The Latest Hardware Revival
Jan. 5th, 2021 08:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerPutting away my Tandy Color Computer 3 after playing some games on “real hardware” didn’t quite deflect my attention back to other “old computers” with more elegant (Macintosh) emulators. I glanced again through the most impressive archive of Color Computer disk images I know of, and this time I noticed a “GIF Viewer.” That got my mind moving. As with most of the other computers of its time, I know the “CoCo 3” had its own unique image formats, but it had been on sale in Radio Shack stores when the GIF format had been introduced on CompuServe (and getting the viewer running in an emulator revealed a startup screen dated to then rather than “later,” with what I recognized as an ID number from that online service.) The format might now most bring to mind quick-and-dirty silent animations (and winking debates about “soft G or hard G?”), but the possibility of “linking then and now” did seem there.
For no more profound reason than personal amusement, I’ve used an application (via Wine) that can convert images to “Apple II hi-res” (a little more impressive than the highest resolution of the original Color Computer and “CoCo 2”) and gone to some lengths to make dithered black-and-white pictures I’ve then converted to “MacPaint format” to display on the early Macintosh. Making GIF files didn’t seem quite as involved, although I knew it would still be a little more complicated than just “Save As...” The Color Computer 3 had been a pretty major leap in “colours on screen” for my family, but from today’s perspective its most vibrant display (but not the highest resolution it was capable of, the tradeoff of the time) could only show sixteen colours at once selected from sixty-four choices in total (better than the Tandy 1000 could manage, but not quite as good as the Atari ST). Delving into the manual for GraphicConverter, I figured out how to boil a scaled and cropped image down to a particular palette; a bit of searching turned up a few artistic selections of sixteen colours; a bit more searching revealed the specific colours a “CoCo 3” could display those palettes would have to be approximated in. (Along the way, I at least sorted out the austere mathematical logic of specific red, green, and blue brightnesses being mixed in that helped explain at last just why the “RGB colours” looked more jumbled than the “composite palette”).
Even if I’d resorted to “anime pictures” again (including pictures from franchises that hadn’t existed when the Color Computer 3 had been on sale, which can seem that much more of a cheat somehow), it was something to get those first images displayed in an emulator. As I discovered VCC was slower to do this than the tricker-to-use MAME, though, the thought of resorting to real hardware remained enticing. After hooking everything up again, however, it seemed the GIF viewer was one more program that didn’t quite work with “DriveWire” and loading disk images over a serial cable connected to a newer computer. After returning to emulation to get the viewer to convert the images to a Color Computer-specific format, I could display them on the real hardware with a different program, but there still seemed that extra trace of inelegance to things even as I realised the images were somewhat stretched vertically from the modern square pixels I’d been working with.
Parallel to all that effort, though, I’d also happened again on descriptions of “modern disk drive substitues” plugging into the cartridge port and using SD cards to store masses of disk images, similar to units ordered some time ago for an old Macintosh Plus and two Apple IIe computers picked up through my area's now-defunct Apple user group. Aware these units are made in small batches and don’t always stay on sale for a long time, I committed myself at last to ordering one of them, hoping not just to “run one program.” (At the same time, I ordered some adapters that would let “Atari-style digital joysticks” plug into the Color Computer’s analog joystick ports, and an Atari-style joystick as well.) The “CoCo SDC” arrived in a 3D-printed case, and I found a rather small 32-megabyte SD card I recall also picking up from the user group and started copying disk images to it.
The GIF viewer worked, and so did the Infocom games patched to use lower case. As well, no longer needing to load the DriveWire driver as an audio file every time I switched the Color Computer on let me dig out the “hi-res joystick interface” that also needed to use the cassette port and run the MacWrite clone I’d made considerable use of years ago. DriveWire isn’t completely obsolete, though; with some of its functionality built into the CoCo SDC, I can still connect to another computer over the serial port and access disk files that way, at times a bit handier than setting disk images from Disk Extended Color BASIC. Eventually, I suppose, I’ll have to pack the hardware away and reclaim my dining room table, but for the moment it’s something to use it again (even if composing a first draft of this post on “the hardware discussed” still meant reaching for the number keys to type quotation marks and apostrophes, and a CRT monitor now seems to suffer sharpness-wise compared to LCD screens. I spent quite a while writing stories on a Color Computer 3, and not very good stories in hindsight; now, I’m stuck wondering if my eyes were better back then to handle that old on-screen text for longer.)
For no more profound reason than personal amusement, I’ve used an application (via Wine) that can convert images to “Apple II hi-res” (a little more impressive than the highest resolution of the original Color Computer and “CoCo 2”) and gone to some lengths to make dithered black-and-white pictures I’ve then converted to “MacPaint format” to display on the early Macintosh. Making GIF files didn’t seem quite as involved, although I knew it would still be a little more complicated than just “Save As...” The Color Computer 3 had been a pretty major leap in “colours on screen” for my family, but from today’s perspective its most vibrant display (but not the highest resolution it was capable of, the tradeoff of the time) could only show sixteen colours at once selected from sixty-four choices in total (better than the Tandy 1000 could manage, but not quite as good as the Atari ST). Delving into the manual for GraphicConverter, I figured out how to boil a scaled and cropped image down to a particular palette; a bit of searching turned up a few artistic selections of sixteen colours; a bit more searching revealed the specific colours a “CoCo 3” could display those palettes would have to be approximated in. (Along the way, I at least sorted out the austere mathematical logic of specific red, green, and blue brightnesses being mixed in that helped explain at last just why the “RGB colours” looked more jumbled than the “composite palette”).
Even if I’d resorted to “anime pictures” again (including pictures from franchises that hadn’t existed when the Color Computer 3 had been on sale, which can seem that much more of a cheat somehow), it was something to get those first images displayed in an emulator. As I discovered VCC was slower to do this than the tricker-to-use MAME, though, the thought of resorting to real hardware remained enticing. After hooking everything up again, however, it seemed the GIF viewer was one more program that didn’t quite work with “DriveWire” and loading disk images over a serial cable connected to a newer computer. After returning to emulation to get the viewer to convert the images to a Color Computer-specific format, I could display them on the real hardware with a different program, but there still seemed that extra trace of inelegance to things even as I realised the images were somewhat stretched vertically from the modern square pixels I’d been working with.
Parallel to all that effort, though, I’d also happened again on descriptions of “modern disk drive substitues” plugging into the cartridge port and using SD cards to store masses of disk images, similar to units ordered some time ago for an old Macintosh Plus and two Apple IIe computers picked up through my area's now-defunct Apple user group. Aware these units are made in small batches and don’t always stay on sale for a long time, I committed myself at last to ordering one of them, hoping not just to “run one program.” (At the same time, I ordered some adapters that would let “Atari-style digital joysticks” plug into the Color Computer’s analog joystick ports, and an Atari-style joystick as well.) The “CoCo SDC” arrived in a 3D-printed case, and I found a rather small 32-megabyte SD card I recall also picking up from the user group and started copying disk images to it.
The GIF viewer worked, and so did the Infocom games patched to use lower case. As well, no longer needing to load the DriveWire driver as an audio file every time I switched the Color Computer on let me dig out the “hi-res joystick interface” that also needed to use the cassette port and run the MacWrite clone I’d made considerable use of years ago. DriveWire isn’t completely obsolete, though; with some of its functionality built into the CoCo SDC, I can still connect to another computer over the serial port and access disk files that way, at times a bit handier than setting disk images from Disk Extended Color BASIC. Eventually, I suppose, I’ll have to pack the hardware away and reclaim my dining room table, but for the moment it’s something to use it again (even if composing a first draft of this post on “the hardware discussed” still meant reaching for the number keys to type quotation marks and apostrophes, and a CRT monitor now seems to suffer sharpness-wise compared to LCD screens. I spent quite a while writing stories on a Color Computer 3, and not very good stories in hindsight; now, I’m stuck wondering if my eyes were better back then to handle that old on-screen text for longer.)