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Goodbye, CEEFAX.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19996372

:cry:

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Mon Oct 22, 2012 11:00 am
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When I was a kid, I used to love reading and if I didn't get enough from books/newspapers, I'd read Teletext (just the news and maybe Bamboozle). Then if I was still bored, I'd read Ceefax. Definitely remember it being on at night on TV and it would just go through the pages.

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Mon Oct 22, 2012 11:07 am
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Ceefax and Oracle were very useful services. Though Ceefax has really being replaced by the red button service. So not quite dead, just evolution.

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Mon Oct 22, 2012 11:15 am
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If I couldn't sleep I would switch on the TV and just watch the Ceefax pages scroll by while listening to the background music

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Mon Oct 22, 2012 11:47 am
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Amnesia10 wrote:
Ceefax and Oracle were very useful services. Though Ceefax has really being replaced by the red button service. So not quite dead, just evolution.


The red button service is Diet Pepsi left in a skip to Ceefax's thirst-quenching Coca-Cola... Oh, and whatever it was Digitiser on Four fell under, you'll always be remembered too :lol:

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Mon Oct 22, 2012 10:00 pm
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pcernie wrote:
whatever it was Digitiser on Four fell under, you'll always be remembered too :lol:

Technically that would have been Teletext. Whatever though, it was utterly brilliant at times. All written and mostly drawn by one man...


Mon Oct 22, 2012 10:13 pm
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Digitiser was genius in 1K.

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Mon Oct 22, 2012 10:27 pm
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jonbwfc wrote:
pcernie wrote:
whatever it was Digitiser on Four fell under, you'll always be remembered too :lol:

Technically that would have been Teletext. Whatever though, it was utterly brilliant at times. All written and mostly drawn by one man...


Even then they had the measure of Sony - the tramp in the bins turned out to be the CEO IIRC, nobody had noticed he was missing :lol:

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Mon Oct 22, 2012 10:30 pm
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Ceefax was great for getting the TV guides, Football results/tables and weather etc. But that was before the days of the internet.

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Mon Oct 22, 2012 10:32 pm
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l3v1ck wrote:
Ceefax was great for getting the TV guides, Football results/tables and weather etc. But that was before the days of the internet.


It would still be a better job than waiting for my systems to boot up or using my phone's tiny screen. Or that slow-ass red button and Freeview shambles IME. And there was just something nice about it, something slightly retro that seemed to have a bit more soul than the uniform blandness of the services above :?

It was a prototype internet for me in that once I was on it I was there for bloody ages :oops:

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Mon Oct 22, 2012 10:41 pm
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CEEFAX and Teletext were like magic to me. The beauty of it was that I could make Teletext like pages in the BBC Micros at school (Mode 7 was the teletext mode), so I learned about the control care terms for colours, shapes etc.. Very early grounding for putting tags round text in HTML.

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Mon Oct 22, 2012 11:08 pm
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paulzolo wrote:
Digitiser was genius in 1K.

Every program or application from that era could be made with fewer lines of code. Also when you had to be efficient with coding.

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Wed Oct 24, 2012 3:53 am
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Amnesia10 wrote:
paulzolo wrote:
Digitiser was genius in 1K.

Every program or application from that era could be made with fewer lines of code. Also when you had to be efficient with coding.


It still boggles me how they got Elite in at under 32K, INCLUDING the memory used for the display.

I’ll repeat: 32K

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Thu Oct 25, 2012 9:57 am
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paulzolo wrote:
Amnesia10 wrote:
paulzolo wrote:
Digitiser was genius in 1K.

Every program or application from that era could be made with fewer lines of code. Also when you had to be efficient with coding.


It still boggles me how they got Elite in at under 32K, INCLUDING the memory used for the display.

I’ll repeat: 32K


Wikipedia wrote:
The Elite universe contains eight galaxies, each galaxy containing 256 planets to explore. Due to the limited capabilities of 8-bit computers, these worlds are procedurally generated. A single seed number is run through a fixed algorithm the appropriate number of times and creates a sequence of numbers determining each planet's complete composition (position in the galaxy, prices of commodities, and even name and local details— text strings are chosen numerically from a lookup table and assembled to produce unique descriptions for each planet). This means that no extra memory is needed to store the characteristics of each planet, yet each is unique and has fixed properties. Each galaxy is also procedurally generated from the first.

However, the use of procedural generation created a few problems. There are a number of poorly located systems that can be reached only by galactic hyperspace— these are more than 7 light years from their nearest neighbour, thus trapping the traveller. Braben and Bell also checked that none of the system names were profane - removing an entire galaxy after finding a planet named "Arse".[7]

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Thu Oct 25, 2012 10:14 am
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They also did some very clever things with the display systems. The top, flying part, of the display was MODE 4 - a two colour mode which had a reasonable resolution, but occupied a less memory. The lower half was MODE 5 - more colours, but a coarser resolution. The BBC let to merge modes so one "slice" of screen was MODE 4, the other MODE 5.

To further reclaim memory from the display system, the display was cropped. Again, this was possible on the machine, with the game "pillar boxed". The blank areas to be left and right of the game screen were reused as part of the executable program. Other games employed this task, but you got random junk displayed (this junk was a visual manifestation of the code in the display memory space). In Elite, this junk was hidden by mapping the colours in those areas to be displayed as black.

Again, all this in 32K.

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Thu Oct 25, 2012 10:49 am
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