Terminals

I picked up an old DEC VT420 monitor completely by chance recently. It doesn't seem to be working so I'll see if I can figure out what's going on sometime this week. Off the top of my head, I'd like to get it working with a dedicated Ubuntu machine since I'm so inexperienced (I've been running Mint for the past year just trying to get comfortable with it) but past learning programming and playing around with what the distro has to offer, I'm out of ideas. Lains, are there any of you with older model terminals like this one, and if so, what do you use them for? Pic semi-related, not my photo but it's the same terminal.

>>5129 I actually want one of those monochrome dumb terminals just for the kick of owning one. I would probably hook it up to a airgapped PC. But I wouldn't dare run such monitor alot since it consumes more power that my general purpose tower, so I probably don't need one. Would only be eye-candy for me.

>>5179 https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term

Just connect it to a serial port on your linux box, log in as root, and have an everpresent root terminal open with its own screen and keyboard.

>>5129 I happen to have picked up one as well, got it working and documented it here: https://flisks.site/vt420.html

Be careful while working with a CRT. BTW, I always wanted to get a VT console, where can I get one? Can I trust those from eBay? And it's clear that these things do not compliance with any nowadays' regulations, so it is even harder to get one shipped out of U.S.

>>5630 Saw your VT420 anime blog post. You should try Angle Beats, the opening title should be easily recognizable on libcaca-generated asciiart, good to make a remarkable demo for VT420. Pic related, it's a yeeloong netbook, stallman senpai anyone?

>>5630 Writing a ncurses program to play Bad Apple on this VT420 console is another thing worth to try, both for fun and for the fandom. The refresh rate is a problem, but you can get around it by only updating the changed pixels on the console and some downsampling. It should be easy and a ncurses version of Bad Apple is likely to be written by someone already and can be found by a web search. In case you don't know, It's a fan-made black-and-white animation featuring all the major characters in Touhou Project series and regarded as a masterpiece in the anime fandom community, since then it became sort of a programming challenge to "port" the video to all types of computing devices, especially those legacy devices under harsh constrictions, search the web, just like the old-school CG "demo" culture. And, taking this challenge doesn't automatically made yourself a fandom enthusiast or an otaku, if you have any objections to that, actually quite a lot of them were made by "demo" hackers.

>>5630 here's conway's game of life.

>>5670 Not likely to happen due to what you can see in >>5877 — it takes too long for the screen to update. Playback of a full-blown music video would be atrocious to watch. Instead I'll collect scripts like the Conway one where the slow update speed isn't that big of a problem.