Really cool! Reminds me of distellamap by Ben Fry (co-creator of Processing) - http://benfry.com/distellamap/
Plotter Drawings: Five seconds of Donkey Kong
61–69 of 69 posts
Re: Plotter Drawings: Five seconds of Donkey Kong
#62What is going on with Mega Man? The other games look relatively atomic but Mega Man has obvious dependencies spanning memory locations...
It's shuffling the order of its 256-byte sprite buffer each frame to implement sprite flicker, which is done because the NES can only render 8 sprites per scanline.
Re: Plotter Drawings: Five seconds of Donkey Kong
#63What is going on with Mega Man? The other games look relatively atomic but Mega Man has obvious dependencies spanning memory locations...
It's shuffling the order of its 256-byte sprite buffer each frame to implement sprite flicker, which is done because the NES can only render 8 sprites per scanline.
Nice! I knew about sprite shuffling and wondered how it would look here but didn't realize that was what was going on in this particular case.
Re: Plotter Drawings: Five seconds of Donkey Kong
#64Late to the party, but just wanted to comment that I appreciated the namesake spelled out by social media icons in the footer. Some people put thought into all angles :)
Haha, everyone says that but it's totally coincidental - they're just in alphabetical order. (GitHub looks like an O)
Re: Plotter Drawings: Five seconds of Donkey Kong
#65Very cool! I did a something using bitmaps a few months back ( https://blog.mattbierner.com/nes-memory/ ) but I really like how he visualized changes here. If anyone is interested in exploring something similar, here's the simple fceux script I used to sample the memory of a running NES game: https://github.com/mattbierner/NES-Memory-Visualization/blob...
Your blog post is fascinating and I'm tinkled pink I found it, as I was planning on doing a NES memory visualization project myself for a design class this semester. Your idea of representing the bits as pixels is exactly what I was cooking up in my preliminary notes. It's awesome to see that I wasn't alone in my idea; your write-up and code will be a great starting point -- a valuable citation for sure.
Re: Plotter Drawings: Five seconds of Donkey Kong
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
No masters, each one sold is unique! If you buy one, I'll play another round of Donkey Kong. haha
It's totally worth $200. Same person has probably splurged on something they deem is worth $200.
Chances are most people are reading this story on a phone that costs $200 to make and sells for $700.
Re: Plotter Drawings: Five seconds of Donkey Kong
#67Woah, hey, it's me! I wanted to share this on HN but wasn't sure if it was kosher. I guess someone else did it for me! I just started working on these last week and they were very well received on Twitter. Then, to my astonishment, Edward Tufte retweeted it! https://twitter.com/EdwardTufte/status/954537749234765825 I have one of his books but didn't realize he was on Twitter until that moment. I was blown away. A lot…
Cool, you wrote your own NES emulator for this? This is off-topic, but I've been meaning to write an emulator for ARM Cortex-M platforms as an introduction to the idea, but haven't had much luck finding good beginner-friendly resources. So...thanks for writing up and collating so much information about the NES in one place!
I'd recommend having a look at emulators for other chips in general and just tailoring them to ARM Cortex-M. The architecture reference manuals (ARM ARMs, har har) are freely available on ARM's website[0]. I'd recommend the ARMv6-M for Cortex-M0/+ or ARMv7-M for Cortex-M3/4/7. I think the latter manual covers both ARMv7-M (M3) as well as ARMv7E-M (M4 and M7).
[0] - http://infocenter.arm.com/help/index.jsp?topic=/com.arm.doc....
Re: Plotter Drawings: Five seconds of Donkey Kong
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
As numbered edition artworks that would be considered very low end. The price is a reflection of both intrinsic and extrinsic value as perceived in the fine art world. Intrinsic meaning the investment of individualized effort, which include what we might call "set up costs," and extrinsic meaning: can this artist command some multiplier based on their name? $200 suggests a modest return on modest sales by an "unknown…
As a lifetime student of art I consider the art world and its notions of 'intrinsic value' to be bunk. As I said before he is free to price his art at whatever rate he wants, and I am free to object to whatever price I want.
You'll notice in my description I'm describing as intrinsic tangible costs, e.g. materials. E.g. in this case what would be investment in the hardware plotter, paper, software... etc (There are opportunity costs for time which are pretty objective as well.
That is: I do think that so long as you assume someone isn't for more complicated or personal reasons distributing their work at a loss, there are really intrinsic costs... and hence arguably an intrinsic value. Assuming that your market agrees that you've done more than ruin the materials as materials.
BUT I agree with you, these costs are usually immaterial in most art world attributions of value. That is, who cares if a De Kooning consumed $400 in paint on a $400 canvas.
My interest was that in most industries, e.g. non-consumer hardware electronic goods, it's an industry standard to charge something on the order of 4:1 or 8:1 over the material costs, to account for all the less tangible costs: and provide a "healthy" profit which is liable to not also be so high as to invite competition.
In this case then it'd be expected that the cost of tangible material investment was around $25-50/work, which seems the right ballpark at least.
QED IMO anyway those drawings aren't "overpriced," quite the contrary. :)
Re: Plotter Drawings: Five seconds of Donkey Kong
#69What is going on with Mega Man? The other games look relatively atomic but Mega Man has obvious dependencies spanning memory locations...
I don't see Mega Man on the linked page -- is it somewhere else?