That is so awesome! The digital tuner is extremely useful. I think the only thing I wish I could do with it is bung in the tuning hex code instead of seeking or loading from disk. But that is a minor niggle and it works really well :)
Also, that may be your sole contribution, but I suspect that work is the majority of the diff from Acorn's ATS. That and switching the I/O to I2C via the user port.
I like what they have done with the NEXT, but unfortunately I have no nostalgia for ZX Spectrums, I grew up in a BBC Micro household. I do have a +2 in my collection here, but I rarely use it.
The NEXT is capable of running other system cores, such as the BBC Micro. I was an Oric Atmos fan in the day, for me its quaint to be dealing with Speccie stuff now, but as soon as the Atmos core is ready I'll be booting that too ..
I can't say my parents' TVs had zero memory, but it was at least very limited compared to my grandparents' TV.
The former was maybe fast if you were on page X and navigated to page X+1, X+2, maybe X+3 and X+4 (is that how the coloured buttons were usually arranged?) but for everything else was slow.
At my grandparents, every page was retrieved almost instantly.
>is that how the coloured buttons were usually arranged?
I think it depends on the system in use, but from my recollection it was a hierachical system - so from the home-page you may have links to News, Sport, Weather and TV Listings; from the News Page, the links may have been to National News, Regional News, etc.
Maybe when you got to an individual story one would be a link to 'next page' (or story) and the other 'previous page'?
One of the best uses I found was a low-fi daily quiz. Each page had a question and four answers, and you pushed the button for which you thought was correct. I think it also demonstrated that pages need not have a completely numeric id - I recall the quiz pages being something like '12;' - presumably to stop you cheating and jumping directly to an answer.
I believe Fastext was implemented with pre-caching. Since the page declared which the four page numbers were, the Teletext decoder was able to pre-fetch those pages while you read? This is what made it fast.
Essentially if you spent half a minute reading a page, the four coloured fast text pages were already received.
"Teletext" in this context is a signalling protocol for transmitting text content over PAL TV, for decoding by an appropriate receiver.
The BBC's service was branded "Ceefax", ITV and Channel 4 branded theirs "Teletext".
The current 'red button' service is a completely different protocol running on DVB (Digital Video Broadcast, i.e. digital TV). Text packets are added to the MPEG-2 stream.
FWIW you can still get Teletext over MPEG TS (DVB or IPTV), it's just already de-modulated, but even error correction bits are still there (and are useless).
In France most IPTV operators still use teletext for live subtitling because it eats much less bandwidth than dvbsub
They’re not the same and I don’t think they’ve ever been synonymous with each other (or at least not by people who work in the Broadcasting industry).
Red Button is the service that replaced teletext/ceefax in 2012. Teletext was an analogue service, Red button was a whole new digital service offering similar information, it’s entirely different infrastructure underneath, it’s not just a “lick of paint”.
You're right. My bad. I worked on a modernisation project for the DVB version of this in 2018. Internally we used to refer to it as Teletext, hence my confusion.
It does, the first part of my post shows this on the TV. But for the BBC Micro I'd need to physically hack the Morley quite a bit to take composite input. I also have an Acorn Teletext Adapter, this can easily take composite instead of RF via a jumper.
Ah thanks for this clarification - I was wondering what the need was for the RF modulation and if it was necessary for just plain old TV use. Great project and thanks for bringing the possibility to my attention!
The modern version (W65C02S) is not 100% pin compatible. It would be very obvious very quickly if that had been done. There isn't another modern equivalent with the same pinout that I'm aware of.
Yes, there are many original 6502s around, and they are probably worth half of an R65C02, or even less.
Also, that may be your sole contribution, but I suspect that work is the majority of the diff from Acorn's ATS. That and switching the I/O to I2C via the user port.