Four years ago, I was toying around with Teletext rendering prototypes for an Amiga demo. Those prototypes quickly turned into a demo in its own right, and I put aside the original goal of doing this on the Amiga.
That demo became 420 Years of Teletext.
Teletext output on the Amiga took another year to crack. It then turned out it wasn’t a “world’s first” achievement after all, but fun was had all around!
Back then, it was only a month before the party (Evoke 2022) when we had proof: This can actually work! The demo was already half done when Green hooked up the trusty Nokia TV of his youth, and it ran some effects in 25 fps. I only had a stupid smart TV myself, and the software-based Teletext rendering in those devices cops out at seven frames per second. Lame!
At the party place, we recorded the thing hours before the deadline with Ghost’s mobile phone in a dark orga room, and this has been the only proper recording of the demo ever since.
Until now! A higher-resolution version is on YouTube, too. Enjoy and learn all about Teletext’s history! :)
