Keith Palmer's Multi-Purpose Journal

“There were computers from other companies than Radio Shack?” seems just amusing enough a realisation for me to use it in explanations of how I got to delving into “old computers,” but I do wonder about it oversimplifying things. In any case, there have been things about the particular computer I was using when I came to the realisation just mentioned that I learned well after the fact. It doesn’t seem that many years ago that I was looking at the list of software on a Color Computer archive and really picked up on a program named “TW-80” to the point of wondering about its name. From reading old issues of The Rainbow magazine I’d known about a word processor for the “CoCo” called Telewriter. When The Rainbow’s editorial content had still been dot matrix printout, full-page, typeset ads for Telewriter had promised to transcend a text display that might seem unpromising for word processing (with sixteen lines of thirty-two characters each and no lowercase, just capital letters in “reverse video” boxes to indicate them) by drawing characters on the highest resolution graphics screen. I’d known how the program had become Telewriter-64 as the Color Computer reached the 8-bit memory limit and then transformed into Telewriter-128 on the Color Computer 3, which had a much improved text display. The not quite in-between number, not mentioned in a Rainbow article on word processors that had shaped my awareness of the options there at the end of the 1980s, tickled my fancy enough to load TW-80 in an emulator. I sorted out it pressed the equally improved graphics of the “CoCo 3” into service.
( Listing 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 )

New programs (even if only “new to me”) help keep “old computers” from becoming the fixed entity the first part of that name might imply. New gadgets play their own role, but most often I try out the new programs with emulators, which can provide their own novelty. A little while ago I learned about a MAME “front end” called Ample. As if acknowledging how it ran on the modern Macintosh it focused altogether on Apple computers starting out, but within that bound it did make it easier to preload disk images, fill virtual expansion slots, and enable “CRT emulation” without adding command line arguments or scrolling back and forth through MAME’s own austere menus. Having already tried out the emulation MAME now offers of the early colour Macs, I was willing to try out Ample a bit.

A while after that, I went back to the program’s source code page and discovered some Tandy computers had been added without me noticing, focusing on the Color Computers. I had noticed the Atari ST listed in Ample’s list of machines before, and thought a bit about how it had also used a Motorola 68000 and had been greeted with proclamations that its low price would surely lead to software dominance, only to wind up supporting gadgets that let it run Macintosh programs. The new addition was just a bit more of an unusual juxtaposition. Much has been made of the Apple II and the original TRS-80 being introduced in the same year; something has been made of the cheaper, more widely available TRS-80 far outselling the Apple II in the 1970s (when Commodore partisans aren’t trying to make a similar point about the PET or at least talking up how it booted into BASIC and had lowercase as a standard). I am conscious even so that Radio Shack computer users seemed more conscious of Apple computers among “the competition” than Apple users were of Radio Shack computers. In any case, I downloaded the new version, aware of a comment or two insisting the dedicated Color Computer emulators that can be made to run on the Mac still have certain limitations. What I found straight off, though, was that the Color Computer 3 program I’d first emulated via MAME, the graphical word processor Max-10, still has a problem with its “keyclick” sound.

In the process of trying to make “RLE image files” that much more cross-platform by getting them displayed on an (emulated) TRS-80 Model I hooked up to a Percom Electric Crayon, I did realise at last that the Disk BASIC commands I’d discovered could read through an unformatted data file of arbitrary length also existed on the Color Computer. Back when I’d thought that would be much more involved, I’d instead found proper machine-language programs for that computer that could display RLE images. (While the very first one of them I’d tried had required an actual “CoCo” hooked up to another machine to send it the image file through its serial port, after lucking into a much more capable utility I’d then found the original CompuServe terminal program could also work in an offline mode to display the images first introduced to provide weather maps on that commercial online service.) Even so, the thought of proving the concept once more had me turning to BASIC manuals again.
( Listing included as a small service )

When I’d restored an antique Color Computer 3 word processor not just to minimal usability (running in a more elegant emulator) but to minimal usefulness (with another program to turn that emulator’s “printer output” into printable PDF files), I did ask myself how much “dot matrix aesthetic” I needed these days. Still, making printouts of some of the (not very good in retrospect) stories I’d written more than thirty years ago with Max-10 wasn’t the only quick and simple thing I could now imagine doing with it. Its ads in the late 1980s had played up combining graphics with styled text (as MacWrite’s ads had in the mid-1980s.) To get the graphics was just a little complicated. Instead of using Max-10’s complement CoCoMax III, I resorted to the generation, importation, and conversion of RLE image files. In the end I had a PDF printout... and the impression it looked vertically stretched. I’d had a sense of this happening before. Having needed to adjust the Epson graphics code in a hex editor to make the printout more than one black bar, I’d then felt out how to reduce the blank top and bottom margins and keep each Max-10 page from spilling onto a second PDF page. This, however, was that much more obvious. Zooming in on a PDF page revealed the command-line program I’d managed to compile formed its graphics from tiny circles, and I was starting to wonder if the circles were a little further apart than they could have been.
( Options open up )

In poking away once more at the old computer I actually used “back in the day” for some time of late, I did get around to thinking of another small program for the Color Computer I’d once tried out and made a copy of off an old diskette. Even at that point, there’d been something about it I hadn’t quite understood. Now, though, I took another look, and this time I seemed to crack a secret of sorts. I then sort of sat on my thoughts through my recent vacation to save them for a post.
( Some technical details )

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... )

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 )

Taking a better look at the latest instalment of a “newsletter for the current TRS-80 user” I’ve been aware of for some time, I happened on a preview for a new version of the TRS-80 emulator that helped me get back to dabbling with “the first computer in my family.” When a recent version had added support for a low-end Color Computer variant, that had intrigued me and raised daydreams of the program eventually covering Radio Shack’s complete Z80 and 6809 lines alike. The preview went in a different direction, but I was surprised even so to see a promise of a “Japanese Model I.” I’d known the Model III could be set to display katakana characters; for that matter, I’d known there was a variant of the Apple II Plus that could do the same thing. I hadn’t known the TRS-80 had had an international variant so soon, although when I did a bit of searching I did turn up a few references to it.

In the month I’d learned about the upcoming release I’d been reading the issue of 80 Micro from exactly forty years before, and Wayne Green’s editorial had fulminated about “the Japanese sell us their stuff, but won’t buy our stuff,” then gone on to cast dark aspersions on late nineteenth-century immigration to the United States as if to make sure more than one group was offended. (He’d also warned the IBM PC offering CP/M had “set a standard Japan could clean up with,” not quite considering the cheaper option available earlier that Microsoft just happened to be able to provide to anyone else...) That juxtaposition might have been a bit more interesting in the end than trying out the new emulator option just to get a sense of how it would work, although this program offers an on-screen keyboard that lets you know what Japanese characters you’ve switched over to typing.

While trying out “full-screen video for the (emulated) TRS-80,” I took another look at some message boards recommended by the emulator and video player’s programmer. On one of them, I happened on another recent accomplishment for those old computers, one better aligned with my impressions of their homely capabilities. Someone had programmed a new “Z-machine interpreter,” which could play more of Infocom’s interactive fiction and the text adventures built afterwards on a foundation of reverse engineering than the interpreters Infocom had provided for Radio Shack’s computers in the 1980s. I could put the interpreter file and the “Z-code” games on a disk image (even if I had to use a Windows utility via Wine), and proved the concept with “MST3K: Detective.”
( That was just the beginning )