fozztexx

fozztexx OP , 1 day ago

@rodbotic I swapped them around and tested them one at a time and in pairs to verify that it is one specific stick that is bad and not the slot.

fozztexx OP , 1 day ago

@rodbotic Bad slot or bad stick would have the same errors. If you look at the errors you can see it was failing on specific addresses. Only way to verify is to move the stick around and see if the errors follow the stick or the slot.

fozztexx , 5 days ago

@Cloudscout probably not, but Universal Soldier: The Return is better since JCVD leans into the comedy.

fozztexx , 3 months ago

@Cloudscout

"Just needs a fuse!”

“Replace the caps!”

fozztexx OP , 4 months ago

Slowly getting back online. Old drives removed, new drives installed.

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fozztexx OP , 4 months ago

Actually booted on the first try!

fozztexx OP , 4 months ago

Level 29 #BBS is back online. #RetroComputing #VintageComputing

fozztexx OP , 4 months ago

@Cloudscout I'd like to do it again, just have no idea where to get started with interfacing Python to a Mastodon API.

fozztexx OP , 4 months ago

I've spent the last week trying to make sense of this grotesque monstrosity and crime against humanity. It is just insane what was done to the original.

Every fifth frame is a blended interlaced abomination of the frames before and after. This should be easy to fix, just drop every fifth frame!

fozztexx OP , 4 months ago

Except, it's not every fifth frame! When there's a scene cut, the blended interlaced frame is randomly changed!

fozztexx OP , 4 months ago

But wait, it gets b̵e̵t̵t̵e̵r̵ worse! During “fast action” scenes where animation happens on every frame instead of every two frames, there's twice as much frame blending! That means that now there is some data loss.

fozztexx OP , 4 months ago

As I was gathering up examples I just discovered that sometimes it’s more than that! For some reason on occasion they will just blend a whole lot of frames together in a row.

There's absolutely no reason to do this at all! First they could have used a normal 3:2 telecine pulldown to convert the 24 frames per second into 60 fields per second. And second, it was a video file and they could have just left it at the original 24fps because computers aren't analog CRTs.

fozztexx OP , 4 months ago

I know what you're thinking, why not simply de-interlace the frames and re-assemble them? Here's an example of before frame, blended interlaced in the middle, and after.

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fozztexx OP , 4 months ago

Pulling out the top field of the interlaced frame looks like this. That's right, it's not just interlaced, it has been blended with the two frames! Not only that, it wasn't a simple blend, the amount of blending varies on every single row! I wrote a python program to brute force finding the blend percentages and this is the alpha channel.

What. The. Heck. It's like someone said "Hey, these computer things are neat! Look how much I can make them do!” without any thought to how awful it looks.

Alpha mask of how the two fields were blended

fozztexx OP , 4 months ago

But if we have the blended frame, one of the unblended frames, and the alpha mask, it should be possible to unblend to recover the frame that was lost, right? In theory yes, but apparently they mangled things far more than that. Subtracting out the known frame from the blended frame shows significant data loss.

fozztexx OP , 4 months ago

I'm pretty sure this cartoon was also drawn and animated entirely on a computer, no paper or film was involved. Yet somehow there was a digtal to analog to digital conversion done. You can see NTSC color artifacts.

Full frame

fozztexx OP , 4 months ago

@Cloudscout There's no video tape or laserdisc release of this show. Only the first season was ever released on DVD, and only in PAL. These copies came from a free streaming service.