Merry christmas + another teaser (Patreon)

Congratulations on (nearly) making it through another year, happy holidays to anyone who's celebrating them, and thank you all so much for everything.

I've already thanked you all a thousand times for the life you've made possible, and I don't want to dwell on money issues, but I do want to express my deepest gratitude to everyone who donated to the gofundme. It wiped out the vet bills, plus a chunk of credit card debt, and as it happens, also allowed me to make my car much safer.

I told this story during my last livestream but in short, I didn't realize just how bald my tires were; apparently Toyota Siennas eat up tread at a ridiculous pace, so the brand new tires I put on in 2022 were already failing the penny test. Sienna tires aren't cheap either, but the leftovers from the gofundme were enough to get some really good water+snow tires (michelin crossclimate 2s) which should be far safer in the probably-ongoing rain. If things go well, I'm going to drive down to California early next year and pick up some new and exciting channel material, and I will feel a lot better about that drive with these wheels. Without your help I would have had to put that off for a couple months, so, thank you again, your contributions helped keep my sanity intact.

2025 was a hell of a year, one of the worst of my life to be frank, and not all of it's nightmares have faded into the past yet, but I have emotionally recovered from the Sara+Udon situation, I think, and I'm looking forward to 2026. I'm confident it'll go better, and I hope the same is true for all of you.

Now, with that out of the way: I've kinda decided that, since I have so much crap that isn't going to show up in videos any time soon, I should really include at least a teaser in every post I make on here, otherwise I'll never get through it all. So, let me show you the wacky computers I just received.

(I should note: The person who owned these (or similar machines) may have been in touch with me about them - I could swear I had some kind of conversation on this topic with someone who was negotiating to get me a set, and I just got overwhelmed and forgot to get back to them. If that was you, sorry, I'm doing my best. Anyway.)

These are 24-frame Compaqs, as described to me, though they aren't all Compaqs. In any case, they're a set of PCs (486 class) that have been heavily modified to enable them to be used on film sets.

When filming a CRT, if you don't want to get ugly and distracting strobe effects, you need the tube to scan at the exact same rate and phase as the camera shutter. In TV productions, using TV displays, this isn't so hard - news sets in the 80s and 90s used CRTs that were genlocked to everything else, so that the screens were refreshed in perfect lockstep with the cameras shooting them. No bars, no flicker. Film is harder, however, since the standard film framerate is 24 FPS, a frequency no CRT in existence has ever supported, and computer monitors are even harder since virtually no PC supports genlocking.

To solve both these problems, several companies built machines like these, with customized VGA cards that could output 48hz. That's a lower frequency than most computer users will have ever seen before, but since the IBM 8514 (which gave us the 1024x768 resolution back in 1987) scanned at 43hz, this odd refresh rate was actually within the gamut of multisync monitors sold in the late 80s and 90s. And, since it's exactly twice the rate of a film camera shutter, it can be genlocked.

Here's one of the machines, branded by Sparkology, the one-man system builder who put them together. This is one of myriad businesses of this sort, who build things that are needed solely in the film industry, and which are genuinely necessary for productions big and small, yet don't have enough demand to justify a "real business," manufacturing custom hardware from the ground up to serve the need.

The scrappiness of the product should be apparent from the misaligned BNC plugs, ballpoint-labeled switches, and extremely poorly cut out label on the front. I doubt the guy made more than a dozen of these things, if even that; given that he himself dropped them off at an ecycle store that a good friend works at when he was getting out of the business, it's possible these three are the only ones he ever built.

So, how do they work? Damned if I know. I'm thinking of trying to get a hold of the fellow to see if he'd be interested in talking about his work; he seems like a bit of a character from his website, with a history working at ILM among other things. As far as I know he modified these things himself, and the mods are... extensive.

I really do not know what's going on in here at all. There's a rats nest of wires going all over, some clearly handmade PCBs attached to what I think is an off the shelf ET4000 graphics card, a little helper board of some kind glued to the ISA riser, a jumper soldered to a pair of pins on the ISA bus which I think goes to the knob on the front labeled "speed trim"... yeah. Reverse engineering this would probably be impossible for me, so hopefully I can get an explanation from the horse's mouth.

In any case however, they came to me with the hard drives intact, which is good because they're completely useless without the custom software to make the hardware function. In addition to that however, there's also some material from productions this was actually used in! I ripped one of the hard drives and booted it up in 86box to find the machine was running Windows 3.1, and the primary production tool was Macromedia Director.

This is a shot from Metro (1997), a seemingly dismal Eddie Murphy vehicle. It seems like they made a LOT more CG than actually got used in the film so I suspect there were some cut scenes, though I don't know if I want to bother getting the DVD in order to prove that.

This is the TDD 911 call from Scream (1996) - and an interesting detail is that there are two copies of the file. One is what you see here, which has a few more lines than actually appear in the movie (the scene in the film is extremely brief and shot in extreme closeup), while the other is watermarked as a demo; I guess the production was shopping CG vendors and decided to go with Sparkology! Another interesting note is that the folder is named "scarymovie" which, apparently, was the working title for Scream.

Finally, a shot from Nash Bridges (1996-2002), the atrocious and deeply confusing Don Johnson vehicle that also starred an extremely bemused Cheech Marin who visibly had no idea what he was doing there or what they wanted from him. If you've never seen this thing, please check it out, it is the worst TV show I've seen in my entire life and I cannot believe it ever got aired, let alone for six seasons. In any case, there's material on this drive from a half dozen episodes.

It goes without saying that this is one of the more fascinating artifacts I've found or received in my travels. I have never really gotten over the magic of movies, and they also tend to feel kind of timeless to me. So it really boggles my mind to look at these framegrabs and realize that the very machine sitting on my desk here was on those movie sets as they were being shot. It's one thing to have "the kind of machine" that was used, and quite another to have the exact one - even if these specific productions aren't exactly the pinnacle of the film or TV artforms.

Anyway, hope you all had fun reading this post, and have a merry christmas or whatever else you're doing!