New Adventures in Low Resolution
Jul. 9th, 2022 07:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerAfter glancing at the home page for a particular TRS-80 emulator and realizing its version number had advanced another sub-point, I downloaded the update. It had got me back into fiddling around with the very first computer in my family; having had the different emulator I’d delved into over a decade ago stop working with my updated operating systems when it wasn’t updated as well, I do appreciate continued work on a program.
To see just what had been updated I launched the emulator and checked its built-in release notes; it took a second to see one more TRS-80 model had been added to it, an obscure “Micro Color Computer” released as Radio Shack’s computers really proliferated one year yet not quite compatible with the larger Color Computer. I’d happened some years ago on one person who keeps porting programs to the MC-10’s limited Color BASIC; having the chance to try out those programs did interest me. (In the process, though, I did happen to realise a different Color Computer emulator that had caught my attention more in recent months for adding the considerable upgrades of the Color Computer 3 to its emulation did offer the MC-10 as well; I just hadn’t installed the particular ROM file it needed.)
Along with that potential amusement, I did happen to take another look at a link visible on the emulator’s home page for a “TRS-80 video player.” While the page had made a point of “getting this working on real hardware,” noticing it also said you could use the emulator got my attention at last. After having fiddled around with “video for the black-and-white Macintosh,” the thought of trying something similar for a previous and lower-resolution generation of computing did seem amusing. Getting the program running in the emulator wasn’t too much trouble; as rough as the video was, its flicker did make things look just a bit more recognizable than my usual impressions of “TRS-80 graphics.”
Once I’d run through the sample videos, I supposed I’d have to try converting a few clips of my own. The Perl script that would command ffmpeg to begin boiling down the video only returned error messages, though. Remembering what I’d got into to keep MacFlim running I tried my virtualized Linux, but got the same error messages. Then, supposing the cross-platform emulator had started as a Windows application, I resorted to my copy of Parallels, installing Perl and ffmpeg into a new “Wine bottle.” The script worked, but the small utilities provided to turn the boiled-down frames and sound into a video file didn’t.
Before I was quite ready to give up, I contemplated how I’d tried compiling those utilities from their source code to start with. Running them from Terminal, I did manage to make the video files at last and got them to play back in the emulator. The complicated back-and-forth workflow was perhaps a bit much to make video files with only somewhat better resolution than the earliest “mechanical television,” but I’ll admit I was still amused. I’ve been looking into early home video lately (including looking up information about an obscure format that had managed to get a video signal off specially made vinyl records, even if the effort of developing this format had marked the end of RCA as an independent company regardless of of Radio Shack itself selling a player for them for a few years), and my family’s TRS-80 had preceded our first VCR by half a decade. On the other hand, playing these video files on actual hardware pretty much requires the file space of a hard disk or a modern flash memory system, and we never got to the point of floppy disks with our first computer.
To see just what had been updated I launched the emulator and checked its built-in release notes; it took a second to see one more TRS-80 model had been added to it, an obscure “Micro Color Computer” released as Radio Shack’s computers really proliferated one year yet not quite compatible with the larger Color Computer. I’d happened some years ago on one person who keeps porting programs to the MC-10’s limited Color BASIC; having the chance to try out those programs did interest me. (In the process, though, I did happen to realise a different Color Computer emulator that had caught my attention more in recent months for adding the considerable upgrades of the Color Computer 3 to its emulation did offer the MC-10 as well; I just hadn’t installed the particular ROM file it needed.)
Along with that potential amusement, I did happen to take another look at a link visible on the emulator’s home page for a “TRS-80 video player.” While the page had made a point of “getting this working on real hardware,” noticing it also said you could use the emulator got my attention at last. After having fiddled around with “video for the black-and-white Macintosh,” the thought of trying something similar for a previous and lower-resolution generation of computing did seem amusing. Getting the program running in the emulator wasn’t too much trouble; as rough as the video was, its flicker did make things look just a bit more recognizable than my usual impressions of “TRS-80 graphics.”
Once I’d run through the sample videos, I supposed I’d have to try converting a few clips of my own. The Perl script that would command ffmpeg to begin boiling down the video only returned error messages, though. Remembering what I’d got into to keep MacFlim running I tried my virtualized Linux, but got the same error messages. Then, supposing the cross-platform emulator had started as a Windows application, I resorted to my copy of Parallels, installing Perl and ffmpeg into a new “Wine bottle.” The script worked, but the small utilities provided to turn the boiled-down frames and sound into a video file didn’t.
Before I was quite ready to give up, I contemplated how I’d tried compiling those utilities from their source code to start with. Running them from Terminal, I did manage to make the video files at last and got them to play back in the emulator. The complicated back-and-forth workflow was perhaps a bit much to make video files with only somewhat better resolution than the earliest “mechanical television,” but I’ll admit I was still amused. I’ve been looking into early home video lately (including looking up information about an obscure format that had managed to get a video signal off specially made vinyl records, even if the effort of developing this format had marked the end of RCA as an independent company regardless of of Radio Shack itself selling a player for them for a few years), and my family’s TRS-80 had preceded our first VCR by half a decade. On the other hand, playing these video files on actual hardware pretty much requires the file space of a hard disk or a modern flash memory system, and we never got to the point of floppy disks with our first computer.