Classic Doctor Who Streamed On 31-Year-Old TRS-80 Home Computer?!

Christian Cawley is a writer at Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews - All the latest Doctor Who news and reviews with our weekly podKast, features and interviews, and a long-running forum.

Do you fear nuclear armageddon? Concerned that the apocalypse might prevent you from watching Doctor Who as pestilence and war shatters the fabric of human society? Petrified at the loss of the Internet?!

Don’t be. A hacker who goes by the nickname gp2000 has demonstrated how Doctor Who can be viewed on a 31 year old TRS-80, a home computer that was available on both sides of the Atlantic in the early/mid 1980s. Equipped with a pair of 5.25″ floppy drives (remember those?!) and a chip capable of processing at just 4 Mhz (the one in your desktop computer is typically around 2 Ghz), the 30 second video – while monochrome – is at an impressive 25 frames per second.

As ExtremeTech explains,

The resolution of the video is 118×48, which equates to roughly 1KB per screen. The floppy drives (only one can be active at a time) can read a byte of data every 32 microseconds, giving a max theoretical bandwidth of 30.5KB/sec — so, 25 fps is possible, with bandwidth to spare. Gp2000 says the program that plays the video works in 32-microsecond steps; 13.5 microseconds are dedicated to reading data from the disk, with the remaining 18.5 microseconds spent decoding the data, drawing the screen, and driving the speaker. (The audio, incidentally, is 31250Hz at 1-bit per sample — which would usually be used for simple beeps and bloops, but can just about be coerced into playing music.)

You may well know that I’m a bit of a technophile, but this is quite simply amazing. It’s the sort of amazing thing that the Doctor himself might knock up during long nights in the vortex, or stranded on lonely planets in an alternate universe…

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