I’ve created a utility that will take an image URL and allow you to generate a TRS-80 BASIC program that will display the image on your TRS-80 in all of its 128×48 monochrome glory. Check it out!
I’ve created a utility that will take an image URL and allow you to generate a TRS-80 BASIC program that will display the image on your TRS-80 in all of its 128×48 monochrome glory. Check it out!
Pete,
I tried loading your generated Basic program file into TRSDOS 1.3 Disk Basic and the file wouldn’t load. The problem seems to be that you are terminating each line of your generated program with 0Ah instead of 0Dh. When I manually changed each of these bytes (using SU 3.2), the program loaded and ran fine.
Thanks for the bug catch! I guess I only tested in emulators that handled the linefeed conversion. I’ve just pushed out a fix for this issue! Let me know if it works for you.
It works great now! The other thing that you may wish to update are the 4 programs that you pre-generated as examples (Clint, Star Wars, NY Mets and Trump). They still have the 0Ah terminators and don’t load properly.
And by the way, this is so cool! Very fine programming job on your part! The images look better if you step back a few feet from your monitor. They also appear to look better if they are somewhat condensed. This is to be expected with the primitive graphics. But, nevertheless, it is remarkable what you have created here.
Would you be willing to share any technical details as to how you coded this?
Thanks, again! I’ve updated the sample programs with the correct line endings. I might put together a blog post on how I did this eventually.
In short, it’s a simple Java webservice that downloads, converts to monochrome and resizes the image. The image bits are then converted to the appropriate TRS-80 graphics ASCII characters which are inserted into a BASIC program template.