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Bad Apple on an Apple //e: playing video on a stock 1 MHz Apple II [video]
- apricot 6y agoThe author gives some technical information in this Reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/apple2/comments/mbrh2f/playing_video_on_an_apple_e/ https://www.reddit.com/r/apple2/comments/mbrh2f/playing_vide...
- ddingus 6y agoHe's running code out of the region of memory that the CF card dumps the data from the disc to! Basically it's an entire 90 kilobyte program that draws the animation! Edit: 90 Megabyte! Something like this could have been possible back in the day, given a DMA capable i/o transfer device. LDA #PIXELS STA #SCREEN . . .
- apricot 6y agoThe transcoder that he wrote to convert the source video to a 90 MB 6502 program that draws the animation is pretty nifty too: there's no time to update the whole screen between frames, so he diffs them and updates as many pixels as he can, starting with the ones that are most noticeable according to a perceptual distance metric. Details in this talk from two years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM3deQAgMpE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM3deQAgMpE
- ddingus 6y agoThanks for linking his other talk. The result is pretty great. I will enjoy the details.
- rangibaby 6y agoIt’s interesting to me that someone smart enough could have thought of this in 1981, but considered it impossible because 90MB was an absurdly large amount of data
- ddingus 6y agoAnd from what source material?
- Tabular-Iceberg 6y agoFilm and video certainly did exist in the 1980s.
- danparsonson 6y agoBut could anybody digitise it?
- ddingus 6y agoThis! Mechner pioneered doing that from VHS when doing his game Prince of Persia. Something like Bad Apple would be a heavy lift.
- retrac 6y agoThere are experiments with full motion digital video dating back to the 1970s. While computers certainly weren't fast enough to stream video data to or from memory (and you'd fill a supercomputer's entire RAM with 2 seconds of uncompressed video), video could be DAC'd in real time while streaming off digital tape, and vice versa. And such tape data could be read in, processed and written out by a computer (slowly...) Still, while technically possible to do this sort of video compression in 1981, it would have involved extremely specialized hardware to scan the film in the first place, and a good amount of compute time on a real big machine like the Cray-1 to do the compression. (And Rick Astley wasn't a star yet, so what would have been the point?) Fun fact though: just two years later, Cyndi Lauper's iconic music video was edited in digital form, including the insertion of computer-processed video effects: https://youtu.be/PIb6AZdTr-A?t=90 https://youtu.be/PIb6AZdTr-A?t=90 While such things as picture-in-picture are so common today we don't even notice it unless pointed out, that was mind-blowing at the time. But it took hardware worth a million dollars due to the megabytes of RAM required to fit the 10 second clips they worked with.
- 6y ago
- JKCalhoun 6y agoWould there have been a 95MB disk drive available for the AppleII in those days? (And at what cost?) Amazing though.
- tambourine_man 6y agoIt was about a megabyte per cassette tape, depending on the encoding, right (counting both sides)? Doable, with lots of tape swapping, I guess :) Though probably a shorter version would be nicer [edit] Forget that, from the Reddit link: “We end up reading data at about 533KB/sec, and are I/O bound.”
- apricot 6y agoA custom-made cassette reading peripheral card in every slot, and eight cassette players running in parallel at high speed?
- tambourine_man 6y agoI like how you think :)
- ddingus 6y agoLol, this should be done. Dealing with sync issues would be top of the list. Maybe stagger them, so they can be stopped every so often. Reach key data, kill motor, wait, start motor? Or maybe just toggle the motor line quick? Just enough to slow it a little! All kinds of insanity possible. Stereo tapes could possibly deliver 2400 baud x 2. Eight 4,800 baud tapes * 2 minutes 'ish I am coming up with 0.5 to 1MB range numbers :( But I really like this craziness!
- setpatchaddress 6y agoNot a chance, no. Here's something from 1985: https://www.atarimagazines.com/creative/v11n8/36_The_Sider_10Mb_of_mass_s.php https://www.atarimagazines.com/creative/v11n8/36_The_Sider_1... > Five years ago I drooled over the new 5Mb Winchester hard disk drives being introduced to the Apple II market. Although I knew how useful a hard disk could be, I also knew that I would never be able to justify the purchase of a $3000 mass storage device for a $2000 computer. I also knew that I would never be able to fill 5Mb of disk space. > How times have changed. Today, a full fledged Apple IIc or IIe costs a little over $1000. And a 10Mb hard disk drive costs only $695. That's right. First Class Peripherals offers the Sider, a hard disk drive with 10Mb partitionable among four operating systems for $695.
- tambourine_man 6y agoThis is freaking amazing. Is that just me or is retro computing all the rage right now? I don't know if Google's algorithm has taken a hint, but it seems like it's everywhere I look.
- ddingus 6y agoIt has been growing nicely for a few years. The pandemic helped retro, IMHO. Whatever the cause, I love to see all the stuff people are doing, and the whole scene reminds me how far we have come. [Looks over at 1Mhz Apple //e, thinking about some fixed point code to drop into that retrogame project...] What I did was buy some goodies. 16Mhz CPU card, CFFA for disk storage. Floppies are getting super long in the tooth. Now the machine can be really quick! Lots of fun possible.
- charcircuit 6y agoWhy not just emulate an older computer? Using old hardware like that will be slow and inconvenient.
- kitsunesoba 6y agoDepends a lot on the machine in question, but in many (if not most) cases emulators aren’t particularly accurate and can sometimes be missing major features. For example if you want to run classic PowerPC Mac games with 3D graphics, you’re going to need an actual old Mac because no emulators currently implement enough of a GPU to run them. Aside from that, with emulators you’re adding layers of indirection and modern technology with unavoidably higher overhead (like USB) that impact latency — even if emulated machines are faster in some ways they can be less responsive than actual hardware. The best of both worlds are hardware recreations of classic machines using modern technology, but these are exceptionally rare. It’s a shame because with how much everything has shrunk, it’d probably be possible to build a meta-retro-box about the size of a NUC that contained hardware for a bunch of different systems.
- 6y ago
- marcodiego 6y agoNone of these bad apple demos impressed me more than the master system one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLRtjkkBto0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLRtjkkBto0
- argvargc 6y agoWow, it's full colour with PCM music and looks like its only a 4.5MB zip download. Definitely way beyond any others. (For anyone unaware, the Sega Master System CPU was a Z80 @ 4Mhz, and the system had 8KB RAM and 16KB VRAM.) Video player details here: https://github.com/gligli/tiler https://github.com/gligli/tiler
- anyfoo 6y agoIt would be a shame not to mention Jim Leonard's 8088 Domination, which pioneered (I think) the whole idea in 2014 for the original IBM PC, by also converting Bad Apple as full-motion video into 8086 machine code (8088 is the same software-wise)! https://trixter.oldskool.org/2014/06/19/8088-domination-post-mortem-part-1/ https://trixter.oldskool.org/2014/06/19/8088-domination-post... The video is linked at the top of the excellent writeup, the Bad Apple part starts after an initial color video part. It's truly amazing, and I wonder what I would have felt if I had seen that on an IBM PC back in its day.
- rangibaby 6y ago> It's truly amazing, and I wonder what I would have felt if I had seen that on an IBM PC back in its day. I felt the same way about the 8088 MPH demo, knowledge that the original IBM PC could do that would have had unimaginable effects.
- Klaster_1 6y agoI still remember how suprised I was when I saw Jim's familiar face in "8088 Domination" credits. He's a co-founder of MobyGames, to which I dedicated several years of my youth and still remember fondly. If you read this, thank you.
- prpl 6y agoPioneered? I remember creating videos for my TI-83+ in 2000 (z80): https://www.ticalc.org/archives/news/articles/4/41/41557.html https://www.ticalc.org/archives/news/articles/4/41/41557.htm...
- anyfoo 6y agoThanks, I wasn't aware (hence the "I think" in parentheses in my original comment). It's not entirely clear from the very short article, but "outputting a compiled TI-83 assembly program" seems to indicate that that was indeed a similar approach already.
- rrdharan 6y ago50 years from now: “we backported <AGI> to an AMD Ryzen with only 64GB of RAM and 16 cores”...
- flobosg 6y agoBy the way, the Bad Apple!! video has been ported to several retro platforms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Apple!!#Demoscene https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Apple!!#Demoscene
- PostThisTooFast 6y agoWhat is the origin of this "Bad Apple" video, and why is it everywhere all of a sudden?
- meibo 6y agoBecause it may not be obvious to everyone: Bad Apple is a music video from the Japanese video game series "Touhou" which is sort of a fan favorite among the crowd that would port FMV to retro systems. It's not really all that recent, if you put it into YouTube you'll find ports of it to all sorts of retro consoles and PC's all throughout the last century. I assume it's also quite popular for this use case since it's monochrome.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- krapp 6y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lNZ_Rnr7Jc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lNZ_Rnr7Jc
- numpad0 6y agohttps://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm8628149 https://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm8628149 No one involved complained as long as end result remain roughly BY-NC and the music is cool so everyone just took it and put into various projects, which only made it increasingly famous. The original song was for the PC-98 game by ZUN, vocal remix was by Alstromeria Records, I don’t think video creators for the concept and the famous version has preferred names to be associated with.
- dwheeler 6y agoThe video's been around since 2009. Video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FtutLA63Cp8 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FtutLA63Cp8 Wikipedia article: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Apple https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Apple!! I recommend watching this video, "Bad Apple explained:History and Analysis": https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6QY4ekac1_Q https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6QY4ekac1_Q It's fascinating. I think this video is a fabulous example of community creation.
- cromwellian 6y agoC64 version using VQ compression: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsDy-4L6-tQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsDy-4L6-tQ A much much more impressive display of the same tech in this Onslaught Eclectic demo by the same author: Real time decode of video and audio from floppy at 16fps https://youtu.be/FTtKHLZTbtA?t=713 https://youtu.be/FTtKHLZTbtA?t=713
- wiz21c 6y agoYep. Doing it with a HD is soooo much easier it's not even funny. Onslaught is definitively 10000x much more impressive. I can't resist to post my own version on Apple 2 too (without sound because I was not fluent with MockingBoard at the time): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiSFeqedcho https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiSFeqedcho Compression is the real deal !
- tasty_freeze 6y agoVideo on a TRS-80 model 1/3/4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ah9HSCZzQI0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ah9HSCZzQI0
- foft 6y agoJACs version for the Atari 400/800 is also impressive. Using the ANTIC for character set compression and displays as overscan. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiLB8PQUJtc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiLB8PQUJtc