The HotSpot - Episode 377

God, I remember thinking Teletext was so cool as a kid. I wonder if there's a way to play stuff like Bamboozle again?

Edit: OMG http://www.digitextsim.com/452/

I'm here for serial true crime podcast

I don't know if they talked about our old friend, Winamp during this Hotspot, but someone put up a 'museum' of Winamp skins. If you want to see the way things were when Nu Metal was king, here you go - https://skins.webamp.org/

Ceefax football and cricket scores were really helpful back in the 90s

Oi!

ALIEN GATE!!!

I just wanted to say, I had instant nostalgia looking at that thumbnail. Teletext/Ceefax amazed me as a kid. I would go to the childrens page and read short jokes.

That Ceefax screen instantly takes me back to my childhood.. What a weird cool thing Ceefax/Teletext was.

Page 555 for the lottery results!

Ceefax as a BBC service and also independant TV as Teletext was very useful, Channel 4 in the UK had a set of about 10 pages devoted to games which I'd follow every week

Anyone remember Gamecentral? I believe it's now part of the Metro news stuff but I used to love that section on Teletext/Ceefax.

Ceefax and Teletext were amazing. There was a quiz called bamboozle on Channel 4, you got the latest news, cinema times, football scores - all before everyone had the web. And page 888 still subtitles every programme.

Ceefax is what made me realise I needed glasses. I have a very distinct memory of me as an 11 year-old (or thereabouts) perched on the edge of the sofa hardcore squinting to read the teletext and then my Mum goes "I think we should go get your eyes checked"

I'd always just assumed that was how everyone's eyes were.

Came in here to reference bamboozle! and literally every comment mentions it.

UK back in the big leagues.

Parsec is crazy, theres a group of streamers i watch that play wrestling games that use it all the time, and there are Aussies in the group, and it seems to work pretty well for them. Very rarely do they mention the lag being bad enough that it effects their ability to play.

Jeff put me on a Ceephax kick.

Gamecentral was alright, but it was no Digitiser.

I have no idea how Digitiser was able to keep going as long as it did - I can only presume they were just left alone to do whatever they wanted. The send off was pretty infamous:

Video seems broken :(

Continental european here but we had teletext as well and it was great for checking sports results. I think it was originally an ingenious hack made possible by using unused parts of the UHF broadcast spectrum but Wikipedia knows better.

Look Around You seems kind of insane in a good way like Control.

Also why is Brad's video mirrored? It's only when I noticed the "RATS SRAW" poster that I figured out what was weird about Brad's room.

Can confirm parsec for fighting games is super doable, but requires hosting it on cloud infrastructure to make it super solid and reliable.

A lot of folks in the Marvel 3/DBFZ/Guilty Gear scene started using it because the delay netcode in those games is buttcheeks.

Still never going to be as good as rollback netcode (as Jeff pointed out, you start hitting a speed of light issue, and the only way we currently have to address that is a predictive layer in the netcode) but for games that are already out and stuck with delay code... it's pretty dang good.

(also if you and opponent don't both live fairly near a server base it can be a problem, the california folks do not have that issue though)

Teletext is still active in Finland :)

The main channels have their teletext pages online as well:

https://yle.fi/tekstitv

https://www.mtvtekstikanava.fi/

Many people use them via mobile apps as well as teletext pages tend to load much faster than websites.

Browsing through the pages was a common pastime of mine in the 90s, there was a lot of content in there (news, classifieds, articles, general public information, sports results, pixel art, schedules, airport arrivals/departures, ads, travel packages, test pages, subtitles in several languages, etc.).

Teletext is still very active in Europe. Until we moved house a month ago we used it almost daily for news and stuff. Since we don't have cable anymore there is no way to access it now on the TV. Our Swiss Teletext can be accessed over the internet (www.teletext.ch) :-p

I used it a lot in the early 90s before the Internet :)

Hearing Jeff mention CEEFAX is good stuff

ya, 3d All Stars is a total disappointment. A lot of people can play those at hi res already. I was at least expecting a remodeled and retextured SM64 and hoped they modernized the camera in SM64 and Sunshine.

I am glad I am not a sucker for limited time stuff just for the sake of it. Cause that is the only reason to buy that crap and why it probably won't flop for sales.

@serhulse: bamboozle. Holy shit I am 6 years old again.

@himsteveo: Try switching to Progressive in the settings. The HTML video wouldn't play for me either.

The Mario stuff has some problems, but boy they just took an absolute shit all over the announcement. I don’t really care and I’m not here to defend Nintendo, but the shared reaction of [Fuck all that horse shit] was a little surprising. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This was the TV I was playing Burnout on when the cops raided the house.

Jeff is a treasure

brad The Shipping Forecast is indeed excellent

ha and then you find the very thing I dug up

Following football matches entirely through Teletext made me the man I am today.

@jeff Ceefax took up BBC channel time in the early morning hours instead of regular programming. That ended when BBC started their own 24 hour news channel and just used that to cover time.

The video doesn't appear to be loading? :(

These guys are completely shook to their core by the notion that Sony's going to offer pre-orders directly on their own store like they've been selling hardware and physical games for a while now.

Anyone else having trouble with the video loading?

@Alex if you haven’t seen it you’d like Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace

@pearsonpark:He has tweeted about it before now.

You cared enough to post about it. Personally I think they went too easy on Nintendo.

Opinion seems to be split pretty evenly between those who think it is a shameless, soul less cash grab and those who just want it anyway - it is already topping the pre-order charts.

@alternate: Like, it’s Nintendo in 2020... I’m not sure what people were expecting of this. They’re an enormous company that wants more money and sells games that people want to make that money. The entire industry is a soulless cash grab so I’m not sure why this one stands out to folks.

Here to say that in middle school (which was 1988-92) we had a BBC Micro with the Teletext adapter in the school library.

Bit late but want to throw my ceefax/teletext experience out there.

Probably around 1993 my family finally got rid of the ancient early 80s tv/vhs player we had been putting up with and got a lovely Toshiba that looked something like this.

We finally got cable (believe it was going by the name telewest at the time) and a VHS with videoplus so I could easily record and watch WWE rather than hoping my Dad would remember to leave the TV on ITV and press record on the VHS with a 4 hour tape in to make sure WCW at 1am on ITV was recorded.

However the thing I liked the most was finally being able to access ceefax and teletext. For those outside the UK, Ceefax was the BBCs service and Teletext was on ITV and channel 4 (we only had 4 channels available through an aeriel back then BBC 1&2, ITV and C4).

Ceefax was good for news, weather, sports. ITV teletext much the same but also had the holiday section for people seeking a cheap last minute deal to Majorca. Channel 4 is where it came alive though.

'Bamboozle' a 20 question multiple choice quiz (this got reduced down to 12 later on), '15-1' much the same as Bamboozle but just sports questions, 'Frame it' where kids sent their poor drawings in and they were poorly converted to teletext format - here's Homer as Baby spice by Hannah aged 9 which is actually pretty decent given the normal standard. But perhaps best of all there was digitiser the videogames section where you could get latest reviews, news, cheats and game charts and it was updated daily. Anyway I loved this shit until we then finally got the internet in 97/98

@joolsus Thank you! That worked! Didn't think of that, but I will from now on.

Mario Kart Live is probably a test for ad hoc video streaming to and from a Switch... like for a Wii U-like gamepad?

I haven't listened to this yet, but I just want to say that I met an ex girlfriend through Teletext.

Am I the only person that never payed any attention to inverted horizontal camera control in 3rd person games? Like I never even thought about it being a thing and just naturally got used to it on a game by game basis. When people complain about it I'm just like huh.

@sauce_: Sure, but they shouldn't get a pass because every company does it. Compare this to the new Tony Hawk remaster. Actibizzard got slated for Tony Hawk 5 and sales were poor and it can be argued that the new remaster only got a proper go because of that. If Tony Hawk 5 had sold well they would still be putting out quick and dirty ports.

All Stars 2 is a trifecta of middle fingers for me. Pretty much untouched rom dumps, not even a complete collection and the artificial scarcity of the time limit. All that for full price.

Not like other companies don't get shit too. See Halo Infinite, Horizon port, etc.

Mario 64 on switch isn’t 16:9 though. It’s 4:3 and doesn’t even take up the whole screen vertically.

I feel like Brad not knowing what "on the 8s" meant deserved a bit more ribbing. Perhaps the most Dan thing I've ever heard from him. Where's Bakalar when you need him?

Brad mentioned that he grabbed an archive of Weather Channel music clips. If anyone's interested, here's a link to a folder I made that includes most of that music.

And here's the site I got it from that has been updated since then with even more music.

Video seems broken

Both series of Look Around You are great. The first is a parody of BBC for Schools and Colleges. The second was based on Tomorrow's World, it does a great job of capturing both of these.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oK6iKfstF40

Ceefax was basically the Internet for most of us in the UK until the late 90s.

To everyone having trouble with streaming the video, downloading seems to be working.