AI Image Generation on a 1980s Tandy 286: Retro Rig Renders Pics in 9 Seconds
jacobpederson · reddit · 2026-10-01
A developer got AI image generation running on a 10 MHz Tandy 1000 TL/3 (286): a DOS program called DeskMind talks over PicoMEM WiFi to a Python server that calls Krea 2 in ComfyUI, with Qwen3.8-27B rewriting prompts — about 9 seconds per image.
Key techniques:
- Dither-aware prompt rewriting: Qwen rewrites prompts to request one large subject, bold shapes, strong contrast, and no fine detail, since the 16-color RGBI palette punishes gradients.
- Anamorphic resize before dithering: 640x200 pixels are 2.4x taller than wide on a 4:3 CRT, so images are squashed with Lanczos first or circles come out wrong.
- Pre-dither grading: contrast 1.15, saturation 1.3, light unsharp mask at target size.
- Three dither engines (Floyd-Steinberg, Atkinson, Bayer, Yliluoma, etc.) with a live preview GUI.
- Vision sees the dither too: the original and dithered images are both fed to Qwen in chat.
Output is a 160x50 thumbnail plus 64,000 bytes of packed 4-bit pixels written straight to video memory (1s transfer). GPLv3: github.com/RowanUnderwood/DeskMind
More from coding & agent
- Dev warns: less code review is coming, but don't follow the loud AI cargo-culters — mgill25 · 2026-10-01
- 39 Agents Across 8 Departments: The 2026 Data Science Team Is a Folder — mdancho84 · 2026-10-01
- Dev builds his own AI-powered Substance Designer for a city sim game — D3VAUX · 2026-10-01
- Ethan Mollick: I underestimated AI's ability to self-organize, agents beat elaborate orchestration — emollick · 2026-10-01
- RegLLM: a diagnostic harness measures bounded autonomy in regulated agentic AI — Dipankar Sarkar · 2026-10-01
- Dev uses Claude Code to produce a product trailer and marketplace GIFs — full workflow inside — SinanDev · 2026-10-01