Rendering Complex Images On A 39-Year Old PC With BASIC
945You know what I really enjoy? Doing weird things with retro computers. My constantly WIP Compaq Portable has been put up to the task of rendering a Mandelbrot set posted as a challenge on Reddit's /r/retrobattlestations. I also wanted to try my hand at making a YouTube #short, since I've never really done short-form content, so out comes the camera, a bit of code modification.
My socials:
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ncommander
Twitter: https://twitter.com/FOSSfirefighter
Discord: https://discord.gg/V8esNah
Blog: https://casadevall.pro
I used Compaq DOS 3.3 with Compaq's re-branded GW-BASIC which is pretty close to IBM's disk BASIC. To make life easier, there was already a version of this fractal for the HP-150's BASIC, which is a direct descendant of Microsoft's GW-BASIC. As far as syntax/commands went, I just had to make a single change on how the screen mode is handled. Afterwards, I just had to change the resolution to something that's actually viewable (although I think the image is a bit squished, I may need to look into this more)
Afterwards, I needed to figure out how to record a multi-hour timelapse. There were multiple attempts that failed due the camera quitting mid-render, making this a much more irritating experience than it needed to be. However, as this video shows, I can claim success!
This is my first experience with shorts, so I'm not sure I'll do more in the future, but it was a neat project, since I managed to do this with only a few hours of editing.
Music Credit:
"I Can Feel it Coming" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
#retrocomputing #programming #shorts