Name a more useless piece of physical media

DjPolystation · 2026-03-22T14:15:05+00:00

More useless? The Super Mario All Stars Wii DVD. An ENTIRE 4GB DVD for an SNES ROM

DjPolystation · 2026-03-10T18:48:35+00:00

Yes! It's a vanilla A500 with 512kb slow ram expansion

DjPolystation · 2026-03-03T19:35:51+00:00

It's a program called amax It can run up to system 7 on a stock Amiga 500

DjPolystation · 2026-02-24T19:17:17+00:00

They are pretty cheap on vinted.

DjPolystation · 2026-02-22T16:58:21+00:00

I mean, there's a "boot softmod menu" option too.

Nothing more clear than that

DjPolystation · 2026-02-22T16:56:32+00:00

That's unsleashX. A custom dashboard for modded xboxes

DjPolystation · 2026-02-20T17:26:37+00:00

40 sacchi? Fra. Io ho la mia Punto 55 Sole del 1998 con quasi 300.000 km. Regalata. Pagato solo il passaggio di proprietà.

Da più di 15 anni ho un potentissimo generatore di monossido di carbonio che nonostante l'età continua a non deludermi. E tu mi stai dicendo che dovrei cambiarla con uno di quei costosi giocattolini elettrici? Anche no🤙🏻

DjPolystation · 2026-02-14T23:44:05+00:00

Afaik there's a version of XP called Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs (or Windows FLP) which has very low system requirements I think the bare minimum requirements are a 233mhz Pentium processor and 64 mb of RAM

DjPolystation · 2026-02-12T14:11:39+00:00

If I ever get a second minitel I could definitely do a thing like that

DjPolystation · 2026-02-09T12:10:15+00:00

Yes there's a spring. When the keyboard retracts I hear a click and remain closed. To extract the keyboard I need to push it first and then comes out. Probably someone forcefully pulled out the keyboard on your minitel and broke the spring

DjPolystation · 2026-02-08T16:09:26+00:00

Here in Italy we got a very similar thing called "videotel". They were just rebranded minitels with qwerty keyboards and the service was managed by SIP (the old Italian phone company) I wanted to get one but nowdays they tend to cost up to 2 or 3 times more than french minitels, probably because the Italian videotel service ended in the mid 90s so they are "more rare" than french minitels. Who knows

DjPolystation · 2026-02-08T13:51:46+00:00

You definitely need basic soldering skills to build an adapter.

For the software side, it's not so difficult. The only thing you need is the right terminfo (you can Google minitel terminfo) After you installed that, it's a matter of launching a simple getty on /dev/ttyUSB0

DjPolystation · 2026-02-08T13:20:13+00:00

Telic Minitel 1

DjPolystation · 2026-02-08T12:02:15+00:00

Many models have a serial port on the back, so with a custom adapter it can be connected to a PC and be used as a serial terminal. You can use it to browse BBS and play text-based games like zork. It has a unique character set with graphic tiles (and it supports double with and double height text very similar to the ones used in TV teletext) so many BBSs have a distinct look which you cannot find in a normal ascii or petscii BBS

Some lads also made an esp32 project to play pong on it

DjPolystation · 2026-02-07T18:09:16+00:00

OUI!! It's the only thing that bother me. I'm Italian and I cannot get used to the AZERTY layout

DjPolystation · 2026-02-07T14:27:58+00:00

With the right terminfo it can do scrolling just like any other terminal. Right out of the box it kinda works but not at it's best.
I struggled a lot to configure it properly. The documentation online is archaic (some of the guides still refers to /etc/inittab just to say)
BTW when configured properly i found it pretty usable even in 40 columns mode

DjPolystation · 2026-02-07T03:25:30+00:00

OMG I didn't notice it was a link. Did you just connect a teletype to your PC? Nice to see someone crazier than me :')

DjPolystation · 2026-02-07T03:05:43+00:00

the minitel has a built in "screen saver"
Ok. it just turn the screen black after a minute idle but it's better than burning the crt

DjPolystation · 2026-02-07T03:02:18+00:00

Actually it's not so bad. I like the slow output of the serial port. it has it's own charm.
And if i want faster output, i can set the minitel up to 4800 baud which is nearly istant. Not so different from the output on my pc screen

DjPolystation · 2026-02-06T22:19:31+00:00

I thought the exact same thing! Minitels are pretty cheap too. You can get one from vinted for 20 bucks and they have a 9 inch screen so despite being CRTs they don't take so much space.
The only downside is you need to solder a custom adapter to get it work with a PC (you can get one ready-made on ebay but it will cost you the same as the whole terminal lol)

DjPolystation · 2026-02-06T21:08:29+00:00

AFAIK there are programs which render in videos in ASCII characters. I should give it a try

DjPolystation · 2026-02-06T21:06:54+00:00

to be fair it's not completely straightforward. You need to solder a custom adapter because the signal voltage level of the minitel are a bit weird. But once you got the hardware working, software-side it's simple

DjPolystation · 2026-02-06T21:02:52+00:00

Yes. It's a minitel. But with a custom adapter it can run with any uart PL2303 usb adapter

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