Y Box & the 2600

[wiseguyusa]

I asked this in that other thread, thought it deserved its own thread. I don't consider this an "idea peddle" because I have no doubt that some one has already thought of it.

 

This is the "Ybox" I assume that since it is a couple years old, everyone here has long since seen this:

 

This article compares it to "an Atari 2600-era Konfabulator"

 

Why not go 1 step further and design and program it to actually plug in and work with the most popular/common video game of all time? Since the 2600 will plug in to an old school TV, it could keep some of those TV out of the landfills for a few more years, and do some really cool new tricks!

 

Has anyone done any R&D is this area?

 

http://www.engadget.com/2006/10/11/ybox-the-set-top-internet-box-in-an-altoids-tin

[Wickeycolumbus]

I really don't see a market for this one, but here you go any way. Might be able to squeeze an "X" in there, people seem pretty excited about those these days.

 

ybox.bin

[raindog]

Why not go 1 step further and design and program it to actually plug in and work with the most popular/common video game of all time?

 

Wait, you want to make a PS2 version? That doesn't seem all that retro... yet...

 

[RetroFiends]

I'm not quite sure I understand what you're attempting to accomplish. A tiny atari 2600? It's possible, but it's already been done. One was built into a controller, which you just plug in a cartridge to the controller, there have been handheld ataris, and then to a lesser degree all those atari joystick tv games and atari flashbacks.

[wiseguyusa]

Something that could "repurpose" an old tube TV with updated content, weather, stocks, sports scores etc.

 

that would work similar to Gameline with menus to select content but using the Ethernet connection.

 

use the user interface (joysticks, or other controllers) and the capability to connect directly with a TV from the 2600 and add it to the internet connectivity and widget support of the Y-Box

[raindog]

In all seriousness, that article is from back when a computer in an Altoids tin was a big accomplishment. Now you can just stick a Raspberry Pi in there and write some custom software --- a browser in full screen pointing at a back end or a really pixelated XBMC skin should both work if you're going for that 1980 Videotex/Minitel look. You could probably even write some VCS software with a hacked copy of Stella to read data from a file or socket and display a nice flickery ticker, but I'd just simulate the blockiness in HTML/JS myself, maybe with a woff font.

 

http://snapguide.com/guides/make-a-raspberry-pi-case-from-an-altoids-tin/

 

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=40&t=28814

 

However, it's Peppermint or GTFO.

 

Edit: Swype sucks. Been using it for 3 months to try to wean myself off of my Bluetooth keyboard for anything but coding, but it just makes my posts more typo-ridden than they already are.

Edited January 9, 2014 by raindog

[Wickeycolumbus]

Something that could "repurpose" an old tube TV with updated content, weather, stocks, sports scores etc.

I must be missing something, why not just turn on the TV instead?

[raindog]

I must be missing something, why not just turn on the TV instead?

 

Unfortunately, the days in which you could turn on a TV and instantly see headlines without some kind of smart TV app or external box like this one are, for most people, in the past. Headline News abandoned the "all headline stories, all the time" format a decade ago, Weather Channel and most 24-hour news channels make you wait anywhere from 5 to 20 minutes for a forecast, I haven't seen a constantly updated scrolling sports score ticker since the videotex days, etc. When I was home sick from school in those days, I would switch the cable box to one of the videotex channels and just leave it on, reading books and looking up periodically to see if something interesting was happening. No blaring commercials or endless "analysis" by talking heads killing time till something shinier comes up, just the news and weather, repeated endlessly.

 

Even if those things did still exist in their '80s form, having a device like this will let the user tailor the output to his or her taste, so that, for example, an expat Manchester United fan living in New Jersey can see those scores instead of what the Giants are doing, someone who lives an hour outside a city but is still on their cable network will see their own weather and not the city's (which is often very different even half an hour outside a city, where we live), someone who never wanted to hear the names Obama or Romney again could filter those stories out during last October's election coverage, etc. Additionally, I would always rather look at information than listen to it, and something like this wouldn't need sound at all unless it was something the user specifically wanted.

 

I use my smartphone for all those purposes, but it seems to me that the object of the exercise is to recapture the late '70s-early '80s look and feel of videotex services with updated flexibility, combined with the awesomeness of a computer that fits in an Altoids tin.

Edited January 9, 2014 by raindog

[wiseguyusa]

The suggestion wasn't so much about capturing a by-gone era as it was saving old school TV sets from the landfill. A sports ticker for instance, could turn a hole-in-the-wall dive into a "sports bar" for a minimal investment.

[RetroFiends]

Noble quest aside, I'm pretty sure this is the wrong section. Unless, of course, you actually have a means of programming such a cartridge and the means to create the custom hardware that'd be required.
The most robust "repurposing" internet program for a retro console I've seen is probably breadbox64, a twitter client for the 64. (Which seems to have disappeared)

And, as much as I get a thrill from an old TV, for the environments sake, the sooner they're gone -- the better. Not only are they outdated on a technical level, they are wholly energy inefficient and hazardous. You're right, we should keep these out of landfills-- take it to a local recycling entity that has the experience and expertise to dismantle and repurpose these machines. NEVER throw them away. The same goes for CRT computer monitors and similar electronics. I keep an old(er) TV around for my own retro game systems and my VCR, because these things look much better on their intended display ratio/output, but I won't even pretend that we need to preserve these machines.

[raindog]

Yeah, any bar that calls itself a "sports bar" without at least a couple of enormous TVs and half a dozen smaller ones (most or all of them HD) is not going to last long. People go to sports bars to watch games, not see a ticker they can get on their phone. (While I'm not into sports, I go to a sports bar one night a week for trivia, and we've been to 4 different venues, all of which have had a dozen or more screens, and only our first venue back in 2009 had any CRTs.) I could see doing something like this in a barcade, though, where a good-sized chunk of the clientele is men of a certain age who have a fondness for old video games and tech.

 

Coding the 2600 part of this might actually be pretty easy. The big-digit display for time/temp could easily be done with an asymmetrical playfield. A crawl would be harder and you'd probably have to use a flickery kernel, something like Stellar Track or Suicide Mission if you have extra RAM available, to make the crawl cover the screen horizontally.

 

The tough part would be getting the data into the 2600. You'd need to basically have another computer hooked up to the net scraping web pages for the data you want to present, digest it into a tiny amount of text data and send it to the 2600 over the joystick ports, maybe emulating the keyboard controllers. Handling the data on the VCS side shouldn't be too tough, but the hardware would be pretty far beyond me.

 

I'd probably just write a Linux or Android app with big, chunky pixels, myself, and use a Raspberry Pi as outlined in my earlier post.