hckrnws
Beautifully old-school Web in so many ways. Besides the obvious (the layout, the "Sign the Guestbook" link) it is the whole "love" displayed by the site.
Kids, this is what the original web was like. Dedicated (maybe obsessive) site creators that (by hand) put together a site as a tribute to their passion—perhaps hoping to find other like-minded souls out there.
No ads. Wild, I know.
How feasible is it to make a crt from parts? I find crt's fascinating learn best by doing- I at least want to demonstrate horizontal and vertical sweeps. But I've never seen a DIY CRT kit before.
> How feasible is it to make a crt from parts? [...] I've never seen a DIY CRT kit before.
The closest thing that springs to mind: A friend of mine once drilled a hole into an empty Vodka bottle, stuck two wires in it (one at each end), a hose adapter for a vacuum pump, "sealed" the whole thing with a hot glue gun and hooked it up to several scavenged microwave oven transformers in series. Yes, the output was rectified and capacitors were also involved.
Here are some pictures:
https://chaos.social/@itsyndikat/107846783094589995
IIRC what he wanted to do was plasma etching.
I suppose rearranging the electrodes (using a piece of sheet metal with a hole in it; both fed through the neck of the bottle) and wrapping the sides of the bottle with 4 strips of aluminium foil could get you a beam and some crude deflection control. Not sure tough what you would coat the end of the bottle with, but I guess vacuum coating would be applicable.
If that sounds absolutely insane to you, I'd wholeheartedly agree.
At least to my ears, trying to build a CRT from first principles, combined with learning-by-doing and learning-EE-from-youtube-tutorials, sounds like a fast path to end up either dead or in a permanent care facility. Not exactly something I'd hand out in beginner-friendly kit form.
This person scraped phosphor out of a broken fluorescent tube and made several experimental CRTs: https://www.sparkbangbuzz.com/crt/crt6.htm
From the site: "The cathode ray tubes that I am describing here are crude and they are relatively easy to make at home. They are in fact, much easier to build than most technically minded people would ever imagine."
Is it strange that this isn't the first time I've been on this site? It's got pretty great info, and I used to work a lot with vacuum tubes...
As someone who's pre-18, without the nostalgia bias, I couldn't find the website any uglier, but the guestbook part... That was cute.
It's ugly because you're not using a CRT to view it.
It's not supposed to look like that.
I dont know about CRT as I dont have any, but in my screen looks ugly. How would a CRT screen make it look any better?
It's a joke, a meme response to "games looked so bad back then" types of comments made about games built during the CRT era and played on modern "perfect pixel", so to say, monitors.
Also, yeah. The site was ugly, you're not missing or misunderstanding anything. It's pure nostalgia to those who experienced the web back then, a reminder of a simpler, more ideal time in the internet's life.
It's just a reference to how CRT-era games look better on CRT as the devs were working with CRTs in mind and taking advantage of their way of rendering images[1]. I don't think there is actually a noticeable difference for the website itself, CRT performs a sort of interpolation which is great for old games that accounted for it, but for content that is already high-enough in resolution there is not any improvement
[1]https://wackoid.com/game/10-pictures-that-show-why-crt-tvs-a...
this site is oozing with early 2000s charm - love it
i also like how they use a through-hole transistor as a scale for their miniature CRTs section
be sure to check out another more modern labor of love for CRTs: crtdatabase.com
Crafted by Rajat
Source Code