Legacy LD5

Well, this isn't even vaguely stompy related -- although I do intend to make some stompy C64 games when I dust off my machine language programming brain cells -- but this is a typically Dinosorcerian adventure worthy of a storytime. Plus, I'm bored at work.

As some of you may know, I've been in a kick to reacquire and refurb Commodore 8-bit computers. After all, the Commodore 64 was the best computer ever! I now have a small army of various Commodore 8-bit machines, and have been going through much fun and hassle to get them to work. One thing I've discovered is that not only is it nigh impossible to find a modern LCD TV with S-video inputs, but most don't "like" the proto-S-video that the Commodores put out. Frustrating, to say the least!

So, I think...is there anywhere I can get an old Commodore monitor? A nice, proper CRT? I did get one of Jenn's friends to send me one, but the degausser was broken and it was always discolored and after repeated futzing it just died altogether. I do have a Sony 27" Trinitron TV buried in the garage, but it's a little too huge for desktop monitor use. So I'm thinking...isn't there anyone still making new CRT TV's?

Turns out, there is. A company called Starlite (insert variant extension here). They're basically a Korean/Chinese company who has a distributor in America, and they make lots of small electronics...seems they like to specialize in karaoke machines now. But, in the saddest death of any worldwide technology, this TV is a Disney-branded kid's room TV sold at Toys R Us.



There are a few variants at Toys R Us...including a "Cars" one, "Pirates of the Carribean", "Faeries", but my choice was "Hannah Montana." She must be out of vogue now, as her TV was the cheapest of all the identical hardware there. So I'm thinking, "This is very sad, but I must rescue this technology." After all, there's quite a bit of vintage hardware that won't work with an LCD monitor, like light pens and light guns, and I want a "real" display for my Commodore stuff if I need it. I also wanted something that was new, as old TV's are going to be very hard to keep working properly (as my dead Commodore monitor attests).

So I pick it up for a hundred bucks. (The others were about $30 more.) Getting it home and peeling off the Hannah Montana plastic crap as best I can, it seems like it'd work okay. No S-video, but maybe I can open it up and see where the chroma and luma are inserted, so I can wire up my own connector. But...when I connect the C64, the picture is too high. Looking in the menu...nope. All I can adjust is brightness, contrast, tint.

What the fuck?

I open it up. Nope, no analog controls for said adjustments either. So I look online, and I see that other earlier models of Disney-branded TV's have a special "service menu" you can access to make tons of adjustments. But can I find the manual for this TV? Nope. Does the code for the earlier model work? Nope.

Well, I wasn't giving up.

I did a lot of Googling, trying to find the latest incarnation of this Starlite company. There was a listing for my TV with Underwriters Labs, the company that assures safety and whatnot. I can at least find web pages mentioning the model, but no sign of a manual. I do see a page about "Starlite Karaoke International" or some such, and I find an E-mail address (with a Hong Kong domain name) on a shattered web page, and fire off an E-mail to it: "I'm looking to get the service manual for this HM1310ATV, or at least the codes to get into the service menu."

A day later, I get a response, and from a seemingly real English speaking woman with a USA phone number in her signature. I'm shocked...I actually heard back from someone, and they spoke English? Amazing. But the response is bad: "We're sorry, we don't service that equipment [consider it disposable] so we don't have any service manuals on file."

Well, I wasn't giving up...again. Remembering what I happened to see in my Googling for the manual, I put on my social engineering hat. "Isn't it required by Underwriters Labs for you to have a service manual on file for all your UL listed devices?"

Now, I have no idea if that's true. It probably isn't. But it sounds like a dangerous situation, and companies HATE liability. I get a response two days later, "I'll contact our techs overseas and see what I can find out."

Well, all right! This lady's actually responsive, even if she isn't telling me what I want to hear. So I wait a couple more days. I hear back from her: "The techs say that you can't adjust the picture of that TV without specialized equipment, sorry."

Ramping it up? No problem, baby. "I've got what I need to do it, can you give me the manual or the access code?" We go back and forth for weeks, with me keeping the pressure on. Three weeks after first contact, I hear back her OWN ultimatum: "I'm sorry, but we're not allowed to release a service manual to non-qualified technical personnel." Bam.

My immediate reponse: "Oh, didn't I mention it when I first contacted you? I'm a repair technician, and work on TV's all the time." Her immediate reponse? "Well, if you send me your credentials we can send you a copy of the service manual."

Forty-five minutes later, I have the following credentials worked up:

http://www.lavadomefive.com/cert1.jpg
http://www.lavadomefive.com/cert2.jpg

And no, they're not even remotely legitimate. All based on bits of my past and on tiny scraps of Googling, but complete bullshit. Bam, lady -- I'm now an electrical engineer. I actually was certified to solder to military specifications when I was a teen, but I've never had any formal training in electrical repair, nor did my former company ever offer it. But, should they actually try to investigate it, it would seem legitimate, it all made "sense". Jenn and I took turns making up fake signatures...I figured a hand-written signature on my certs would be a nice touch.

The next morning?

The service manual is in my mailbox. Moments later, I have it posted on the Internet on Scribd:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/55305298/HM1310ATV-TV-Service-Manual

I actually follow up with her some more...the schematics in the back are completely illegible, and I was hoping to find the input spots for chroma and luma, but no dice. She didn't have a good enough copy. She did manage to read me off the main IC chip, and doing further research, it's not likely I could do it, nor would I want to...too much of a pain in the ass to access.

So, that's my saga. Over three weeks of research and lying, in order to take (literally) 30 seconds to read the manual, press MENU on the TV, press 6483 on the remote, to get into the service menu so I could adjust the motherfucking picture.

Since I had put so much effort into the TV, I decided to ghetto-paint it black to de-girlify it and whip up some ghetto logos and stuff for the side (although the foam Commodore logo on the side is actually pretty nice):



The front panel is the most ghetto...just more self-adhesive foam bits to cover up the gay front panel. And the color logo is just printed out and glued on. And the vinyl white lettering is too huge, but it's the smallest I could get.

But I'm quite proud of my achievement.



There are still more TV's available, and now they're on sale for $80. The sale is good until the 11th of next month...I have a feeling that, after that, if they're not on a lower sale, they may just disappear. I may have to rescue another one for good measure.

Now THAT is a man that will walk a thousand miles to play Dino Eggs the way he *fucking* wants to.

Well hey, way to take control of a situation. ^..^

*is crushed under Tombfyre sarcasm*

I've got my Godzilla slippers on and everything!

*mmms at slippers* And thanks, DX. Yeah, I just recently picked up a 64C off of eBay as well, as I wanted to have one of the later model 64's as well. Needs some love, but seems to work well.

Kommodore Kruft strikes again.

I especially enjoyed the lying and deceit.

I know, those are my favorite parts, too!

I think they still make CRTs for laboratory uses, mostly for those funky seethrough oscilioscopes to demonstrate partical physics.

They still do a lot of movie and film stuff on CRTs because of the color reproduction.

Wow, so it's been almost a year since my last "heist".

I have a new one. This one isn't as successful, but just goes to show how the Voice of Authority™ can get you places.

So, at my fhitty workplace, we have lots of Planar PL1910M monitors. They're pretty susceptible to ESD shocks, or so it seems, or maybe dirty power. In any case, the Planars frequently get brain-fucked, show no display, and flash the power light. There's a somewhat difficult to find reset option that usually gets it back on track. However, we've had one or two out of the hundreds that are even wackier...they claim the controls are locked and cycle through the RGB colors and base combinations like a boring slide show.

Keeping Hannah Montana in mind, I email for support. My opening salvo:



It was a web-based form, so kept it simple, just wanted to get the initial response. Within minutes, I get:



That was the poorly worded title of the email response. The body was just a stock "Here's how you do an RMA" letter body, but it was signed by the personal name of a tech. So now, it's on. The Voice of Authority™ comes out, cock flailing:



Again, just a few minutes pass, and I get:



The advice about "the power button" doesn't even make sense. At this point, I've got the monitor torn open. I'm assuming it's impossible or unlikely to update "dead" monitor firmware over the DVI link somehow, so I'm looking for a service port, serial interface of some kind, for hooking up to and updating the firmware. I don't find any. I do find that the brand of chip on the driver board is Novatek, and don't get very far finding mentions of updating them. Ah, well, I think. I guess the only reason they mention firmware revisions is that Planar buys whatever the latest and greatest Novatek LCD driver chips are, and they're updated frequently. Hell, they may just buy the whole little driver PC board as a whole unit to stick in a case with an LCD screen. So I figure I'm just finishing the thread by saying:



Well, my VoA™ technobabble just put me over the top, apparently! I get this worshipful, although possibly sarcastic, response:



HOLY SHIT! I think! Well, not the first time I've been lied to at first. However, before you think I magically won, it was not a firmware update. Apparently some similar models of Planars get mindboofed enough that Windows doesn't see a "Planar monitor" but a "Novatek device" of some sort, so the "firmware flash" he sent me was just a Windows monitor "driver" .INF file to manually force it to be a Planar again, and use the right resolutions.

But check that shit out? That bowing at the end? I'm surprised he didn't call me master or something.

Anyway, just wanted to share my latest social engineering adventure with you all.

well you ARE dino "sorceror" you tiny dim-wit

Postus resurrectus! poof

Just wanted to add yet another denouement: first of all, that Toys R Wee in Ankh Ridge still has like four Hannah Montana TV's, in crispy faded boxes. Price is now $50. I really should just ask the manager if I can just have them, to save them disposal fees. No one's ever going to buy them.

Second, I finally got around to bringing home a 19" Emerson CRT TV from work. Back when the world ended (9/11 9/11 9/11), the then-presidente of my company had purchased a cheap TV to put in the hallway at work so that people could watch the news feeds for the first week or two. I think it was used with a VCR once since then, and then put in a box forever-stored and moved like 50x as the company moved around. Well, pretty clear that no one wants it, and it would cost money these days to dispose of it, so yoink!

It's an Emerson EWT19S2. It took me 1/2 a second to Google and download the PDF of the service manual. Then another 5 minutes to open up the remote control and turn it into a "service remote" by adding a jumper. Then another couple minutes to read the manual and adjust the picture settings so a Commodore 64 would look good on it.

So like...fifteen minutes of work to completely haxxor the TV. What did that Hannah Montana thing take...a couple weeks? Makes a weesaur happysad, that does. But anyway, now I have a nice practically new 19" CRT TV to use maybe when we clean up the downstairs den for retro gaming.

I am jealous! We only have two? 13 inch TVs to use for various purposes. Oh well I live in an apartment and that's enough random junk I suppose.

The A/V connectors are going a little funny on the one, but the other is pristine as far as I know. Except the headphone jack just gives audio garbage. VCR still works though. Woo!