This is a reproduction of the article "N. P. Rougier, LOUPE, Tremplin Micro 19 (Mar. 1988), pp. 60–61" for the Ten Years Reproducibility Challenge.
I published my very first (non-scientific) article in a French Magazine named "Tremplin Micro" in 1988, 32 years ago. It was a program written in Applesoft Basic that zoomed out a 21x21 pixels area of an image by a factor 4 (not very impressive by 2020 standards). As written in the original "cover" letter I sent, the zoom was also very slow. At that time, I was learning 6502 assembler but I was not proficient enough to write the program using it. Thirty-two years might appear a relatively small lapse of time compared to Human history, but for digital computer history, this is actually huge, almost half of its history. Imagine that the Apple //e was using a 6502 microprocessor with a 8-bits data bus, had 64Ko of RAM and the speed was barely 1Mhz. The text modes were 40 or 80 columns, and the video modes include a standard graphic mode (140x96 pixels, 16 colors) or an impressive high-resolution mode (280x192 pixels, 6 colors). Despite these apparent limitations, the Apple //e has been a very popular machine complemented by an extended software library. For the Ten Years Reproducibility Challenge, I thus decided to try to re-run the original program, just for the sake of checking if I could. This includes finding the sources (in a usable form), remembering how to load and start a program in Applesoft, producing some original data (image) to test the program, and of course, checking if it was running as expected.
→ Read the rest of the article from article/article.pdf
→ Original article: Tremplin Micro 19 magazine
→ Original floppy: Tremplin Micro 19 floppy
To run the program, you will need an apple //e emulator (for example Virtual II, MAME or Apple //jse), load the challenge.dsk and boot it. Then follow instruxtion
