Keith Palmer's Multi-Purpose Journal

After 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.
( What was updated and what else I got around to )

My RSS reader passed along an item about the death of John Roach, CEO and chairman of Tandy once upon a time. In mentioning he had been the “spearhead” of the TRS-80, I remembered how different retrospectives I’ve turned up have the role of a less high-ranking Tandy executive named Don French wane and wax as if depending on who was supplying the information. That can feel a petty correction to make at a moment like this, though. My own family started off with a TRS-80 Model 1 and stuck with proprietary Radio Shack hardware for years, such that I’ve long had the impression I wasn’t really aware anyone else sold computers until PC clones started showing up in the houses of friends. With that connection I got into emulation of the TRS-80 early enough to tinker with a program for the “classic” Macintosh operating system when I didn’t know where to find other programs for it beyond those supplied with the program. It was about a decade later that I began to try out a more capable emulator with more ultra-low-resolution games ready to hand, but that emulator stopped working some operating system upgrades later. For the moment, though, yet another emulator I happened on not that long ago continues to hold up.

Coaxing a program into working order in a TRS-80 Model 100 emulator that could display one slice of an antique cross-platform image file on the screen of that just as antique portable computer had been just the sort of small accomplishment, kind of pointless now yet “once it would have been amazing,” that keeps me delving into “old computers.” Writing up a post about that for the sake of keeping this journal updated every so often, though, did raise a thought or two about whether I’d somehow discharged my motivating energy and would drift along to something else. There was space left for improvement to the program to be sure. Even if rewriting it in anything faster than BASIC remains a towering challenge for me, I could do something about it being “basic.” While I’d got started just by seeing what sort of image could be evoked in the limited number of pixels on a Model 100’s screen, deciding to “work with tools at hand” as much as not bothering to “reinvent the wheel” and padding that image out to the fixed dimensions of an RLE file (which had once seemed a “lowest common denominator” of its day, but had just happened to also be the maximum resolution of my family’s desktop home computer back then) had got me wondering about starting somewhere else than the top left-hand corner and showing a different slice of any one of the RLE images I’ve collected.
( Development at length, with pictures and programs at the end )

Poking back through a “retro image processor” on my iPad, I discovered its “ASCII-plus art” section included the TRS-80 Model 100’s character set. With one of those early portable computers having long been in my family (if not ready to my hands right now), I was a bit pleased to find its characters among those of PCs and PETs. In those less standardized days when just seven bits of an 8-bit computer’s address space were defined as ASCII characters, the Model 100’s upper range included not just accented letters and block graphics but tiny icons such as phones, planes, alien landers, and race cars.
( (Slightly) beyond ASCII art )

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 )

Putting 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.
( Links in the chain )

Wanting to post about something more lightweight, my thoughts turned to having run across how it’s possible to “play in your browser” a recent port of the original Pac-Man to the Tandy Color Computer 3. I could mention the only somewhat earlier port of Donkey Kong to that home computer (following up on the rather well-done period knockoff “Donkey King” for its four-colour predecessors) that had attracted just a little attention and the whole matter of “not having had games in the same quantity as for most other home computers, doing something like this now stands out,” but all in all it does seem lightweight.

Even so, though, I did find myself thinking all of a sudden of the way personal computing was presented in the 1980s, of judgments of that decade as a whole both later and period, and of the risk of making broad assumptions about who didn’t have the chance to “have things the nostalgic way I did,” to say nothing of the general risks of nostalgia. Getting the port running outside of a browser (and to be able to play it in emulation pretty much makes it possible to play Pac-Man in emulation without an additional layer of synthetic hardware) isn’t quite a distraction from that awareness, but perhaps it escapes anything being overwhelming.

It wasn’t that long after I started a Tumblr weblog that a feeling of difficulty when it came to putting together posts for here faded, but by that point I was on my way through a project of putting up a selection of old computer magazine covers. That a little while is spent every day skimming a PDF and coming up with a few words of summary does get me wondering about “making best use of my time,” though, and knowing “running out of magazines from some years into the new millennium at last” is still a long way off has begun to raise a ghost of fatigue even as I got wondering what to post here next.

However, while there’s a bit of a disconnect between loading the covers into my queue and them becoming available for whoever else may see them, I did realise today one particular cover from 1986 had just become available, the September 1986 issue of The Rainbow where the Tandy Color Computer 3 burst onto the scene at last. There’s some personal nostalgia here in that my family used one, in fact held onto it for years after Radio Shack had stopped selling them and whatever third-party sources of interesting new programs and games there were were fading away, which I fear to admit led to some feelings of frustration at the time for all that holding out meant that when my father finally shelled out thousands of dollars for a complete new system where he’d been able to use existing disk drives with a new CPU and add an RGB monitor for less of an all-at-once layout six years before we took the jump to a Macintosh LC II and not a generic PC box (for all the games that would have meant). I suppose there were thoughts afterwards that the “CoCo 3” had had adequate word processing, colour paint programs, and basic telecommunications, and anything a newer computer could do was just elaborations... CD-ROM might have started seeming a bit different, though. At the same time, though, I can also reflect that as young as I was in 1986 I’d already been able to use two previous generations of microcomputer and home computer.

I often suppose one part of what motivates me to seek out information about the computers of the 1980s, one particular subject among a good many others, is the sense I was around at the time but not quite aware of a lot of things outside the amiable corner of the Radio Shack Color Computer. That sense can be carried too far, though. My related interest in the text adventure games dignified with the name interactive fiction does have something to do with my family having been given a copy of the Infocom adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which first made me aware of adventure games that could accept more than two words at a time and then suggested in a catalog there was a whole line of other games like it. The only problem was that the regular hints offered for the game in the Color Computer magazine The Rainbow never quite explained how to solve its last and most elaborate puzzle. When I did manage to make out the faded hints in a high school acquaintance's old hint book, the sense of it being too late to play any other Infocom game was right to the extent of the re-release collections having less elaborate packaging and being for more elaborate computers.
( Advantages to the passing of time )

Seeing a bit of attention paid to "old computers" from an unexpected but notable direction did get me thinking of the home computer games I'd actually played when I was young (instead of managing to get around to them years later), and which of them might be called "personal standouts." I thought of the Pole Position imitation I would load and then twiddle the TV's tint knob until the blue "artifact colour" of the backgrounds changed to "green grass" (although the Radio Shack Color Computer 2 could start up with its blue and red artifact colours switched, which made for a different experience again), of the "first-person perspective maze" our disk had gone bad for unfortunately early on so that long years later it became one of my most notable pushes towards getting emulator programs working, and of several illustrated adventures, some easier to play all the way through than others. After remembering those and other Color Computer games, though, all of a sudden I reminded myself that before it my family had started out with a TRS-80 Model I. Even with its low-resolution black-and-white graphics (converted to black-and-green with a thick piece of green plastic foam-taped to the converted RCA surplus TV that served as its official monitor), we had some games for it. Two of them that came to mind right away were the Berzerk imitation "Robot Attack" and a "swoop a spaceship over an enemy base and through a cavern" game from a "software every month" cassette magazine, both of which I'd got working on emulators in recent years. That double revival, though, had also got me thinking of a third game stuck in my mind but which I hadn't been able to find in these latter days...
( The third game, and some illustrated proof )