Old Computers Diversion of the Day

[krpalmer]

Keeping up my occasional interest in "old computers," I took another look at a mailing list about TRS-80 computers and saw a link to an emulator that runs in a browser. The comment that it ran just with Javascript and not Java caught my attention somehow in a "technology had advanced" way. After that, though, I managed to remember that I've seen and used emulators running in a browser that use "just Java," including a Color Computer one and an Apple II one I learned about not that long ago, linked to by someone who had just written a text adventure specifically for that computer. (That caught my attention at the time in a way that a piece of interactive fiction written for one of the modern cross-platform engines might not have, although I know that this particular adventure only has a "two-word parser.") In any case, you can do things with the TRS-80 emulator right off; several games can be loaded into it, and I'm tempted to recommend "Sea Dragon" and "Galaxy Invasion," so long as you understand their graphics are one low step up from "ASCII graphics."