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Here's a video showing the Minitel running.
It's running a flash game: Hexagon.
It's the prequel to Super Hexagon on iOS.
I love it.
I'm going to show you the inside of the machine, since
many people asked for it.
I installed my camera on a tripod
so everyone can see.
The original tube is here.
Be careful where you put your fingers.
The original video board is here, kept.
What's new is this, this board here.
It's a board that plugs
into this connector where there was
the mother board with the CPU
which has been removed.
This board adds...
it does two things,
it adds
a composite video (CVBS) input for the screen
and an audio amp
in order to make this small speaker works,
which is not so small, it's quite hard to fit it in the case.
So, in place of the mother board
there's this. And plugged to this there's this small thing here.
It's really tiny.
It's a small device for
for watching videos on a TV, it's a Chinese stuff costing
US $70 (~53 euros)
on Chinese sites like Deal Extreme. This one comes from
AliExpress.
Here you can see the tiny WiFi board.
Here
there's the Allwinner A10 System on a Chip (SoC),
and plugged to that
there's a small receiver for a mouse, because
not everything is doable with only a keyboard, some stuff
don't work quite right,
for instance, the Youtube app is mostly unusable on a keyboard.
This USB plug here, comes... I'm going to show you.
It comes here.
It's a part from a PC keyboard
which has been reconnected... there's only wires and electrical tape to see,
I should strip it down, so you can see
better.
As for the Minitel keyboard, only a ribbon cable comes from it.
It's a matrix keyboard, it's quite simple, but
the mapping was nowhere to be found, I had to take the keyboard apart to make it myself,
check where each track goes
and after that
plug that semi randomly on a PC keyboard controller.
You just have to follow rows and lines,
and you get inputs that don't match anything,
that you make to match, in software.
It sounds easy, but this software part is almost
biggest pain in the ***.
Besides that...
I almost showed you everything, actually.
Voilà.
As I never showed the Minitel running with sound,
I'm going to play
a bit of Hexagon.