The Scanline Pointer
Jan. 29th, 2016 06:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerThe Renga in Blue weblog aggregated on Planet IF has been working its way through a series of early text adventures for a while now. While it's moved a lot slower than The Digital Antiquarian, it has pointed out some intriguing obscure works on its way from the first mainframe-based games to the simple BASIC adventures squeezed into early home computers, now illustrated with screen shots from appropriate emulators. After a game I could tell had been ported to the Radio Shack Color Computer (although I did think of one person who's moved into the unoccupied niche of porting a slew of small games to the tiny variant of that machine sold for a little while in the effulgent year of 1983, when Tandy was churning out minimally intercompatible computers as if to see what would stick), though, the next set of images just had me guessing.
Adding "scan lines" to the display of an emulator seems easy enough to do, but I wondered what TRS-80 emulator, or at least what obscure configuration of one, produced that effect. I could have thought of a browser-based emulator I had happened on a while ago, but there was the question of just how to run programs not included in its site's small selection... and then, in the next post, I saw a link to a new site that can load what seems every TRS-80 program in a large existing archive into the emulator. Not every one of the "Model I" programs seems able to run on the "Model III" emulator (which I believe was an issue with the actual computers), but it certainly lifts the online program a ways above "a brief diversion."
Adding "scan lines" to the display of an emulator seems easy enough to do, but I wondered what TRS-80 emulator, or at least what obscure configuration of one, produced that effect. I could have thought of a browser-based emulator I had happened on a while ago, but there was the question of just how to run programs not included in its site's small selection... and then, in the next post, I saw a link to a new site that can load what seems every TRS-80 program in a large existing archive into the emulator. Not every one of the "Model I" programs seems able to run on the "Model III" emulator (which I believe was an issue with the actual computers), but it certainly lifts the online program a ways above "a brief diversion."