Developer plays TV series on ’80s PC

A developer managed to play the intro to the science fiction series Doctor Who on a 1983 PC. From a floppy disk, the video can be viewed on the TRS80 Model 4P, a computer with a 4MHz processor and 64Kb of RAM.

The developer uploaded the video to YouTube a few days ago, but didn’t explain how he managed it until Wednesday. The video plays at 118×48 pixels at 25fps. The TRS80 has two 5.25″ floppy drives, which can read a byte every 32 milliseconds. Of these, the program uses 13.5ms to read the data, while the remaining 18.5ms are used to decode the data and screen, ExtremeTech writes.

To play the 30-second video, the developer, who has only identified himself under his nickname gp2k00, must use four floppy disks. The floppies each have 180KB of data; a floppy must be changed every seven seconds. The developer says that he does not want to watch a whole movie in this way, although it is possible.

The PRS-T80 Model 4p runs on a Zilog Z80A processor with a clock speed of 4MHz. The computer has a working memory of 64KB. The computer was for sale from 1983 at the American retail chain RadioShack.