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Many interesting learnings. One of them is how much the level of abstraction has been pushed up thru the years of technological improvements. A graphic designer
by josep-panadero 6y ago
Many interesting learnings. One of them is how much the level of abstraction has been pushed up thru the years of technological improvements. A graphic designer in 2020 does not need to know how memory works in the CPU, not even most developers need to know that.
The other learning, in the oposite direction, is about "A Pixel Is Not A Little Square" (http://alvyray.com/Memos/CG/Microsoft/6_pixel.pdf http://alvyray.com/Memos/CG/Microsoft/6_pixel.pdf). Abstractions are really useful, but they fail in some cases. Pixels are more complex that the abstractions we use.
And, of course, the article has some beautiful graphics.
- Daho0n 6y agoOh wow, square pixels. That takes me back. Thank you for the link.
- rob74 6y agoOTOH, square pixels are mostly an artifact - back in the day, if you looked at the image your C64 or your SNES would produce on your TV, you couldn't really see the individual pixels as squares, because the low-quality analog display provided its own "antialiasing" - that's what emulators have trouble recreating...
- jcelerier 6y agonah, I have a CRT TV hooked up for retro gaming and things look pretty square
- lmm 6y agoThey're not sharp-edged squares, they're dots; they might be broadly rectangular but they'll have rounded ends and fade gently at the edges. Look at short-exposure photos showing a scanline in process.
- city41 6y agoOn CRT displays, a pixel can be rectangular. It depends on how many pixels are jammed into a line, which is completely arbitrary. This causes oddities with emulators as pixels are always square on modern displays. This is especially an interesting problem with the Super Nintendo, this video explains it all nicely: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssluTgfkdlg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssluTgfkdlg
- JKCalhoun 6y ago> "A Pixel Is Not A Little Square" A pixel is a little circle. (just kidding — skimmed your link though and it was my 30-second takeaway)