Some of one of the best hacks don’t resolve any actual world issues or reinvent the wheel. They’re often nothing greater than an train in attempting to make one thing work that’s both seemingly unattainable or pointless: equivalent to getting YouTube to work on a 40-year-old pc with a hideously outdated display.

Although greatest recognized for the extremely standard Commodore 64 8-bit pc that will go on to promote nicely over 12 million items around the globe, Commodore was really based in 1958, lengthy earlier than the C64 arrived, and was partly chargeable for the private pc revolution within the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. In 1977, Commodore released the PET computer (named in an attempt to make computers feel like part of the family and less intimidating) which looks laughably outdated now but sold for well over $3,500 when introduced 45 years ago.

Thorbjörn Jemander managed to acquire a rare Commodore PET 600 which it turns out was secretly a Commodore 8296 SK model (with SK referring to a separate keyboard that could be removed) rebadged for the Swedish market a few years later with a surprisingly decent 128 KB of memory. The machine’s most distinctive characteristic is a monochromatic vivid inexperienced CRT show with the flexibility to show a whopping 80×25 grid of characters. To say it’s ugly by at present’s display requirements is an understatement, so what higher approach to make use of this relic of the early desktop PCs than by getting YouTube movies to play on it?

Not solely was the PET 600’s display restricted to only displaying characters (letters, numbers, punctuation, and so on.) however the machines behind them had been impossibly gradual, typically taking just a few seconds to load and show lists of recordsdata or different information. There was zero likelihood a devoted YouTube app may very well be developed for Commodore BASIC which the PET 600 ran, so Jemander needed to take the lengthy street.

They created a mixture of hardware and software they dubbed the BlixTerm which took the type of a cartridge related to one in all the PET 600’s enlargement ports on the again. Inside the cartridge is a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W which connects to YouTube over wifi, masses a requested video, after which converts the 640×200 grayscale stream to an 80×25 grid of ASCII characters from the PET’s inner ROM.

A second interface card masses the generated frames from the Raspberry Pi into the PET’s video reminiscence, which is the bottleneck of the method given the vintage PC’s restricted processing energy, however by optimization, Jemander managed to attain a really watchable 30 FPS playback pace. Watching YouTube on a 45-year-old desktop PC is much from simple on the eyes, however the truth that it’s even potential is past spectacular.