Not only was the PET 600’s screen limited to just displaying characters (letters, numbers, punctuation, etc.) but the machines behind them were impossibly slow, often taking a few seconds to load and display lists of files or other data. There was zero chance a dedicated YouTube app could be developed for Commodore BASIC which the PET 600 ran, so Jemander had to take the long road.
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They created a combination of hardware and software they dubbed the BlixTerm which took the form of a cartridge connected to one of the PET 600’s expansion ports on the back. Inside the cartridge is a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W which connects to YouTube over wifi, loads a requested video, and then converts the 640×200 grayscale stream to an 80×25 grid of ASCII characters from the PET’s internal ROM.
A second interface card loads the generated frames from the Raspberry Pi into the PET’s video memory, which is the bottleneck of the process given the antique PC’s limited processing power, but through optimization, Jemander managed to achieve a very watchable 30 FPS playback speed. Watching YouTube on a 45-year-old desktop PC is far from easy on the eyes, but the fact that it’s even possible is beyond impressive.
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