The Panorama Viewer for MSX

Lately we're seeing more 360 degrees panorama images and videos on social media, YouTube and other interweb pages. You know, them ones where you can look all around, as if you were there. Although our beloved MSX computer system is more than a thousand times slower than modern hardware and graphically so much more restricted, it didn't stop David Heremans making a panorama viewer. That's right, on MSX. David, aka turbor, who made this program, first presented it at the Nijmegen fair in 2018.

You will find everything you need on one disk for download. Once the program is running you can use the cursor keys to look around. If you are not actively looking around yourself, the program will start to rotate automatically after a while.

There are two common methods used to create 360 image viewers; one method uses 6 images as faces of a cube, the other uses a single image with an equirectangular projection. The latter is the most popular one.

The MSX program has an equitorectangular panorama image stored in its memory. It is the image that you obtain with the observer at the center of a transparent sphere, and you paint the surface of the sphere with the image that you see behind it.Then you cut the surface along one of the longitudes and stretch it out flat so that all longitudes are straight
vertical lines. This kind of projection is probably best known as the default mapping used when you see a worldmap.

You can get your copy right here from the MRC Download Database.

Relevant link: Download the Panoramic Viewer.