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Make your screen look like a vintage terminal display

Rob Beschizza at 6:27 am Tue, Jan 25, 2011

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cathodescreenshot.png Perfect for playing old-school roguelikes! OSX only, unfortunately. Download [Cathode via JWZ]

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  • EH

    Bezel is too substantial.

  • Griefer

    Reminds me of when I first discovered the Internet. Back then I used VT100 serial terminals that looked similar to this, which were connected to a VAX system.

  • Anonymous

    Looks like minecraft to me.

  • Rezmason

    Note that Macs that use Intel graphics hardware aren’t supported. (:()

    • Anonymous

      Ther site states following
      Requirements

      Intel Mac
      Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard
      OpenGL 2.0 or later
      Note: Older Macs with Intel GMA cards are not supported.

      Perhaps you meant the other way around?

  • t3knomanser

    Man, $20? That’s a little steep, I think. Yeah, it’s fully functional without a license, but gradual picture degradation is an annoying hook.

  • Michael Rohm

    There needs to be something like this for XP. Freeware, preferably. I had a program that emulated the bash shell, on XP (not cygwin) but I have since forgotten what it was called or where to find it.

    • Anonymous

      Unix Tools
      or
      Power Tools

  • AetherWeaver

    I agree $20 is very steep for that. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are a few free utilities that do essentially the same thing.

  • naam

    glTerminal has been doing this for years now, including baud-rate simulation. I think it’s multiplatform as well. Recently tried it again, and on the OSX port, you need to make sure you go into preferences and set the renderer to ‘Classic Terminal’.
    Very free of charge, as well.

  • jetfx

    And it’s still a Mercator projection!

    • Anonymous

      That’s nothing, Every ASCII artist knows the “solidest” ASCII character is M, not D.

  • solitaire

    There’s been a free program that does this on OS X for some time called glterminal: http://riffraff.livejournal.com/356503.html

    For those with Linux, you can use jwz’s own XScreenSaver for a similar effect with either of these commands:
    /usr/lib/xscreensaver/apple2 -program bash -text
    /usr/lib/xscreensaver/phosphor -delay 1000 -program bash -scale 3

  • doggo

    My screen is a vintage terminal display, you insensitive clod!

  • foxtails

    That image reminds me of Global Thermonuclear War.

  • solitaire

    There’s been a free program that does this on OS X for some time called glterminal: http://riffraff.livejournal.com/356503.html

    For those with Linux, you can use jwz’s own XScreenSaver for a similar effect with either of these commands:
    /usr/lib/xscreensaver/apple2 -program bash -text
    /usr/lib/xscreensaver/phosphor -delay 1000 -program bash -scale 3

    • Nadreck

      Cool! BTW – I had to go into “Preferences” and change the render plugin to “Classic Terminal” before it would do anything on Tiger for me.

    • penguinchris

      Cool, but lacks all of the additional options that make Cathode stand out. Lacks all the ambiance – it’s just the standard terminal, curved (and a little over-exaggerated I’d say) and with less-readable text.

      Anyway, this surely isn’t worth $20, as others have noted. It’s really quite neat to try out for a few minutes, and it’d be awesome for terminal-based games (such as the roguelike suggestion), but I sincerely doubt anyone’s going to pay $20 for it.

      Throw it in the App Store for $2-3 and the guy would probably get tons of paid downloads… of course that might backfire since those who would be interested in this probably are mostly ideologically opposed to the app store :)

  • arikol

    doesn’t work on the older ATI X1600 based MBP, apparently… booo

    • Zuhaib

      Looks like I am not the only one with a MBP that has a X1600 that has this problem. Also $20 is really steep when you consider how Apps in the Mac App stores are a lot cheaper and offer more.

  • overtonewiz

    What’s to stop someone from just dragging the pic into iPhoto, going to sys pref and tadaaa?

  • Church

    I have my terminal emulator set to similar colors as it is. I’m loving the ‘curved’ screen and the burn-in, but I don’t think I $20 love it.

  • Anonymous

    The reason screens were curved back then was to correct for curvature in the image on the phosphor. The text as seen was actually straight.

    I want a great big lens that I can tape to my monitor. Preferably 20 pounds of glass.