly mind blowing
Absolutely amazing. That Python code coming to the rescue was also pretty cool!
Yes... sorry I missed the pin comment, you found the issues I pointed out and congrats sorting it out. I don't think you should consider it cheating as the technology has moved out of reach of the common person, the fact that you could recover it at all is truly an amazing feat... what an adventure that was!
All good!
I am so grateful and amazed that thames / fremantle still had this tape and made it available to tou. did you already have a player for it ? I worked in uk for a premium rate chat / competition telephone company late in the 90's, and these tapes were used for storing the calls usually ona recorder that held around 444440 calls, and were bought from the bbc quite cheaply. One of the tapes we received was a dr. who tape, which I retrieved instantly on sight. unfortunately thought it had been loaded earlier that day, and now had "dirty gurty" from manchester on it. Ikept the box though and sold it alone on ebay earlier this year, and it still fetched over £125 . Thank god this tape did not suffer this fate.
To clarify, they pulled the tape from the archives and digitised it at 25i then sent me the file via Box.
Brilliant! :) Nicely done. Analyzing the video for the dot and reading the binary directly from it was my idea from the beginning. But didn't want to spoil the fun od experimenting and probably you've thought of that already so I was patiently waiting for the next episode. :) And I'm glad - the nostalgia factor went high up. Cheers! :)
Thank you very much for this second video!
Imagine when it originally aired, you'd try so hard to capture it live and your mother turned on the vacuum or the mixer.
"MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMMM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
In case anyone is wondering, vacuum cleaners produced a lot of visual noise on a broadcast analog TV in the form of "snow".and lines. Same with blenders.
@@plateshutoverlock Old PTSD triggered from comments. New PTSD triggered from car ignition systems, wind and rain killing digital signal.
Best of both formats.
Just watched this video and it was a rollercoaster! So much suspense, the emotional build-up was intense, and the drama was on point. Great ending.
I freaking love this guy! I could feel his repeated disappointment just as when it happens to me. He did exactly what I would have done when he asked Themes for a copy of the video. BRAVO. You sparked a moment when I stood from my chair, yelling, ‘Are you kidding me right now?!’ when you played that ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ song. For a moment, I actually believed it was that song that you downloaded. I have also been haunted by project staring me in the face like it did to you. I recall small, weird pieces of my childhood from back in the ‘80s-Mister Wizard’s World, Beyond 2000… I don’t remember ever seeing the show that you got that project from; maybe it was a UK thing. But I’ve seen this experiment somewhere else, and I recall thinking, ‘Huh, I wish I had a computer.’ We had one kid in our school who had a Commodore PC, and I hung out with him as a little kid because he was the only kid in the school with a computer. My parents eventually got a TANDY 1000, but that was lame because they didn’t let me do anything but play Oregon Trail… and there’s only so many times I can handle dying of dysentery, whatever that was… lol. I’m gonna try to look at my old journal to figure out who else did that stupid dot on the TV project. I swear I've seen it Somewhere else. I was born in ‘77, so we’re not that far apart. But watching your video, I see my ‘80s nerdy self in you. I just want to give you a BIG HUG for hanging in there and making it happen. I do nerdy projects like that, and often times they blow up, or I get discouraged and forget about them. YOU ARE MY HERO for sticking with it. BTW… I saw the red plaid PJs with the hat… yeah… mine is a onesie that’s shaped like a blue dragon with purple dots-looks a lot like Sully from Monsters, Inc. So much alike, bro!
Haha glad you enjoyed it! Thanks for joining the fun
Terrific. One of your best. Hats off to everyone who contributed to this.
Thank you for your kind words! Means a lot 👍🕹
All I can say is BRAVO for all the brain-blasting, hair-hurting work you have done to get this working!
Thanks so much for all this testing and work!!! OMG! I just downloaded it and loaded it on our C64c computer and the kids loved it. Cheers!
Nice!! That proves the point that this would be amazing in 1985 as a kid!
@@RetroRecipes I was living there during this broadcast but I missed it. Probably too busy playing C64! haha
awww that was lovely!!! Was riveted all the way through watching and discussing with a friend as if different things would work etc. Really fun watch thanks so much!
Most anticipated part II ever.
That was super cool! The actual content of the program wasn't the important bit, it was the adventure to get there! You are probably the only person to get that working.
This was defently for the hardcore hobbyist and computer science crowd. For the more mainstream crowd that mostly just wanted games, this was typically done through screechy audio (modem/tape drive data) that could be recorded directly on to a cassette tape. I wonder how many people actually built this light modem back in the day? 🤔
WOW! Epic episode! I wish I had heard about the project in process. I would have enjoyed jumping in to help out too!
This is your TheBEST video till today 😊 Greetings from Ivan - Croatia OldRetro collector and enthusiast ... your channel is my time-machine ❤
Thank you for your kind words! Means a lot 👍🕹
Infrared phototransistor is such a classic mistake, so many people made that mistake during my undergrad EEC Engineering courses
Your perseverance is inspirational!
That is some legendary patience right there Perifractic, amazing. You might well be the only person who did ever get the full code lol.
@RetroRecipes what a fantastic video - really entertaining. Thanks for this. Wish it were possible to show the original presenters of the show how it worked all these years later. Especially given that, as we've now learned, it would've never worked for anyone back in the 80s! Granted, some of them might not care, but some may.
This tells us that journey is more fun than reaching the destination.
Would be interesting to debug your setup, and see exactly where it went wrong. (the circuit signal, the monitor refresh rate, the recording software etc)
So awesome, you even got original format of video from owner! So glad someone figured out decoding direct from the video too, I think you could still do it from the screen if everything is tweeked right (which could also still need tweaks in receiving assembly code)
I just thought of this when he mentioned the filter. A Nintendo NES Blaster was built to pick up light from a CRT so that had a good chance of working.
It would be great to build a transmit circuit with white led. To confirm if it is the tv/recording pal/ntsc transmission... just to verify the receiver circuit does work.. transmit a "hello world" to the c64. Thanks for sharing, great video!!
Thank you for your wonderful show! Enjoying every episode.
I really enjoyed this two episode series. In the end you had little choice but to use this method. Glad you could get a result.
An outstanding example of patience and determination when putting digital archeology in practice. Great work, Indiana Fractic!
Congratulations on decoding that old mystery. Like all projects of this kind, the fun is in the way getting there no matter the struggle, although I would likely have cheated by first disassembling the decoder program to figure out what it actually did with the data and then just split the video into frames and reading the dot like your python program. But as you indicate the original youtube footage would likely not work either, so it was awesome that you got sent the original footage. Again, you win, even though the price is somewhat of a lackluster. :)
What a herculean effort, wow. At the climax though, I couldn't help but think of Ralphie in A Christmas Story and his decoder pin. "OVALTINE?!"
Astounding job, I actually remember these episodes and craved so much to make the receiver.
When I saw the "congratulations" message initially, I thought that was it 😂 The payoff was worth it when you consider its flashes of light for a binary digit of 1 or 0 over a CRT monitor (I assume, im not well versed in IT). How modern operating systems run on essentially binary always fascinates me.
Anyway I found the channel through part 1 and have been anticipating this episode since! Thank you for this incredible journey
Great job finishing the project! 🙏
8:30 for those who don’t know, making a peace sign with the back of your hand facing the person it’s directed to, in the UK that’s equivalent to the middle finger.
@@VagrantChildOfficial It's extremely old sign that was started by english archers on a battlefield xD This gesture is easily 700 years old.
Well done Perifractic and the Lemon64 community, you got there in the end! 👏😃
73 - that's my year of birth as well.... I guess that's why I keep watching videos like these
Программа для расчета матричного квадрата переданная через ТВ. Интересные времена были. Жаль что эксперимент как я понял провалился(
Прекрасно что вы раскрыли тайну, отличная работа! 👍
I was afraid the MP4 compression would be a problem, as I mentioned in the last video - this flashing is great to be compressed. I don’t even think about the deinterlacing.
But great Freemantle send you the tape!
And isn’t it amazing how our community comes together?!
You should speed up the driving footage with an audio overlay like the original show used to do to simulate turbo speed LOL I will never forget that first emersion breaking scene where a car going over an overpass at the same speed as KITT as he drove under it at "turbo speed", I was so glad I recorded it on VHS, I kept watching it over and over laughing my teenage ass off, god I loved that show
8-bit Rick-rolling is definitely the best thing I'll see today (*except you finally conquering this retro code beast)
Well done to everyone in this project,.