My favorite #trs80 feature was that it blasted enough EM that it would make noise on my bedroom radio. It got so I could often debug my programs sonically because I knew what different sections of the code sounded like when they ran. Loops were easy to spot.
@RebelMoogle sadly, stricter FCC regulations have deprived of this avenue.
@rafial maybe there'd be a way to emulate that. Make music out of code, but in a more literal(?) sense. :D
@RebelMoogle yeah, I was thinking about that. Maybe use something like a profiler or strace and mapping the tracing information into tone.s
@rafial The Commodore 64 also had a EM-related "feature" like that. I remember reading in RUN magazine that certain memory addresses weren't quite memory shielded, so some BASIC programs would PEEK from that "forbidden" memory address and use that as a better pseudo-RNG than the built in RNG.
@Almafeta that's awesome. Random. org today gets its entropy from radios listening to stray frequencies.
@rafial I didn't have a III at home until much later, and it was kinda shielded. But running audio for games thru the tape deck was weird. Wrote a few musicy programs around that after seeing Dancing Demon.
@mdhughes huh, so you mean there was audio on the cassette mixed in with data?
@rafial No, you had to unload the cassette and hit passthru (Play? Not sure now), then send data to the port to make tones. Some company made speakers but I only saw them at RatShack.
@mdhughes oh wow, I never saw that. I can see how it would be done though.
@rafial There's some hires hacks Trash Talk's discussed, but all I played was Telengard, Apshai, text adventures, and Creative Computing type-ins, so 64x16 text and fat pixels was fine. Atari had hires color, but really sold me on non-hacky sound.
@rafial Kinda surprised I didn't get into the CoCo instead, but I think the guy at the RatShack disliked it and pushed people away.
@mdhughes yeah, years later I learned how cool the CoCo was, but Radio Shack emphasized it as being for games, and my dad wanted an "educational" computer
@mdhughes I discovered there was a CoCo variant that was marketed in France called "Alice", that came with this super cool Moebius inspired programming manual. Maybe if that had existed here, I could have had a CoCo _and_ discovered Moebius years earlier …
@mdhughes I just remember doing sound by abusing the tape relay
@rafial that's amazing! debugging by sound. So cool! Now I want to know what my code sounds like. :D