61–70 of 73 posts
There's something very... right about the black and white rendering from those early macs. Can't exactly put my finger on it but they seem very natural in a way that I can't readily identify in any other setting.
A crisp, high contrast display and neat, little square pixels just reinforces that kind of regenerative feedback loop.
Bill Atkinson of Apple developed a new dithering algorithm for early Macs. I wonder if it was used for this rendering. https://beyondloom.com/blog/dither.html
The author says “Software-wise I use Aldus SuperPaint 3.0”, so I expect it was drawn 100% by hand.
I don't understand- in what sense is this "1 bit"?
Some common formats:
1 bit .... b/w (foreground or background color set per pixel)
4 bit .... 16 colors (indexed color palette or 16 shades of grey in 1 channel)
8 bit .... 256 colors (indexed color palette or 1-channel greyscale image)
12 bit ... 16 x 16 x 16 colors, 3 color channels at 4 bits for 4,096 colors total
24 bit ... 256 x 256 x 256 colors, 3 color channels at 8 bits for 16,777,216 colors total
32 bit ... as above, but including an extra alpha channel (mask) for 256 levels of transparency
"8-bit" is also used for graphics on 8-bit computers, most often a palette of 8 or 16 indexed colors in some sort of sub-palette (e.g., 2 bit = 4 out of 8 or 16 colors), in rare cases even 128 colors (like on the Atari 2600). Here, "8-bit" relates to the platform and not to image depth or a specific implementation.
Bill Atkinson of Apple developed a new dithering algorithm for early Macs. I wonder if it was used for this rendering. https://beyondloom.com/blog/dither.html
The author says “Software-wise I use Aldus SuperPaint 3.0”, so I expect it was drawn 100% by hand.
Bill Atkinson's dithering algorithm is great, and I use it for photos when I put them on the blog, to keep them aesthetically in line with the rest of the site
When viewing the site in Firefox, the font in the paragraphs has a very subtle rainbow effect. Here's a screenshot of it zoomed in: https://i.imgur.com/ir0MmPq.png I was wondering how they achieved that effect, but it doesn't seem intentional. It's not part of the CSS, and I only see it in FF, doesn't happen in Chrome. It goes away if I switch fonts, it looks like it's some weird result of how Firefox renders the sit…
If you're interested in showing photographs and paintings on a classic Mac, I actually made an app for that. It takes modern images, dithers them to 1-bit, and then exports the results to MacPaint format (encoded in MacBinary for easy transport). It works on modern versions of macOS: https://oaksnow.com/retrodither/
This site design is one of the best retro Mac site designs I've seen. The author really nailed the pixel perfect fonts — it looks perfect on my low-DPI and high-DPI displays. If anyone's interested, there's an active HyperCard community with some fun projects. There's a Discord server, too. https://hypercard.org/ I found that community through the Avara community, a port of the classic Mac multiplayer networked mech…
On a whim, I picked up an e-ink display, 1800x1400 that has 16 grey shades, though I am unclear whether that is per pixel. Should know soon.
As I learn to use the display, throwing some of this art on it should look great.
That is all really. Just wanted to say nice work from one bit per pixel lover to another.
There's something very... right about the black and white rendering from those early macs. Can't exactly put my finger on it but they seem very natural in a way that I can't readily identify in any other setting.
Still looks great.
For what it is worth, an e-ink display will look fantastic! I have one and will view this eye candy on it soon enough.
