- A good friend of mine bumped into him at a party about 25 years ago and he said he'd being doing math work for the NSA.
- That demo was amazing, thank you.
- The main difference was that 48K basic you had to find the keyboard key with the keyword on it and press that to get the word. Some keys had 6 different functions. It was like learning the 2000 Jōyō Kanji.
With 128 basic, blessed that it is, you could just type like a real human. If you want to print, type PRINT. It taught me how to type really badly and really quickly.
- This was awesome. I did all my early work on a toastrack (and got the burns from it). Always wanted to get another one and restore it.
- This is great. Video here:
- The output isn't the whole story, though. For instance, with Spy vs. Spy the graphics were made on one system and then ported to another system with no regard of the aspect ratio of the port. So it can definitely be that the video output of the system should be 4:3, but the game itself should actually be viewed in a different ratio specific to that title.
Also, this article doesn't go into it, but there is a problem taking screenshots and video recordings of games from emulators because they don't usually embed the aspect ratio into the media file. So when they files are viewed on the Web they look wrong. I did some tests with this recently -- YouTube supports AR metadata. More tests here: https://bsky.app/profile/pekkavaa.bsky.social/post/3lbyzru2e...
- You could make the argument that if the port was originally released that way, then it's 'authentic' enough to emulate it the same way on that particular target system. But yep, I can see why the squashed and stretched graphics would bother people, even if they match the experience on the actual hardware. The thing is, it's a bit of a slippery slope, because sooner or later you come across a case where some of the art was made on system A, and some on system B (with a different aspect ratio) to tweak or flesh out the port, or whatever. So some circles turn out perfectly round, while others are ellipsoid... and then whatcha gonna do? :) (IIRC the first Star Control suffers from this, although I could be thinking of something else here.)
100% agreed on the screenshot/video issue; that's kinda what I meant at the end of my last post. I've also discovered that Youtube respects PAR/DAR metadata, but I find it more useful to actually scale the video myself before uploading, by appropriate X/Y factors. That lets you sidestep the issues you commonly get when you leave the scaling to the YT backend/frontend, like blur and incorrect gamma... (and if your source is RGB, it's also a good idea do the YUV conversion yourself while you're at it.)
- I agree that platinum feels like it should be whiter than cream. It's more of an artistic name. I once showed my car to a friend and informed him the paint color was "Champagne Gold." He took one look at it and said "No, it's metallic beige."
- tldr: nobody knows! but it's a fun read :)
- Back when I ran one of those machines, I was struck by just how on point the display was!
That resolution was dead on point for the CRT Apple used. It was capable of a bit more, say 700 lines, maybe even 800 horizontally. Vertically, maybe 400 to 480 would be pushing it.
Say they used 640x480. The user would have been happy with a pixel in the horizontal direction, and maybe less happy with it in the vertical one. And it would have been a bit less crisp all 9bwr the screen, IMHO.
Monochrome CRTs can be over driven to a crazy amount and they just work. And often, unless the overdrive is just crazy, the user will probably see the differences as the GUI changes too. I have run 1024x768 on a 7" amber screen.
Worked, but not well.
It is much happier with about 500 vertical lines and more like 700 horizontal ones.
PAL ish monochrome 720x586 looks fantastic and is 50hz. Slow phosphors = 50hz being no big deal. NTSC ish 720x480 at 60hz looks good too, maybe a bit more crisp.
All I am saying is for that CRT, the resolution Apple chose will look great! And that is due to that particular CRT and drive circuit.
I think Apple could have pushed it to 640, lime the GS machine could do, and go 400 lines vertical and that CRT would perform almost as well. We may not even be able to tell.
Maybe they did not do that as an overall balance between what the 68K could pixel wrangle, RAM and CRT performance.
- VRML was everywhere in 1995. At least, everywhere in the media. Any time a TV show had to mention the Internet they would show some 3D avatars moving around a virtual world. Made for much more interesting footage than the grey Mosaic browser background.
- Even as a teenager in 1995, I was baffled by VRML. The web barely had interactivity, barely had commerce, barely had halfway-decent page layout! And yet VRML was supposed to be the "next big thing"??
It felt like how it would have if there'd been a massive industry push for smell-o-vision hardware and browser support for an odor-describing markup language. Like, how did that get settled on by so many as the next thing to tackle?!
- Yes! I ran a very high end CAD tool on SGI computers at that time and it could output whe assemblies to VRML!
And that capability preceded other tools and file formats by a decade easy! And offered as many features, and a few we still don't see today given things like Siemens JT, or PTC and whatever they use now.
We would display them three ways:
Netscape was the easy way, and one got a cool view manipulation GUI that way. This performed pretty well on higher end 90's hardware. Could display most of the front of a car with full dimensions and other annotations at reasonable frame rates.
Or, use the dedicated Java viewer the program output in addition to the raw file, which is what the browser used.
Or, buy a viewer tool, and we had one. Cosmo something....
On SGI, using the Java viewer, one could view the VRML in actual 3D with shutter glasses and pull up predefined views useful to shop people.
Really cool. Very few used the real 3D capability.
And that remains true today!
I have another high end CAD tool on my laptop, and it can display 3D on my 60 inch plasma at home. Does it 60hz per eye, which is crazy for both being more than a decade old!
There are at most a handful of companies able to employ similar capability today. Space X is one who does use it however. Go Space X!
I do, and will model complex surfaces in 3D. Pure joy to use.
But, it has to be that most users either do not care, or 3D bothers them, or something...
Also, same goes for viewing files. A small number used VRML back in the day. Today, a smaller, though also a larger than back in the day number use those tools today.
The rest are on paper or static PDF.
FWIW: Open WRL will display the 90's era CAD VMRL data. Kudos to them!
- Yes, it was. I remember writing code to output a network diagram in VRML and it was possible to manipulate the diagram in the web browser (I think Netscape Navigator).
- Wow. That's all I have to say. This is the level of detail we can all wish for in our emulators.
- Indeed. The level of dedication, time and skill it required for this guy to analyze and fix the dozen+ incredibly arcane and minuscule differences between the emulator and actual hardware just so he could remove the small mod that detected this one demo is simply unbelievable. All just for this one demo which does truly insane, deeply unnatural things no other demo (or game) ever attempted. Plus the existing mod already allowed the emulator to play the demo perfectly down to the pixel and millisecond. It just bothered him that a special case mod was needed, so he spent well over a year on research, debugging and analysis - including writing several quite sophisticated visualization tools to specifically identify these incredibly minor divergences.
It's double amazing because the demo is incredible for identifying these insanely challenging tricks and getting them to run on primitive hardware no one thought could display this level of colors or animation AND then a software emulation of the vintage IBM 5150 PC (and monitor) being so precise it's able to recreate this one-off insanity in cycle-accurate real-time with NO case-specific hacks. It blows my mind that either one of these actually exists. Both together is the stuff of heroic retro legends. I'm confident none of the 1970s designers of the 6845 chip would have ever believed their chip was capable of generating these graphics.
- More
i had a zx +2 and wrote code on it in basic. the extra commands the 128k basic had allowed you to swap data in and out of the extra ram. it was still an antiquated basic compared to basics like the bbc or the amstrad cpc's which where around at the same time. but it was cheaper and had a massive user base. so much more software available.