RECOIL

Although looking at a photo on a computer doesn't seem anywhere out of the ordinary nowadays, it didn't use to be so trivial a couple of decades ago. Images used to come in various formats, some of them still in use while others have died out along with their platforms. If you happen to encounter images in native Commodore or Apple II format, for example, you can turn to RECOIL for help in opening them. This lightweight image viewer provides support for countless formats, from a wide range of obsolete platforms, including the Amiga, Atari ST/TT/Falcon, Amstrad CPC and many others.

RECOIL is absolutely free, and you can have it up and running on any modern Windows platform. You can also find it for Linux and Mac OS X, as well as Android and iOS mobile devices. The software comes in a small package, and it doesn't take more than a minute to install it. Also, the application includes everything it needs, so you don't have to install any additional tools or drivers.

The user interface is blank when you launch the application. At this point, you only need to load a picture through a standard browsing option, located in the File menu. If you have multiple pictures in the same folder as the picture you're importing, the software will let you navigate forwards and backward through all images from that folder, either with the arrow keys or with the left and right mouse buttons.

Images from the same folder can be in different formats. It doesn't matter if one is in Amiga HAM format, two in ZX Spectrum CH6 and another four in Atari 8-bit GR8. As long as they're in a format RECOIL-supported format, you will be able to jump from one to another without any issues.

If you're looking for a blast from the past, RECOIL can show you how images on a computer used to look like back in the day.