I would say Apple 2e, but my dad went down to Colorado Springs a couple of weeks ago and got one. We’re waiting for this USB adapter board so we don’t have to hoard floppy disks.
For now, the most “retro” system I can program is the Pokitto, which isn’t 100% “retro.”
While I’m weighing up my options and/or researching some of the older computers (I’m fairly ignorant to anything from the 20th century that didn’t plug into a television), I’d like to mention I have a semi-working ZX Spectrum clone. Doesn’t seem to like many TVs though, I don’t know if that’s because UHF was a terrible connector, whether it’s faulty or whether the TVs I’m using are just so old their UHF ports aren’t working right.
I’d like to find a Commodore 64 to do a mod to though of older systems I’d like to find an Apple g4 cube or some other one that can run early versions of OS X so I can have os 9 to play some games I miss like caeser iii ( I cannot figure out how to use dosbox atm on my pocket chip to play it ) honestly a g3 PowerBook would work if I could find one cheap enough it’s just that cube, so sexy.
I knew about the PDP, but I just watched this video. I had NO idea how advanced PDP-1 was. Polyphonic sound, runtime hw debugger, lightpen… in 1959! Just amazing stuff.
To do that ‘left behind’ effect on a regular computer (i.e. something more powerful than the Pokitto) I reckon you could just have several buffers and then overlay them with an alpha value proportional to their age (or something like that). Naturally you’d cycle through them so there’s a constant amount of memory involved. I think a similar technique is somtimes used for motion blur in modern video games.
I guess the sort of dotty/spray effect could be by colouring with a sort of ‘spray’ texture instead of just drawing a regular line. Not sure about the ‘bloom’ though, that would probably need some fancy shader.
I doubt anyone’s written a paper called “a study of the luminescent qualities of phosphor-based oscilliscopes” or whatever such an obscure topic would be called :P.
I think as a first pass I would load up the pallete with different shades of white and then draw the older lines in lighter and lighter colors before finally deleting them …
IIRC, the PDP-1 only simulated polyphonic sound by switching between notes fast enough that humans can’t tell the difference. I may not RC, as I couldn’t find any real evidence. Even dug out my copy of “Unplayed by human hands” to check the liner notes, which was where I thought I saw it, but nada.
I actually prefer to own an xbox x than a retro system. I enjoyed a lot my atari 800xe, c64 and famicom clone during my school time but I think nostalgia is overrated