VCF East: PetPix, Streaming Images To A Commodore PET

PETaday

Thought the Vintage Computer Festival would just be really old computers with hundreds of people pecking 10 PRINT “HELLO” 20 GOTO 10? Yeah, there’s plenty of that, but also some very cool applications of new hardware. [Michael Hill] created PetPix, a video player for the Commodore PET and of course the C64.

PetPix takes any video file – or streaming video off a camera – and converts 8×8 pixel sections of each frame to PETSCII. All the processing is done on a Raspberry Pi and then sent over to the PET for surprisingly fluid video.

There is, of course, a video of PetPix available below. There are also a few more videos from [Michael] going over how PetPix works.

12 thoughts on “VCF East: PetPix, Streaming Images To A Commodore PET

    1. It was also my first girlfriend. ;) I was only 7 when my school had some PETs and I spent so much time on it I was able to do things most people couldn’t do. Ended up teaching class a couple years later about using “KidStuff,” a LOGO program for PET. (you know, draw forward 10, turn right, draw forward 10, etc)

      Dang I am really old…

      1. You were ahead of your time. We were really lucky to have 4 PETs in our school and I was one of 4 lucky lads to get into a summer class. Back then, GOTO was your friend!

        1. Well, Ann Arbor was a “rich” city as far as public school went back in ’70’s and early 80’s. By the time PET were being retired in Wines school, I think we had like 8 PETS just in the library and maybe more somewhere else that students didn’t have access to.

  1. Something isn’t right. The PET 2001 had a tiny keyboard and a datassette drive built in to the front of the machine. The later 3000 series had the full sized keyboard.

    1. Hi, this is Mike (guy in the video).. The earliest model of PET 2001 did have the chiclet keyboard and built-in datasette as you described. The one I’m using here is a slightly later ‘big keyboard’ version – released by Commodore partially as a response to complaints about how hard the tiny keyboard was to type on! The PETpix will, however, work on pretty much any model of PET, 40 or 80 column. Thanks for checking it out!

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