before the Internet, computer lovers needed to get their cat pictures, picture macros, and animated gifs somehow. If only [Nate] was composing code back in the 80s: he produced a video player for the Apple II, essentially turning the classic computer into a maker that can play one or two animated gifs.
Vintage microcomputers aren’t particularly noted for a significant amount of RAM, or being extremely fast, so [Nate] needed to bring in some additional hardware to provide his just recently obtained Apple II+ a 64k RAM disk to store the gifs.
The gifs are packed off the floppy drive after being converted on a PC with a Python script, minimizing the resolution and colors to 280 x 192 pixels and an outstanding rainbow of four colors. For some gifs, seen below, it’s actually somewhat excellent an Apple II can pull off this trick. It’s outstanding [Nate] got this thing to work, as well.
If you have an Apple II set up, you’re awesome. You must go peruse [Nate]’s git and make your own animated gifs for your remarkable classic computer.