ZXGuesser

Remember to throw in an occasional "Oops we broke the 'don't befriend the space nazis' rule by accidentally befriending space nazis again"

Teletext mosaic tracing of a gymnast on the barrel of a pistol, from The Spy Who Loved Me title sequence

Teletext mosaic tracing of a crouched woman aiming a pistol, from The Spy Who Loved Me title sequence

Glang. Glang-a-lang-a-lang-a-lang-a-lang-a-lang. Glang-a-lang—lang-a-lang-a-lang

One of my favourite things is finding the recovered page in the archive when people share a photo of their TV showing their letter or whatever 😀

D'you wanna flake in that love?

My two best teletext recoveries ever, followed by two shredded tapes.

*turns VCR off and sulks for another two years*

Most of my tapes have come out fairly smashed up but this one is stunningly clean. Check out the subtitles!
The thrill is slightly damped by it being 2004. If only the old recordings with interesting content could come out like this 😆

Teletext Viewer Web based teletext emulator with different services on each channel. Includes Teefax, Ceefax, and Chunkytext.

I've dragged the VCR out for the first time in over a year and a half to get back to some teletext recovery.
The first recording of this evening's tape is easily the best results I've ever had 🤯 I've fed it straight into the test channel on my online viewer: zxnet.co.uk/teletext/vie...

This is most of why I switched to using turned pin SIL socket strip 😄

Maybe they're carrying RS485 or something, and you use a BS1363 to XLR cable like those cursed IEC C13 adapters from the other week 😆

Thankfully the worst I've done is sawn through the end of my thumbnail, but rather embarrassingly I've done it twice for different reasons 🤦‍♂️

Also while they take smaller bites, hand tools are just as hungry for blood.

That was my first thought too 😆

I generally avoid posting anything with lots of recovery errors because they have a habit of doing the rounds on the internet for ever after which make me wince when I see them, but sometimes I get too excited to wait 😄

The "matching pyjamas" in the closing scene were Donnie's his-and-hers paisley bowling shirts.

Schools transmission history for the third of November 1988

Schools Continuity Sheet for the 7th of November 1988, showing opt outs for the Ulster region

The countdown, logo, and the various index pages are for display as regular teletext pages, but the schedules etc are data pages intended to be downloaded somehow and printed off.
Unfortunately the main daily and weekly schedules seem to be compressed or scrambled

the Channel 4 logo all clean and correctly decoded

😍

Now we're cooking! This is the sort of recovery quality I wanted to see from these recordings 😀

The Channel 4 logo, extracted from the IDENT service

And the thing I most wanted to extract after seeing the tell-tale shape of it in the raw signal - gratuitous logo!

More IDENT from a much longer recording. You can see how the timings shift up the page as the items are broadcast.
(excuse all the mangled content this is still with a very hacked together teletext recovery process)

Technically we knew we had it four years ago, I just gave up at the "saw some mangled packets in the terminal window" stage and never got around to the "post screenshots that make sense" bit 😅

The downside is it means there's yet another teletext service to archive and all the tape captures to re-check 🤣

Still needs some work, but that was only a 20 second sample. Hopefully we can find some more recordings where this signal escaped and have a proper poke around 😄

Page 100 of a service called IDENT. It lists page numbers for things like a countdown, daily schedules, and transmission logs

The IDENT countdown page. Showing what I think are timings for trailers.

Feeling at a loose end now that #ChunkyFringe is done and all the TVs are packed way until the next event, so I went picking at an old scab, and figured out how to process a hidden internal channel 4 teletext service called IDENT from a file that's been lurking on my hard drive since 2021 👀

Ah well, ChunkyText is online all year round so I can put things like that up any time 🙂
It's just that I only pester people when there's an event coming up 😆

All the tellies up and running at #ChunkyFringe

Panic averted and candles extinguished

Power failure at ChunkyText towers. Hopefully we'll be back online tomorrow! 😱

try it on the link here: bsky.app/profile/zxgu...

(tick 'Show control codes' in the editor settings to make them visible)