Welcome to my Omnibus page for the TRS-80, or the Color Computer 2, CoCo 2 for short, and affectionately called the Tandy by my family. Here I'm going to record all my expirementation, partly to catch myself up to speed when I pull this thing out from the china cabinet once again, and I forget what programs I use to view the darn thing!
This computer is OLD LOL.
The first step here is a weird one, but I needed a way to turn an analog TV signal into a video input to a computer. Luckily, people have always wanted to watch free, over the air television on their computers! Unluckily, over the air television ceased being analog around 2009. Thus, I had to find old stock of this converter, which would use the old analog standards. Luckily, eBay was a great place to look, and I picked up this bad boy. Weirdly enough, it says digital on the side of it. But I'm guessing this is because the output is digital, as it is branded, and seems to work with, analog tv input. The dvr program it comes with leaves a lot to be desired, and I have not found myself using it much, but the drivers are nice to have! It takes a coax, RF encoded television signal (like the kind you would get from an antenna) and spits out video over USB.
Now that we have a USB in for the video, we need a program to play it on. For this, I use VLC media player, which I already had installed to watch Seinfeld on DVD. Navigating to the Open Media menu shown below, you can set VLC up to read that incoming signal. It is also important to hit "advanced options" as well, and set the channel to either 3 or 4, which the Tandy can be set to using the switch on the back.
And that's about it! Does it look the best? No. Does it have an odd thump sound going at about 5Hz? Maybe. But, I can also actually use the computer in my TV-less apartment, and share the below screenshot to boot!
This is a fun, ongoing project of mine to let me simulate.