9 ms·

Four-Byte Burger [video]

retrocryptid 4y ago
This is crazy. And I mean that as a complement. It mixes geeky obsession with high production values to produce a tour-d-force of 80s nostalgia and personal accomplishment. Well worth watching, even if you're unfamiliar with the 1980s, the Amiga or the original artwork.
- Lev1a 4y ago
  AFAIK Ahoy has been pretty famous for his high production values using well-done research, slick graphics and nice animations for a number of years.
- FireInsight 4y ago
  Ahoy is a very high quality channel! Highly recommend watching the video about Polybius, and the one about the first video game.
- nickt 4y ago
  Stu makes great videos - truly the David Attenborough of video game history. In case you've missed it, he has some other channels, including the brilliant DrinksAhoy [1], Krush Dev Diary [2] and music on Bandcamp [3] [1] https://www.youtube.com/@DrinksAhoy https://www.youtube.com/@DrinksAhoy [2] https://www.youtube.com/@krush8272/featured https://www.youtube.com/@krush8272/featured [3] https://xahoy.bandcamp.com/album/four-byte-burger https://xahoy.bandcamp.com/album/four-byte-burger
  - sph 4y ago
    A similar channel in style, thoroughness and love for the 80s and 90s is Posy. https://youtube.com/@PosyMusic https://youtube.com/@PosyMusic Recommended if you want to see deep, geeky and fun explorations of the world of liquid crystal displays, Hi-Fi stereos and anything that tickles his fancy. A good starting point: "Segmented Displays" — https://youtu.be/RTB5XhjbgZA https://youtu.be/RTB5XhjbgZA
senkora 4y ago
I would love to have a print of the reproduction as wall art.
- p1mrx 4y ago
  http://xboxahoy.com/images/four-byte-burger.png http://xboxahoy.com/images/four-byte-burger.png
  - blakespot 4y ago
    I don’t suppose there’s a version that is not scaled to 1.2x height, for conversion and display on an Amiga CRT, avoiding the need to scale the PNG and lose quality. (Ahoy, if you’re reading this.) I’d love to have such a version.
    - drewtato 4y ago
      https://i.imgur.com/sXiDtCg.png https://i.imgur.com/sXiDtCg.png
      - moron4hire 4y ago
        How are there JPG artifacts on a PNG?
        scrollaway 4y ago
        imgur is terrible and compresses png to jpg in some cases
    - zokier 4y ago
      Just opening it in GIMP and scaling back down to 200x320 seems to work fine, I don't notice any weird artifacts or anything.
  - xmonkee 4y ago
    Damn, just looking at this image for a minute can trigger an intense wave of nostalgia for my childhood.
VikingCoder 4y ago
I absolutely love this. However... I was wishing the recreation had been done in software rather than in Photoshop. I was hoping that some clever image processing would result in a Github Repository of a program that could take any photograph of a pixel image, and reproduce the original pixels. Handling all of the distortions along the way...
- jonny_eh 4y ago
  "Wow, amazing accomplishment, I just wish you did it a different way" HN is wild.
  - VikingCoder 4y ago
    I'm not going to spend a day and a half reproducing old pixel art in Photoshop. I celebrate an artist who will take the time to do that, and I think their final result is fantastic. If there were a tool that would help me do this, there are situations where I would use it. I actually wrote a tool that took a PNG and helped me break out the original sprites, backgrounds, and fonts from an old video game. But I recognize that doing this from a photograph is a couple orders of magnitude more difficult. If anyone is looking for a technical challenge, and has the relevant skills, here I am highlighting how amazing I think it would be.
    - codetrotter 4y ago
      “I'm not going to spend a day and a half reproducing old pixel art in Photoshop” ..instead, I will spend a month and a half writing a piece of software to reproduce the pixel art for me. :^)
    - gorjusborg 4y ago
      The effort the author is willing to put in is a main reason why this content is entertaining to me. The other main component is that he followed through and did it. Commentary by those who don't care enough to invest a day doing it, that also haven't done it, and that are being critical of the work seems pathetic and sad. The work itself is inspiring and joyful.
throw7 4y ago
Leaving the monitor on its side overnight gets rid of the discoloration??? Ok, somewhere here must know why... or we're being bamboozled.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  Maybe for the same reason that you shouldn't mount chips upside-down lest all of the electrons fall out?
- kmoser 4y ago
  I can confirm that turning a monitor on its side does result in distorted colors, especially on the edges. When I experienced this with a Commodore 1701 monitor (we're talking early to mid-1980s) the only other electronic device nearby was the Commodore 64 it was attached to, so it's unlikely caused by other devices. This thread explains that you need to degauss the monitor after turning it on its side: http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=84041.0 http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=84041.0 I suspect leaving the monitor off overnight effectively degausses it.
  - throw7 4y ago
    Hmmm, in my vague memory I do remember some monitors having a "degausse" button...
    - hnbad 4y ago
      I believe that came later. I do recall my early IBM PC compatible having a monitor with a degauss button that would give a satisfying FOOMP sound (accompanied by a twitch of whatever was on the screen) if the monitor had been sufficiently gaussy before.
  - richyfreeway 4y ago
    I'm working from old memories here but iirc the degaussing circuits in TVs and monitors only work after they've cooled down. He didn't have to leave it all night, maybe an hour if that would have done.
donatj 4y ago
I feel like it'd be easier to write some software to do this rather than by hand in Photoshop. I somewhat wonder if there were actually at least 2 shades of blue in the background of the original given how much visible noise it contains.
- M4v3R 4y ago
  Yeah the background of the original also seemed to contain some kind of slight texture.
causality0 4y ago
An underrated aspect of digital image preservation in general is that you are not looking at it the way it was designed and intended to be viewed. These images were designed by someone working on a CRT to be viewed on a CRT. In some cases such as retro game emulation, the translation to LCD or OLED displays badly mangles the intended look. https://twitter.com/CRTpixels/status/1357132408634630144/photo/1 https://twitter.com/CRTpixels/status/1357132408634630144/pho...
- mbork_pl 4y ago
  Yes! I remember reading a long blog post or something about this very thing a few years ago, with photographs. The difference between a CRT and an LCD was amazing. Sadly, I couldn't find that post (and I did search...)
- wholinator2 4y ago
  Hmm, Twitter seems to be fully down currently. Even just twitter.com won't load
- zokier 4y ago
  I don't know if I'd call it underrated anymore nowdays that crt filters/shaders are mainstay in emulator community. Especially with 4k displays you can do quite a lot of tricks to get that CRT look. You have also products like Analogue Pocket that do incredibly detailed display emulation (although lcd instad of crt..). https://docs.libretro.com/shader/crt https://docs.libretro.com/shader/crt https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/12/analogue-pocket-review-the-greatest-game-boy-ever-made/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/12/analogue-pocket-revie... Some closeup shots of Analogue Pocket display https://www.reddit.com/r/AnalogueInc/comments/rikszr/analogue_pocket_macro_shots_of_display_modes/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AnalogueInc/comments/rikszr/analogu... edit: found also this lengthy article on setting up Amiga emulation with CRT shaders, which includes comparison shot with real CRT: https://blog.johnnovak.net/2022/04/15/achieving-period-correct-graphics-in-personal-computer-emulators-part-1-the-amiga/ https://blog.johnnovak.net/2022/04/15/achieving-period-corre...
  - VikingCoder 4y ago
icelancer 4y ago
Ahoy's channel is amazing. If you haven't delved into Iconic Arms and all the Retro videos, man, you're in for a treat.
joezydeco 4y ago
Jack Haeger is still around, working for a pinball company outside Chicago: https://www.pinballnews.com/site/2021/02/15/jack-haeger-joins-american-pinball/ https://www.pinballnews.com/site/2021/02/15/jack-haeger-join... Maybe someone can ask him about the art?
- tomcam 4y ago
  Thanks. I submitted a form on that page yesterday after reading your post. No luck so far I guess?
  - function_seven 3y ago
    He’s commented on the video now. It’s pinned. It brought the widest smile to my face to read it.
- neffo 4y ago
  How about... an Amiga-themed pinball machine?
stewx 4y ago
This is delightful. The attention to detail is astounding.
who-shot-jr 4y ago
This is computing heritage. wipes tear from eye
msie 4y ago
Shocked that there was no "save" functionality at the time. Inspiring actually: Just do it.
- rzzzt 4y ago
  Just freeze and save the entire contents of memory, paint program included, using an equivalent of an Action Replay (provided one existed for the Amiga at that time).
  - pham803 4y ago
    Datel didn't come out with an Action Replay cartridge for the Amiga until the A500 (ie, a few years after this). I still have my ARII- a truly amazing piece of hardware. In addition to letting you freeze a program and dump memory to disk, the cartridge had a ripper option that let you graphically pan through memory to look for images to save (another option searched for music trackers).
    - mattl 4y ago
      I had a Multiface for my CPC and it was an amazing piece of hardware.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
atum47 4y ago
A long time ago I was fiddling with code to "reconstruct" pixel art [1]. After watching this video I am tempted to try to restore this image using code. by the way, I first discovered ahoy back in 2016 and I've been a subscriber since. great videos of the highest quality. 1 - https://github.com/victorqribeiro/pixelRestorer https://github.com/victorqribeiro/pixelRestorer
- Raicuparta 4y ago
  The restored pixel art in every example is blurrier than the original jpegs, I guess because it didn't align perfectly with the original pixel grid. So it doesn't seem very useful.
tomcam 4y ago
Captivating. I mostly had to listen to it as a podcast, occasionally sneaking a glimpse at the screen while waiting at a red light, and his descriptions were so precise and vivid I had no trouble following along. Love the documentarian voice and dry humor.
marcodiego 4y ago
Once he got the color palette, resolution and aspect ratio, why didn't simply automated the conversion, eg. using nearest neighbor in color space to determine the color of each pixel? Why did he do it "by hand" instead?
- lovasoa 4y ago
  Because he's an artist, not a programmer. But I have to admit that, after finding the video on hacker news, I was quite surprised when he opened Photoshop too
  - Arnavion 4y ago
    Also that wouldn't have let him do the animation at the end of the video.
    - wyldfire 4y ago
      Just need to throw in some clever CV segmentation ;)
lvl102 4y ago
[flagged]
- codetrotter 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - rdlw 4y ago
    > It would be cool if the creator of the original four-byte burger made an NFT version of it. It would not be cool if the creator of the original four-byte burger made an NFT version of it.
andrepd 4y ago
Ahoy is an incredible channel. This video about tracker music is amazing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roBkg-iPrbw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roBkg-iPrbw
- M4v3R 4y ago
  This video is one of my favorites from Ahoy, what a great job preserving this awesome piece of retro music history.
zokier 4y ago
Does anyone have good scan of the original? Would be nice for playing along
blakespot 4y ago
XboxAhoy linked me his IFF, and here it is on my Amiga 1000 and 1080 CRT. (Obviously that old 1080 doesn't like to lie on its side...) Std: https://www.flickr.com/photos/blakespot/52835711339/in/album-72157621596272210/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/blakespot/52835711339/in/album... Rotated: https://www.flickr.com/photos/blakespot/52834954342/in/album-72157621596272210/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/blakespot/52834954342/in/album... So lovely in phosphor!
- djmips 4y ago
  Looks like you didn't wait so it would auto-degauss for the vertical.
kingcharles 4y ago
If anyone wonders what it is like to be born British, this is the answer. We can't help ourselves. This is the burden we live with on a daily basis.
daguava 4y ago
[dead]
vivegi 4y ago
This made my day. What a trip down memory lane!
umvi 4y ago
Did Ahoy compose the background music?
wodenokoto 4y ago
It's hard to say what is CRT and camera artifacts, but it looks to me like the background isn't flat.
2809 4y ago
I love how the 3.x Workbench still feels so close to a modern OS.
pwrrr 4y ago
Very cool thanks!

This is crazy. And I mean that as a complement. It mixes geeky obsession with high production values to produce a tour-d-force of 80s nostalgia and personal accomplishment. Well worth watching, even if you're unfamiliar with the 1980s, the Amiga or the original artwork.

Lev1a 4y ago
AFAIK Ahoy has been pretty famous for his high production values using well-done research, slick graphics and nice animations for a number of years.
FireInsight 4y ago
Ahoy is a very high quality channel! Highly recommend watching the video about Polybius, and the one about the first video game.
nickt 4y ago
Stu makes great videos - truly the David Attenborough of video game history. In case you've missed it, he has some other channels, including the brilliant DrinksAhoy [1], Krush Dev Diary [2] and music on Bandcamp [3] [1] https://www.youtube.com/@DrinksAhoy https://www.youtube.com/@DrinksAhoy [2] https://www.youtube.com/@krush8272/featured https://www.youtube.com/@krush8272/featured [3] https://xahoy.bandcamp.com/album/four-byte-burger https://xahoy.bandcamp.com/album/four-byte-burger
- sph 4y ago
  A similar channel in style, thoroughness and love for the 80s and 90s is Posy. https://youtube.com/@PosyMusic https://youtube.com/@PosyMusic Recommended if you want to see deep, geeky and fun explorations of the world of liquid crystal displays, Hi-Fi stereos and anything that tickles his fancy. A good starting point: "Segmented Displays" — https://youtu.be/RTB5XhjbgZA https://youtu.be/RTB5XhjbgZA

senkora 4y ago

I would love to have a print of the reproduction as wall art.

p1mrx 4y ago
http://xboxahoy.com/images/four-byte-burger.png http://xboxahoy.com/images/four-byte-burger.png
- blakespot 4y ago
  I don’t suppose there’s a version that is not scaled to 1.2x height, for conversion and display on an Amiga CRT, avoiding the need to scale the PNG and lose quality. (Ahoy, if you’re reading this.) I’d love to have such a version.
  - drewtato 4y ago
    https://i.imgur.com/sXiDtCg.png https://i.imgur.com/sXiDtCg.png
    - moron4hire 4y ago
      How are there JPG artifacts on a PNG?
      - scrollaway 4y ago
        imgur is terrible and compresses png to jpg in some cases
  - zokier 4y ago
    Just opening it in GIMP and scaling back down to 200x320 seems to work fine, I don't notice any weird artifacts or anything.
- xmonkee 4y ago
  Damn, just looking at this image for a minute can trigger an intense wave of nostalgia for my childhood.

VikingCoder 4y ago

I absolutely love this. However... I was wishing the recreation had been done in software rather than in Photoshop. I was hoping that some clever image processing would result in a Github Repository of a program that could take any photograph of a pixel image, and reproduce the original pixels. Handling all of the distortions along the way...

jonny_eh 4y ago
"Wow, amazing accomplishment, I just wish you did it a different way" HN is wild.
- VikingCoder 4y ago
  I'm not going to spend a day and a half reproducing old pixel art in Photoshop. I celebrate an artist who will take the time to do that, and I think their final result is fantastic. If there were a tool that would help me do this, there are situations where I would use it. I actually wrote a tool that took a PNG and helped me break out the original sprites, backgrounds, and fonts from an old video game. But I recognize that doing this from a photograph is a couple orders of magnitude more difficult. If anyone is looking for a technical challenge, and has the relevant skills, here I am highlighting how amazing I think it would be.
  - codetrotter 4y ago
    “I'm not going to spend a day and a half reproducing old pixel art in Photoshop” ..instead, I will spend a month and a half writing a piece of software to reproduce the pixel art for me. :^)
  - gorjusborg 4y ago
    The effort the author is willing to put in is a main reason why this content is entertaining to me. The other main component is that he followed through and did it. Commentary by those who don't care enough to invest a day doing it, that also haven't done it, and that are being critical of the work seems pathetic and sad. The work itself is inspiring and joyful.

throw7 4y ago

Leaving the monitor on its side overnight gets rid of the discoloration??? Ok, somewhere here must know why... or we're being bamboozled.

JohnFen 4y ago
Maybe for the same reason that you shouldn't mount chips upside-down lest all of the electrons fall out?
kmoser 4y ago
I can confirm that turning a monitor on its side does result in distorted colors, especially on the edges. When I experienced this with a Commodore 1701 monitor (we're talking early to mid-1980s) the only other electronic device nearby was the Commodore 64 it was attached to, so it's unlikely caused by other devices. This thread explains that you need to degauss the monitor after turning it on its side: http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=84041.0 http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=84041.0 I suspect leaving the monitor off overnight effectively degausses it.
- throw7 4y ago
  Hmmm, in my vague memory I do remember some monitors having a "degausse" button...
  - hnbad 4y ago
    I believe that came later. I do recall my early IBM PC compatible having a monitor with a degauss button that would give a satisfying FOOMP sound (accompanied by a twitch of whatever was on the screen) if the monitor had been sufficiently gaussy before.
- richyfreeway 4y ago
  I'm working from old memories here but iirc the degaussing circuits in TVs and monitors only work after they've cooled down. He didn't have to leave it all night, maybe an hour if that would have done.

donatj 4y ago

I feel like it'd be easier to write some software to do this rather than by hand in Photoshop. I somewhat wonder if there were actually at least 2 shades of blue in the background of the original given how much visible noise it contains.

M4v3R 4y ago
Yeah the background of the original also seemed to contain some kind of slight texture.

causality0 4y ago

An underrated aspect of digital image preservation in general is that you are not looking at it the way it was designed and intended to be viewed. These images were designed by someone working on a CRT to be viewed on a CRT. In some cases such as retro game emulation, the translation to LCD or OLED displays badly mangles the intended look. https://twitter.com/CRTpixels/status/1357132408634630144/photo/1 https://twitter.com/CRTpixels/status/1357132408634630144/pho...

mbork_pl 4y ago
Yes! I remember reading a long blog post or something about this very thing a few years ago, with photographs. The difference between a CRT and an LCD was amazing. Sadly, I couldn't find that post (and I did search...)
wholinator2 4y ago
Hmm, Twitter seems to be fully down currently. Even just twitter.com won't load
zokier 4y ago
I don't know if I'd call it underrated anymore nowdays that crt filters/shaders are mainstay in emulator community. Especially with 4k displays you can do quite a lot of tricks to get that CRT look. You have also products like Analogue Pocket that do incredibly detailed display emulation (although lcd instad of crt..). https://docs.libretro.com/shader/crt https://docs.libretro.com/shader/crt https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/12/analogue-pocket-review-the-greatest-game-boy-ever-made/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/12/analogue-pocket-revie... Some closeup shots of Analogue Pocket display https://www.reddit.com/r/AnalogueInc/comments/rikszr/analogue_pocket_macro_shots_of_display_modes/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AnalogueInc/comments/rikszr/analogu... edit: found also this lengthy article on setting up Amiga emulation with CRT shaders, which includes comparison shot with real CRT: https://blog.johnnovak.net/2022/04/15/achieving-period-correct-graphics-in-personal-computer-emulators-part-1-the-amiga/ https://blog.johnnovak.net/2022/04/15/achieving-period-corre...
- VikingCoder 4y ago

icelancer 4y ago

Ahoy's channel is amazing. If you haven't delved into Iconic Arms and all the Retro videos, man, you're in for a treat.

joezydeco 4y ago

Jack Haeger is still around, working for a pinball company outside Chicago: https://www.pinballnews.com/site/2021/02/15/jack-haeger-joins-american-pinball/ https://www.pinballnews.com/site/2021/02/15/jack-haeger-join... Maybe someone can ask him about the art?

tomcam 4y ago
Thanks. I submitted a form on that page yesterday after reading your post. No luck so far I guess?
- function_seven 3y ago
  He’s commented on the video now. It’s pinned. It brought the widest smile to my face to read it.
neffo 4y ago
How about... an Amiga-themed pinball machine?

stewx 4y ago

This is delightful. The attention to detail is astounding.

who-shot-jr 4y ago

This is computing heritage. wipes tear from eye

msie 4y ago

Shocked that there was no "save" functionality at the time. Inspiring actually: Just do it.

rzzzt 4y ago
Just freeze and save the entire contents of memory, paint program included, using an equivalent of an Action Replay (provided one existed for the Amiga at that time).
- pham803 4y ago
  Datel didn't come out with an Action Replay cartridge for the Amiga until the A500 (ie, a few years after this). I still have my ARII- a truly amazing piece of hardware. In addition to letting you freeze a program and dump memory to disk, the cartridge had a ripper option that let you graphically pan through memory to look for images to save (another option searched for music trackers).
  - mattl 4y ago
    I had a Multiface for my CPC and it was an amazing piece of hardware.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

atum47 4y ago

A long time ago I was fiddling with code to "reconstruct" pixel art [1]. After watching this video I am tempted to try to restore this image using code. by the way, I first discovered ahoy back in 2016 and I've been a subscriber since. great videos of the highest quality. 1 - https://github.com/victorqribeiro/pixelRestorer https://github.com/victorqribeiro/pixelRestorer

Raicuparta 4y ago
The restored pixel art in every example is blurrier than the original jpegs, I guess because it didn't align perfectly with the original pixel grid. So it doesn't seem very useful.

tomcam 4y ago

Captivating. I mostly had to listen to it as a podcast, occasionally sneaking a glimpse at the screen while waiting at a red light, and his descriptions were so precise and vivid I had no trouble following along. Love the documentarian voice and dry humor.

marcodiego 4y ago

Once he got the color palette, resolution and aspect ratio, why didn't simply automated the conversion, eg. using nearest neighbor in color space to determine the color of each pixel? Why did he do it "by hand" instead?

lovasoa 4y ago
Because he's an artist, not a programmer. But I have to admit that, after finding the video on hacker news, I was quite surprised when he opened Photoshop too
- Arnavion 4y ago
  Also that wouldn't have let him do the animation at the end of the video.
  - wyldfire 4y ago
    Just need to throw in some clever CV segmentation ;)

lvl102 4y ago

[flagged]

codetrotter 4y ago
[flagged]
- rdlw 4y ago
  > It would be cool if the creator of the original four-byte burger made an NFT version of it. It would not be cool if the creator of the original four-byte burger made an NFT version of it.

andrepd 4y ago

Ahoy is an incredible channel. This video about tracker music is amazing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roBkg-iPrbw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roBkg-iPrbw

M4v3R 4y ago
This video is one of my favorites from Ahoy, what a great job preserving this awesome piece of retro music history.

zokier 4y ago

Does anyone have good scan of the original? Would be nice for playing along

blakespot 4y ago

XboxAhoy linked me his IFF, and here it is on my Amiga 1000 and 1080 CRT. (Obviously that old 1080 doesn't like to lie on its side...) Std: https://www.flickr.com/photos/blakespot/52835711339/in/album-72157621596272210/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/blakespot/52835711339/in/album... Rotated: https://www.flickr.com/photos/blakespot/52834954342/in/album-72157621596272210/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/blakespot/52834954342/in/album... So lovely in phosphor!

djmips 4y ago
Looks like you didn't wait so it would auto-degauss for the vertical.

kingcharles 4y ago

If anyone wonders what it is like to be born British, this is the answer. We can't help ourselves. This is the burden we live with on a daily basis.

daguava 4y ago

[dead]

vivegi 4y ago

This made my day. What a trip down memory lane!

umvi 4y ago

Did Ahoy compose the background music?

wodenokoto 4y ago

It's hard to say what is CRT and camera artifacts, but it looks to me like the background isn't flat.

2809 4y ago

I love how the 3.x Workbench still feels so close to a modern OS.

pwrrr 4y ago

Very cool thanks!