Teletext recreated by Raspberry Pi

Teletext (Ceefax, Oracle) was part of British colour television from the 1970s until the last analogue transmissions ended in 2012. On digital TV in the UK, it was replaced by digital text. For those who want the old style teletext to go with their vintage colour TV, there are a number of ways, some of which we discussed on the old forum. These include:

Tuning into satellite TV channels from outside the UK that still carry the old style teletext. Channels such as Eurosport and RTE1 from Ireland can be tuned in on a UK Sky Digital receiver. Those channels are scrambled but you can view their teletext without a subscription or viewing card. Advantage: The text pages are up-to-date, since you are receiving them 'live'. Disadvantages: you need an installed satellite dish and an older Sky Digibox which inserts the teletext signal onto its analogue output. Newer Sky HD boxes don't seem to work. On Eurosport teletext, the time display is always 1 hour ahead of UK time and the pages are limited to sports information.

Playing back S-VHS video recordings of TV channels that carried teletext. You can see teletext pages that were transmitted in the past, when the recording was made. Ordinary VHS recorders were not high enough quality and can't reproduce the telextext signal very well or at all. Disadvantage: S-VHS machines and tapes are not that common.

A few pattern generators such as Philips PM5518TX and ImoGen could generate a few pages of teletext for test purposes. Disadvantage: These devices are long since discontinued and hard to come by.

Enter the Raspberry Pi - no, not a tasty dessert but a small computer designed for educational use. It's about the size of a pack of playing cards and costs around £30 new. Thanks to the work of several people, this device can generate teletext.

There are several models of Raspberry Pi. Any of them can be used. There's even a cut-down version called Raspberry Pi Zero which only costs £5 (amazingly cheap) but the Zero doesn't include a video output socket needed for teletext - you'll have to solder one on the board yourself. I used a secondhand Mk.1 Raspberry Pi model B. This has a composite video RCA socket on board. The newer models have a combined Audio+Video jack socket. You can buy an AV cable suitable for it. The video signal needs to be connected to your television (via a modulator if necessary) just like a DVD player.

The Raspberry Pi is normally supplied as a bare circuit board. You'll probably want to buy or build a case to protect it.

As well as the Raspberry Pi itself, you'll also need a USB keyboard and mouse to set it up (borrow these from a desktop PC), a power supply (a mobile phone charger can be used) and a memory card, preferably 8Gb or higher. The Mk.1 Raspberry Pi uses full-size SDHC cards, the newer models use micro SDHC cards, like mobile phones. You can buy the Raspberry Pi complete with a suitable SDHC card and system software already loaded on it, or buy them separately and install the operating system yourself. I did the latter. Instructions and system files are provided on the official Raspberry Pi website http://www.raspberrypi.org

The Raspberry Pi needs to be running the Rasbian operating system. If you bought one with a pre-loaded memory card, it may give you a choice of systems to load. You also need to be connected to the internet. Easiest way is plug an ethernet cable from your router to your Raspberry Pi. The latest model can connect via wi-fi as well.

Once online, I followed the instructions here: http://www.teastop.co.uk/teletext/vbit/

I opened the shell (command prompt) and typed in the 3 lines of commands:

wget http://www.teastop.co.uk/teletext/vbit/getteletext
sudo chmod +x getteletext
./getteletext

This downloads and installs the teletext software. When finished, run it by typing ./go

With the video output plugged in to a vintage 1988 Sony Trinitron teletext TV, I pressed the Text button on the TV remote.

Hey presto, teletext!

The software includes some archived ITV teletext pages which you can play around with.

The next step was to install Teefax, the 'live' teletext service. I followed the instructions here:
https://github.com/peterkvt80/vbit2/wiki

Unfortunately I encountered a problem after typing in one of the commands:

This came up with "Fatal error opening SSL connection".
I don't understand why the error occured, but then I tried opening the link in a web browser and it worked.
I saved the web page as getvbit2.txt and then typed getvbit2.txt instead on the next two commands.

Eventually (it took a while to install) I had Teefax running!

Teefax comes with some wonderful examples of teletext art, as well as the Bamboozle game.

Unfortunately I couldn't play Bamboozle as it needs Fastext, which this old Sony TV does not support. I'll have to try a newer one.

This is as far as I've got, after several sessions over the last few weekends. I knew pretty much nothing about the Raspberry Pi and Linux before that, so it's been a bit of a learning curve for me. But I'm pleased with the results so far.

There are more projects to try, including creating your own teletext pages. See here:

http://www.teastop.co.uk/teletext/

For example, if you have a museum with vintage tellies, you could create some information pages about your exhibits. The visitors could see the information by selecting the relevant teletext pages.

There are lots of possibilities. I've only scratched the surface. Perhaps this will inspire you to have a go and recreate teletext yourself. And if you get bored of creating teletext, there are many other things you can do with the Raspberry Pi, such as playing vintage video games (with emulator software), or using it as a media player. Have fun!