New and Old #244
Digital transfers of film films, a new-old game console, unobtainable replacement parts, and made-up traditions
The ‘Toy Story’ You Remember, Animation Obsessive Staff, November 9, 2025
Toy Story was a transitional project. Since Pixar couldn’t send digital data to theaters, every one of the movie’s frames was printed on analog film. When Toy Story originally hit home video, that 35 mm version was its source. Only years later, after technology advanced, did Pixar start doing digital transfers — cutting out the middleman. And Toy Story’s look changed with the era.
I love technologies that inhabit a middle ground like this, and the stories around them. Someone in the comments said “Toy Story looked better on film,” which is not the point; it’s that the transfer changes the look. It’s kind of like, as far as I understand, the difference between viewing an old Kodachrome photographic slide via a projector, versus scanning it and viewing it as a digital file.
It was tricky to design a film digitally that was going to be played on real film:
To get the right look, the studio had to keep that final, physical output in mind. The digital colors were tailored with an awareness that they would change after printing. “Greens go dark really fast, while the reds stay pretty true,” said Toy Story’s art director, Ralph Eggleston. “Blues have to be less saturated to look fully saturated on film, while the oranges look really bad on computer screens, but look really great on film.”
And:
Their system was fairly straightforward. Every frame of Toy Story’s negative was exposed, three times, in front of a CRT screen that displayed the movie. “Since all film and video images are composed of combinations of red, green and blue light, the frame is separated into its discrete red, green and blue elements,” noted the studio. Exposures, filtered through each color, were layered to create each frame.
It reportedly took nine hours to print 30 seconds of Toy Story. But it had to be done: it was the only way to screen the film.
Straightforward! Read the whole thing.
Retro consoles that play old media are a big deal in the video game world right now; for example, just recently, a company named Analogue released a high-quality Nintendo 64 clone, the Analogue 3D, that works with modern TVs but plays original Nintendo 64 cartridges. It’s not emulation software inside a shell; it’s new hardware that actually reverse-engineers the original hardware. (This is known as FGPA.)
But the GameTank isn’t a piece of new hardware that will play old games; it’s an attempt at building a brand new platform: “GameTank is intended to inspire new games built for this hardware. As our friends at Time Extension put it, it’s ‘a playground for software and hardware tinkerers alike’.”
This could just end up fizzling, and it will probably not really exist outside of a small community of homebrew programmers and video game nerds. But the staying power of video games in this 8-bit/16-bit style—big enough to present an adventure, but simple enough to pick up and put down and not get lost in—is really interesting. I think video games in that moment had really perfected an art form.
Apparently the connectors on Nvidia’s boards, where they seat into the motherboard, are detachable parts. Meaning, if there’s a problem with the connector, the part can be replaced and the board itself doesn’t have to be scrapped. The only problem is that this part, for some reason, is not provided by Nvidia.
In contrast to recent reports, Nvidia’s modular PCIe connector on the GeForce RTX 5090, one of the best graphics cards, and the RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell may not be difficult to procure if you know where to look. The connector is readily available on Chinese second-hand e-commerce marketplaces, such as Goofish, for less than $25. This information is helpful in case you accidentally damage the connector and need a replacement.
Why you would have to go there, and what the provenance of those parts is, is maybe murky, though the piece cites them as being salvaged components (i.e. authentic parts pulled from scrapped cards).
In a couple of cases that made tech news in the U.S., Nvidia actually replaced the entire card when the problem was a cracked connector. Would it not be cheaper to just sell the part, even at an absurd profit margin? And would it not be worth more in goodwill?
It was good that Nvidia agreed to replace those cards, though, as GPU repair technicians have complained loudly that the replacement PCIe edge connector is simply unattainable through normal channels. That’s incredibly unfortunate, given that it appears to be a fairly simple part.
One of my more left-leaning beliefs is that this sort of thing should be somewhere between looked down on and illegal. I’m curious what the company’s explanation for it would be; it seems like nothing more than attempt to thwart cheap repairs. Which raises the question of why the connector is a detachable part in the first place!
Bowing to the Priest at Mass?, Patrick Madrid, November 16, 2025
I love this, from a writer who looks like a traditionalist-leaning Catholic:
I find it genuinely encouraging to see a growing number of Catholics today—especially young people—drawn to tradition, with a heartfelt desire to rediscover important liturgical attitudes and venerable customs that have too often faded amid the upheaval of the past sixty years. That instinct is good and should be nurtured.
At the same time, care must be taken not to unintentionally introduce gestures that merely appear traditional but were never actually part of the Church’s authentic liturgical inheritance. However well-intentioned, creating a new practice—such as formally bowing to the priest as he processes to the sanctuary—simply isn’t the same as faithfully receiving what has been handed down through the centuries. As far as I can tell, that particular gesture does not exist in the Church’s traditional liturgy.
He’s talking about people bowing towards the priest: not a bow in a personal encounter as an old-fashioned sign of respect, but in the context of the Mass. He’s critiquing the idea that “traditionalism” simply means “anything that looks reverent” or “anything that looks really Catholic,” and reminding the reader that traditionalism implies continuity with an actual body of specific historic practices that arose in the life of the church.
Of course, much of what the church does appeared at a moment in time and became part of practice. But this happened organically. Inventing a “traditional” gesture is the liturgical equivalent of selling a “collector’s edition.”
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Great collection of oddities. The Nvidia PCIe connector thing is frustrating because it's exactly the kind of modular design that should make repairs easier, not harder. Feels like artificial scarcity when replacement parts exist but companies won't sell them. I've had similiar issues with server hardware where OEMs lock down basic components.
Minor niggle - an FPGA is a general purposed programmable chip. It’s not specific to reveese engineering old designs. In my work we use them (large numbers of them)
to emulate new designs. Emulators generally are one of the niches where FPGAs do well, as CPUs are too slow, but custom ASICs are too expensive when your production run is small