Previously in Bringing new life to an old CRT I had managed to get a decent enough video output signal to my old Amstrad CRT by putting together a small VSync splitting board and with some hackery got a decent enough monochromatic image and was fairly happy with it. Some time has passed since then and as discussed in What is a terminal anyway? I had a bit of a change of heart with how I wanted to approach this project, and I ditched the Raspberry Pi and decided to build something with a microcontroller.

Well hey, it’s been some time since I last posted here, but things have far from slowed down…

When I originally created this website the ultimate goal really was for my own personal record, I’ve discovered over the years that I learn a bunch of things to do a project and then quickly forget everything I ever did. Writing things down also is a nice way to hold myself accountable for completing projects, and on the off chance that people read it then hey maybe I can share some knowledge and experience on what is ultimately kind of a niche collection of interests. Since the inception of this collection of notes though, the site has had over 7000 unique visitors, from countries all over the world (shout out to my one visitor from Iraq), which is definitely more than I anticipated ever having.

So far I feel like I’ve focussed a lot on the electronics of this project but one of the key elements that will sell this project as a real life Fallout 4 terminal is the physical presence of the thing. Getting this absolutely accurate has kind of been my key focus since day 0 of this project. I’ve talked a lot about the feel of the thing and the physical form it takes is of course one of the most important elements.

It’s been a little while since I updated on the state of the RIT-V300 terminal project, work has not stopped though. In the previous entry I’d managed to successfully get a Raspberry Pi to output a PAL signal to my CRT, did some work to make the Pi boot faster and optimise the display the best I could, on the one hand it felt like the finish line for this project was pretty close, but after spending some more time working on it and trying to make the “feel” right, I was never truly happy with the results, so this post is going to be less of a technical deep dive and log of what I did and a more of a record of the mental path I’ve taken that’s leading my choices moving forwards.

Over the years of doing anything and everything Pip-Boy related, I’ve spent quite a lot of time in and out of the game files as part of recreating the interfaces in my own PIP-OS variants, it’s become a common part of the process but it’s not something I’ve written much about yet. Recently I did a much deeper dive into reverse engineering some of the in game implementations of the Pip-Boy and I’ve amassed a pile of notes, so I figured it was about time to “formalise” some of my notes in the interest of shared knowledge.