Thursday, February 29, 2024

Teletext on a BBC computer in 2024 #VintageComputing #Teletext #BBCmicro @LinuxJedi

Before the Internet, if you wanted to read up-to-the-minute news or weather in Europe, there was Teletext. It is a low-bandwidth text standard that used to be sent via the hidden black border on TV signals.

BBC Micro and Master computers had a Teletext character generator chip and mode, which they actually booted into by default. Therefore, Teletext was easy to implement via a small ROM and a modem.

Andrew Hutchings (LinuxJedi) managed to get it running, despite Teletext in the UK being killed off years ago.

It turns out that there are web services that generate up-to-date Teletext feeds, and there is a project to turn a Raspberry Pi into a Teletext transmitter based on these feeds.

As for a Raspberry Pi, I have a spare 3A+ which I used to use to test PiStorms, but I accidentally fried the GPIO on it. The rest of the Pi is fully functional, so it is ideal for this.

See how the project was done and how a vintage BBC Micro can still display Teletext in the post here.

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