[Coco] CoCo Video Player Project

[Allen Huffman]

On Apr 3, 2009, at 3:54 PM, Nick Marentes wrote:
> So, it can be done (as long as off a fast storage device) but as  
> Mark McDougall pointed out, what's the point...as can be seen by the  
> fact that no-one remembers this feat.


Indeed. It was cool, but not at all what I am talking about. 4096  
colors was cool, and flipping a bunch of them was cool, but I am  
talking about something else.

This all comes up after Sean told me about a Timex Sinclair 1000 at  
the Midwest Gaming Classic convention that was showing an iPod  
silhouette  TV ad. It was just a white background, with animated black  
shadow figures dancing, but the fact it was able to do it at all was  
pretty cool. I could imagine this type of trick getting attention from  
bloggers.

So, what I want to do is be able to take a video and then convert it  
in to something that can be played on the CoCo.  This is really no big  
deal if the disk I/O can be figured out. The old video digitizer from  
CoCo 1/2 could display black and white "live" video, so the issue is  
just -- can we load something from disk fast enough?

The goal is to make a video player, then have some kind of demo --  
probably a commercial for the CoCo (as an example), or a movie trailer  
(might be asking for trouble with modern copyrights) or, better, a new  
fan-made "commercial" for the 2010 CoCoFest. Then, we get video of the  
demo and pass it along to sites like Boing Boing, Slashdot, DIGG, etc.  
and see if they can pick up the headline "TRS-80 video player app  
released" or whatever, and try to generate thousands of click-throughs.

Ultimate goal: To publicize that the CoCo is turning 30 in 2010, and  
we are getting together to celebrate.

Even dropping down to a black and white low resolution image (with  
sound, hopefully) would be enough to be a neat headline grabbing trick/ 
demo. Don't think too much in to this -- it would be even better if  
the demo was something that could run on a 1980 CoCo 1 vintage  
machine. "30 year old TRS-80 plays 2010 movie" :-)

			-- Allen