6 ms·
Why was the Amiga Kickstart 1.x “Insert floppy” graphic so bad?
- mortenjorck 6y agoI never would have guessed that the Kickstart 1.x graphic was vector, but it’s so clear in retrospect. It’s not hard to spot the nodes of the pre-Bézier shape paths once you’re looking for them!
- throwaway2048 6y agoROM space was definitely at a premium, similarly the PS1 booting splash screen was a rendered 3d graphic, with synthesized sound, not a static image with PCM data. You can have some fun with causing it to corrupt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VcbhDbCY7Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VcbhDbCY7Q
- LocalH 6y agoWhat’s even more impressive is a basically identical graphic was in the 8KB A1000 boot ROM, to ask for a Kickstart disk
- badsectoracula 6y agoThere is a youtube video in the comments with a recreation of the vector image from the original graphics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXhxE4j6dm0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXhxE4j6dm0
- aphrax 6y agoUsing AMOS Basic nontheless
- squarefoot 6y agoYes, a powerful language paired with an incredibly fast interpreter/compiler even on low end Amigas; not a BASIC fan here, but have to admit it was really great. It's also Open Source [0], although it's entirely written in M68K assembly language (hence the high speed) which would likely turn any porting effort into a nightmare. [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20151031001644/http://www.pianetaamiga.it/downloads/AMOSPro_Sources.zip https://web.archive.org/web/20151031001644/http://www.pianet...
- gsmo 6y agoHow funny, I've been on an 80s Amiga Cracktro/Demoscene kick this week and it is an image frequently seen and tweaked in many demos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50WWFEBsgfk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50WWFEBsgfk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pssH6moTGLc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pssH6moTGLc (I couldn't find the specific intros with the funny graphic...)
- etaioinshrdlu 6y agoIt also has an odd mix of anti-aliased text and non-anti-aliased. Additionally, I don't like the aspect ratio of the floppy disk.
- NathanielK 6y ago> Additionally, I don't like the aspect ratio of the floppy disk. The Amiga used a standard 320x200 pixel mode [1] for it's boot screen. On a normal 4:3 CRT this mean the pixels are non-square. Since CRTs are analog, it doesn't really matter to the monitor, but if you just look at the digital bits without stretching them it looks a little flat. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_13h https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_13h
- reaperducer 6y agoRoot cause: The Amiga didn't have curves in its graphic primitives. Just this week i read an article in a 1986 Byte magazine which included a comparison of the Amiga and Macintosh graphic privatives. The Amiga had color routines, but the Mac had circles, curves, rounded rectangles, and a few other desirable shapes that the Amiga lacked. Except for the text, the Kickstart image is not a bitmap, it's the output of a vector drawing program using the built-in ROM routines. No curves, and that's what you get. Edit: September, 1986, page 251.
- TMWNN 6y agohttps://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1986-09/page/n259/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1986-09/page/n259/...
- Aardwolf 6y agoFor me mostly the aspect ratio looks too wide. Not sure if it also looked like that on an Amiga monitor, did it have square pixels?
- ansible 6y agoMost TV output and home computer monitors in the 1980's did not have square pixels. Source: lived through those times...
- perl4ever 6y agoI thought it was just the Amiga. Like, Macs had square pixels, to my recollection, both 512x342 and 640x480. I had forgotten that VGA was 320x200 not 320x240, but PCs also had 640x480, so it seems like square or not square depended on the mode. Strictly speaking, I don't think square pixels were a characteristic of the monitor. If you looked closely there were little dots on a shadow mask monitor considerably smaller than the average pixel, or horizontal gaps between the wires on a trinitron.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ansible 6y agoAnd just to throw a wrench into things, EGA had modes like 640x350.
- andrewstuart 6y agoBad? What about iconically good? Instantly recognisable definitive Amiga ... that's good isn't it?
- panic 6y agoIf you want to see what the image would look like at high resolution -- I couldn't resist making a small JS implementation: http://ianhenderson.org/kickstart-vector.html http://ianhenderson.org/kickstart-vector.html
- sgt 6y agoNow imagine your boss coming back a week later.... panic, I showed it to the client and they love it. Can you quickly change it to hold the floppy between the index finger and thumb - at an angle? It's probably easy to do.
- RodgerTheGreat 6y agoBeaten to the punch, but at least we took fairly different approaches: http://beyondloom.com/tools/amigogh.html http://beyondloom.com/tools/amigogh.html
- tyingq 6y agoNice. Might be interesting to try ctx.scale(0.9,1) or whatever ratio approximates the pixel shape on the Amiga in that video mode...would square up the shape of the floppy.
- RodgerTheGreat 6y agoAdded to mine. Experimentally, it looks like a 4:3 ratio makes the floppy come out square, which lines up with expectations.
- tyingq 6y agoAn unfinished, but "sorta working" attempt to recreate that vector drawing data onto an html canvas. https://jsfiddle.net/kw4b95gv/4/ https://jsfiddle.net/kw4b95gv/4/ I didn't do the color flood fill, and something isn't quite right, but it's recognizable.
- fortyseven 6y agoTossing my JS implementation onto the pile as well, I guess. Missing the flood fill command; picked the wrong graphics library for this and it was too late by the time I'd realized it. ;) Easy enough to change over to something else, but it's time to move on. https://codepen.io/Fortyseven/pen/rNWZpJb https://codepen.io/Fortyseven/pen/rNWZpJb