Keith Palmer's Multi-Purpose Journal

Last May, certain technical difficulties (that went away without my doing anything) as much as trying a new program got me posting that I’d continued drawing on my iPad for a number of months. Since then I’ve kept drawing; bringing that up again is pretty much a matter of going back to that new program at last.
( Some evidence included )

As with other unusual interests, “old computers” have been the subject of get-togethers of various type. For some time, though, whenever I saw notices of conventions and expositions on that topic they’ve been far enough away going to them seemed too big a deal for me.
( A change at last )

Back in December I mentioned I’d started drawing, picking up the “Apple Pencil” I’d bought years before more with vague thoughts of “hand-printing recognition” only to use it for little more than “colouring book” applications. I’d also admitted the resolve to draw had gathered again after more years since that through having dabbled in the controversial terrain of “text-to-image” programs to the point of becoming annoyed with them, but not so much with the grand moral objections raised by others as just with how the fine details kept going wrong. My own drawing skills didn’t seem as if they could manage even the superficial gloss of “adequacy” that had led me along the image generation trail to begin with, much less what those who’d drawn the original pictures fed into its mathematical hoppers. Still, so I told myself, I could at least count fingers and keep them attached to hands.
( With a surprise at the end )

Moving to an “Apple Silicon”-powered computer, I made some small effort to look for updates to applications I use to bring them up to “running natively.” One image browser didn’t require that search, if because I’d compiled an update myself. That program, called Xee, had a few tricks to its interface and features that had suited my own case only to sort of spoil me for moving on to anything else when its “current” version stopped being updated. After a while I had managed to turn up code for a previous version with some updates applied, but there’d been no downloadable version available. However, despite knowing next to nothing about “Mac programming” myself beyond crossing my fingers and starting Xcode’s build progress, that had been enough to produce a working version again. Noticing a different “fork” of the code with different updates a while later, I had even managed to copy enough revisions out of the first repository to produce a version that now said it was “Universal.”
( An animated issue )

Next to the original TRS-80 Micro Computer System with its black and white monitor (converted from surplus RCA TVs, as the folklore has it), the Radio Shack Color Computer’s name was justified. Next to just about any other color-capable small computer from the early 1980s I’m aware of (save those that also used its Motorola MC6847 VDG chip for graphics), the “CoCo” can seem kind of pallid. Maybe that sense strengthened as later programs for it concentrated on its highest-resolution mode with its “artifact red” and “artifact blue” (regardless of certain further tricks pulled off with them).
( Simplifications )
( Elaborations )

Last year I did get away on a vacation that involved more than driving back home for the first time in some time, but a hurricane hitting the Maratimes just as the bus tour was headed that way resulted in me getting back to my place after just long enough to appreciate getting back. My parents moved on to planning another trip, however, and they were thinking bigger this year in looking up a cruise on the line I’d travelled with before. With the itinerary involving travelling north from Boston, past the Maratimes, stopping at the southern tip of Greenland, and circling Iceland before heading back through different ports of call, this was something I was interested in joining.
( An illustrated journey )

Dabbling in some of the earliest word processing programs for microcomputers, and experimenting with Color Computer graphics before that, had been meant to lead to something combining and enhancing both those things, something from my own experience. A lot of my “fiddling around with old computers” amounts to trying to experience things I was oblivious of at the time (I suppose taking interest in the English-speaking anime fans of the 1980s and early 1990s is similar), but every so often I do get back to something I actually remember.
( Once upon a time... )

About two months ago, delving back into one peculiarity of pushing the home computers of the 1980s to their limits, I ran into a grand yet casual claim about just how far the “artifact colours” of the Radio Shack Color Computer could be stretched. A trifle dubious to start with, I was then distracted by some simpler experiments in getting images using a more familiar and limited palette onto a(n emulated) “CoCo” screen. Still, I did keep pondering the suggestion it was possible, with just the right arrangement of black and white, to go all the way from “orange” and “blue” to “green” (a colour more familiar from that computer’s text mode).
( Stretching things along )

For the Easter long weekend I got back home, and one of the things I did there was head down to the family basement to search for an old launch pad for flying model rockets. That pad didn’t turn up at once, and I got distracted on spotting boxes of material from the days when our family computers came from Radio Shack. One item I extracted from a box was a computer catalogue with the Tandy 2000 on the cover. With an ambiguous thought or two about that turning point between “doing things their own variety of ways” and “following Microsoft’s lead with ever-increasing devotion,” I turned to the pages for the less expensive machine we’d had at the time, the Color Computer.
( A peculiar sight )

It seemed a tiny accomplishment to manage to compile some lightly updated source code for an old image browser program called Xee and once more get a personal copy of a program that can both step and jump through through a folder of saved pictures and step forward and back through the frames of an animated GIF as the mood strikes. The tininess came from the feeling I didn’t actually understand how the Objective-C source code I’d come across worked, and couldn’t adjust it so that Xee opens pictures at the same size Preview does, doubling pixels to deal with a “Retina Display.” Keeping Xee locked in “low resolution mode” got a bit more complicated after a system software upgrade and reminded me “all programs are ephemeral.”

In the midst of wondering if I could learn not just Apple’s Objective-C successor Swift but how to create a proper Macintosh application with it, I did get around to experimenting with Xcode a bit more. Along the way, I began to wonder about an item in an Xee submenu called “Remember Zoom Level.” I managed to compile a different set of updates to Xee’s source code, but wound up with a program that crashed every time it tried to open a picture. I resorted to poring over the revisions made to the code that had worked and commenting out some particular commands, and all of a sudden I did have another working program that could remember to scale everything up to two hundred percent. Trying to shuffle every revision from two sets together did wind up breaking the program again, though, even if I got to the point of compiling something that says it’s ready to run on “Apple Silicon,” which I don’t have access to.