Trying for the Home Team

Discovering a relic archive of RLE images hadn’t been aimed at “the broadest possible audience” (of people viewing pictures on their computers in the mid-1980s, anyway) had been an odd amusement for me, if only because I supposed myself in the audience the collection had been assembled for. Shorn of context (including the historical), an RLE image by itself might not seem that much. Not only are they black-and-white only, their data has to be read into a fixed space 256 pixels wide by 192 pixels high. The Apple II magazine article I’d first noticed the images described in mentioned this had been a sort of lowest common denominator befitting online ambitions, and I accepted that in a casual way. A while later, though, in going back to an article in a Commodore magazine, I spotted the comment that size matched the highest resolution of the original TRS-80 Color Computer, my family’s computer at the time. There was a peculiar sting to that. I’d long known the Color Computer’s graphics weren’t that sophisticated (powered by an off-the-shelf Motorola chip recognizable in a few other computers and peripherals), but the clear suggestion it was “the lowest common denominator” did rankle. Then, though, I rallied. I’d already tried viewing RLE images through emulation of the Apple II, Macintosh Plus, and TRS-80 Model 4, and that had seemed sufficient. Now, however, I intended to get them on a “CoCo” screen.
( The extended search )