There's a term I read about a long time ago, I think it was "aesthetic completeness" or something like that. It was used in the context of video games whose art direction was fully realized in the game, i.e. increases in graphics hardware or capabilities wouldn't add anything to the game in an artistic sense. The original Homeworld games were held up as examples.
Anyway, this reminded me of that. Making these pictures in anything but the tools of the time wouldn't just change them, they'd be totally different artworks. The medium is part of the artwork itself.
The same holds true for everything from cave paintings to Roman frescos. It's part of human expression. The tools of that expression shape it.
For example, Bach's music was shaped by the fact that the harpsichord had no sustain. The piano changed that, but "upscaling" Bach's work to take advantage of this new technology would destroy them. You use the new technology to play them as they were written for the old. The beauty comes through despite the change.
Similarly, Liszt made full use of what modern, powerful pianofortes are capable of - although were he a man of our times, he’d probably have been fronting a heavy metal band.
Western classical music had a strong tradition of taking advantage of cutting edge technological advances, especially in metallurgy but also advanced woodworking techniques like lamination making large soundboards possible and pushing the bounds of acoustic amplification.
It wasn't until I think around the advent of recorded music and electric amplification that it settled into a fairly stable set of instruments & sounds produced by them.
Settled, or ossified? Sure, there’s modern classical with more adventurous instrumentation, but that’s not what the moneyed retirees down at the opera house want to hear.
The music of the classical canon is unbelievably fantastic, and it deserves respectful treatment, but the genre has lost the audience for cool new sounds. It’s very unfortunate.
Yeah I actually used that word as I wrote it, and then switched it so I wouldn't come across as judgmental or anticlassical or whatever. I think it's a valid view of it. But my perspective here is that this kind of music is basically german-french elite traditional ethnic music. And as I don't negatively judge for example gamelan or carnatic or gagaku music for being settled/ossified I shouldn't judge traditional european music for that either.
It's simply not the role of any one musical practice to be at the forefront of experimentation forever. What we now call classical passed its torch on generations ago, and rock & jazz have now settled in too. We have hip hop and electronic music taking this role now, and eventually they will bind up into their own conventions and some descendant of theirs will push on.
I have this same ontological debate with myself, I settle it by having a rather stricter definition of classical music. Classical music is popular music that has remained popular for longer than two generations of listeners. Music that follows that certain large scale form is orchestral music.(or whatever sub genre it is)
This annoying behavior does not win me any friends but remember that the great classical composers were the rock stars of their day.
> remember that the great classical composers were the rock stars of their day.
I don't have a source for this but I hear it a lot and I strongly suspect it is a historiographical myth. Pretty much only a very small minority urban (relative) elite had access to live professionally performed classical music during most periods when it was being composed. This is also the group whose writings form most of our current knowledge base about these periods, and whose writings are of course focused primarily on their own interests. We can't really see what they didn't see, or didn't care enough to write about.
But contemporaneous with this elite music there were european folk music traditions, taught and performed ad hoc by individuals or small ensembles in homes and gathering places of the vast majority of "normal" people (peasant farmers, later urban laborers), and including some traveling performers who were known by reputation.
So yeah the great classical composers were wildly popular among the people who listened to the kind of music that they composed, but that was an extremely small part of the population. We don't have very much information at all about what was going on musically with the greater part of the population, but it appears to have been a completely separate thing, it's doubtful the great composers had any name recognition among the vast peasant masses.
Why? Says who? Historians find that our understanding of the past is never complete, and always open to reevaluation based on new information or techniques. I agree with them.
Neither, I’d argue. The greats that we look back at were the outliers, the madmen at the fringe. For every Beethoven or Mozart there were a thousand thousand nobodies cranking out the same stuff that their grandfathers wrote. Rachmaninov was seen as nouveau trash in his time, Holst derided, Gershwin hackneyed. Eno perhaps falls into the same category.
Hell, in a century you’ll see string quartets banging out Aphex Twin at elegant soirées. The real connoisseurs, of course, nod knowingly and mutter that drukqs is “early period”.
Similarly, plainsong was seen as “classical” music for many centuries, and was also a largely rigid form, but there exist some absolute bangers in the canon, mostly unattributed because monks.
It’s hard to see the sweep of history from within it.
Classical and jazz just stopped trying and standardized the instruments. Other types of music are more open to incorporating new instruments. At least that's how I feel.
FWIW the jazz tradition is still alive and well, it just isn't normally called that in the interest of not being confused with the still-extant "traditional" jazz and because many of the musicians consider themselves to be primarily part of some other community.
But there is an absolutely thriving collaboration- and improvisation-based music form grounded in jazz but open to novel & experimental instrumentation and ripe with influence from other contemporary forms like pop, hip hop, funk, reggaeton, metal. I'm thinking of people like thundercat, kamasi washington, nuclear power trio, tigran hamasyan, robert glasper, sungazer, domi & jd beck, louis cole etc.
If you like the sound of old school jazz, the standup bass the piano the brush drum shuffle, this stuff will be alien and hostile and won't feel like jazz to you. But if you like the musicianship of jazz, watching masters collaboratively invent new music in real time, this is where that ended up.
Switched-on Bach is a revelation in part because the synth bass tones are more focused, distinct, and identifiable than when the same notes are played on acoustic instruments — allowing you to hear harmonic interplay which I believe is closer to what Bach heard in his head.
But here are lots of Bach synth albums and only Wendy Carlos’ work has the taste and obsessive fidelity to the original compositions to allow those ideas to come through. Most synth Bach falls into the trap of being idiomatic synth rather than idiomatic Bach, akin to playing Bach on the piano without considering how it would have sounded on the harpsichord.
(have to donate to Internet Archive again now…) anyway Wiki says this album essentially brought the Moog/synths from experimental to popular music. In a lovely fashion, my ears do say.
Wendy Carlos is still with us at 85 years of age, but apparently hasn’t been able to press CDs for two decades, and hasn’t licensed her music for streaming. Her site links to CDs on Amazon, w/o new copies available. She sounds dope, even being an “accomplished solar eclipse photographer” per Wiki.
If anyone knows her I’m curious if someone could help her preserve/distribute these beautiful sounds. (Maybe they’re all preserved but just not distributed, and maybe she’s chillin’ and doesn’t need another cent so it’d just be hassle—wanted to throw it all out there for y’all.)
—
…thanks OP for the great art btw, since I haven’t mentioned it yet. Stood the test of time!
Well, it’s either mental issues, or this is the way she wants it. I assume the latter. She had connections. There are people even today who would throw themselves at her feet to make it happen. She was instrumental in helping Bob Moog make the synthesizer workable for musicians, according to Bob Moog. She did the original Tron soundtrack.
I definitely listened to a lot of Tomita as a kid, I used to check out vinyls of his albums from my local library. The one that sticks with me most distinctly is his very unique rendition of Golliwog’s Cakewalk. https://youtube.com/watch?v=dPQ9d10fnko But yeah, lots of other great stuff from him too.
Oh wow! I have not heard that name in a while! ( and yes, I know I still haven't heard it outside my own head, but that is just a nit to pick..)
Mars. That track is so great! All of them are, but that one shows off so many great synth techniques. One passage is noise that ramps. The spectral distribution changes, from emphasis on low notes to emphasis on high notes while the overall energy remains close to the same.
I remember it because I have never heard anyone else do that in a composition.
It’s interesting to think about the intersection of cultural, technology and aesthetic.
Gaming embraces most of its historical aesthetics while say movies do not. There aren’t serious attempts to replicate the aesthetic of 50’s tv (which are tied in heavily with the culture of the time) similarly, jn the eighties and I imagine prior, I’ve been watching Miami vice and you can tell lots of the rooms are cheap sets with pretty minimal props. This is on the one hand definetly not full formed, but on the other hand I’ve grown to appreciate that aesthetic,
And again other art forms like painting and video games seem to appreciate all eras of aesthetics in their modern versions in a Way tv and movies don’t. (Maybe just due to expense?)
I was also considering the effect of how silent computing used to be. It created a tension and expectation when waiting for an image to appear like waiting for a curtain to open on a play. So when the artwork appeared, the artists worked to make it beautiful. It was almost pushing the edge of what these systems could do, and so as a viewer placed you in an engaging experience right at the state of the art.
I have to imagine that fully realizing a vision can only truly take place when the artists are not working at the limits of the present day tools. I’m thinking of something like games today that choose an art style and run with it, rather than trying to push the hardware as hard as possible.
Was this the artist’s vision, or were they simply making the best of the tools they had?
I'd say that the nearly opposite is often true: the limitations shape art and even make it art. The masterful handling of limitations, and doing apparently impossible, is a legitimate part of art.
Academic Western poetry shed the metre and the rhyme in an attempt to be free from limitations and more fully express things. Can you quote something impressive? OTOH rap, arguably the modern genre of folk poetry, holds very firmly to the limiting metre and rhyme, and somehow stays quite popular. If rappers did not need rhyme as a tool of artistic expression, they probably would abandon it, instead of becoming sophisticated at it.
Same with pixel art, and other forms of pushing your medium to the limits, and beyond.
Pixel art is very much still around today, even though it's far from "pushing" the limits of current hardware. It's pursuing a rather consistent "vision" of maximizing quality while staying within the bounds of a predefined level of detail (i.e. resolution) and color depth.
I think most indie developers choose pixel art (and low-poly 3D) today because they still can’t produce high-quality high-detail art, and high-quality pixel art is prettier than low-quality high-detail art.
It’s still a case where the developer can’t truly express their vision, but they can express it behind a filter, in this case pixelation, that makes our brains charitably fill in the missing details.
Although I’m sure for some games it is part of their vision, because there’s something intrinsically pretty about pixel art and low-poly 3D. Likewise there are 2D games like Cuphead that emulate “cartoon” style, and 3D games like Guilty Gear that emulate 2D anime; those are much harder than making a 2D or 3D game with traditional modern graphics.
I think a slightly different way to think about it is that it’s not always contest for maximum detail. Apple’s new liquid glass look is impressive, but is it necessarily better UI than System 9? I think you could have a reasonable debate about that.
Right. This is kind of what I’m talking about. Someone choosing pixel art today is making a choice; they have a vision. 40 years ago, they were limited by the system. The choice was largely made for them.
Old video games come to mind. The box art would be drastically different than the look of the game. The box art was the vision, the game was what they ended up with after compromises due to the hardware of the day. I think it’s only been in the last decade or so that some game makers have truly been able to realize the visions they had 40 years ago.
I think of the box art and physical manual of a video game like Diablo from 1996, compared to the game itself. The manual had several detailed drawings of monsters and otherworldly creatures with a very "evil" look, but the game itself they were represented as blocky sprites with fairly comical movement, as characters moved on a isometric chessboard-style grid, with abrupt turns and limited speed. Ultimately the gameplay is what mattered, the box art, in-game music and sound effects all created an atmosphere that wouldn't have been as immersive with just graphics.
A point of comparison would be to the game Quake, which came out the same year, and whose graphics felt light years ahead . But Quake mostly became a multiplayer hit, as the single-player story and overall atmosphere weren't very compelling.
I am not a game purist and modern games are just fine, but I do not see the point of AAA games employing 300 artists to model blades of grass that have no gameplay effect. Sure, the screen shots lot great but unless you are making GrassSimulator2000 it would have been better to use those resources for something else.
As a person who spent a great deal of time restoring a long neglected backyard to include a small lawn to play on, I am interested in playing GrassSimulator2000.
When id was pushing the envelope of technology (mid to late 90s) and creating more and more startling games, I remember thinking that none of them really had the appeal of many of the earlier games. And apparently Carmack thought that the story etc. of the game wasn't important. Reading masters of DOOM and watching my 8 year old play DOOM on an emulator made me reconsider. He had a jumpscare in a way that would have been impossible unless the game was so immersive and that is a technological feat. I do agree with you that one can go too far but it's not wholly a pointless side quest.
It might be but it's hard to tell because it's such a recent game. The Wind Waker might be a better example because it's now 20 years old and still renders and plays basically as if it's current gen on modern hardware.
I don't know, I think some improved hardware would greatly improve the aesthetics of the Lost Woods, which severely drops in frame rate when docked. Handheld, the diminished fidelity at 720p buys back some frames.
I'd be inclined to agree about some older Zelda games though, namely Wind Waker. I replayed it on GCN recently, and can attest that HD Wii U version really didn't add anything to the aesthetics.
Thats an interesting concept. Considering it, the big first party titles certainly had stellar presentation art-wise. Doesn't seem like they were limited in achieving their vision in say, sonic the hedgehog. Even the later games with pseudo-3d the art direction makes it feel complete and like it fits the aesthetic.
And even the new ones that have gone back to that style have the same 'look'(obviously because they're trying to be like those old games) but the graphical fidelity doesn't seem to change much beyond more pixels.
A lesser known title that I think hit that perfectly is Rez. So much so that the re-release almost 15 years later was for the most part, just higher resolution and cleaner rendering. But the overall style was not touched one bit.
Even today these pictures have an almost perfect resolution for showing on a compact e-paper display. The viewing area on the original Mac models was not that much bigger, either. They only look "horribly pixelated" when artificially upscaled for a modern big screen.
(A pixel-art specific upscaling filter would mitigate that issue, of course.)
Of course there's a subjective element, but I was born about a decade after these were created and I find them to be beautiful. I love the mural with the tree, it's amazing how it creates a sense of openness that wants me to go outside, even with such a limited palette.
Your opinion isn't popular, but I agree with you. Taking just the first image as an example... this is a digital recreation/modification of a Saul Steinberg cover for the New Yorker originally done in 1976. This cover created a extremely popular subgenre of stylized map drawing at the time, but the Mac version looks like mostly clip art images all splodged together with no real sense of composition or perspective. There are many other examples in here which I feel were made by people who happened to have access to the technology, but did not necessarily have great artistic ability.
That being said, although there are also some extremely good examples in here (in my subjective opinion), I absolutely think there is a nostalgia element at play. I worked on these machines in the 80s and feel that nostalgia myself.
Many new games are released today with pixel art because that's the aesthetic they want to portray.
Some games, like Borderlands or Wind Waker, use aggressive cell shading. They age like wine, because the game has a distinct art style that gives it character.
I get your point. Truth is on both ends though. There truly are games which peaked in their visual style and even with modern power at their disposal nothing could be added that would make them look better. The medium they used, some of them, they used it to its maximum potential. I'd take pixel art's swan song game of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Modern rendition of it with let's say more detailed graphics, even vector one, would just make it look worse. It's perfect the way it is and I'd argue if you were to do it today and you chose the same art style, it'd come out the same with only smaller differences (like overall high resolution but still "subdivided" into smaller ones, effectively still being lower resolution).
I get the aesthetics of pixel art games. And I would likely not enjoy modern remakes of them. My point above was just, that I do admire those arts as great of their time - but looking at them today like in the picture above, I simply don't like the pixel style as an art style on its own.
I didn't play them. but I owned a Game Boy in late 90's and I emulated 8-16 bit microcomputer/console games in 2001-2005, and I really appreaciated them.
If you want to make MacPaint drawings that incorporate your modern photos then I make a program for that. Retro Dither on the Mac App Store dithers and exports photos to MacPaint (wrapped in MacBinary for transport):
There’s also a chapter in my new book explaining how to write the same program in Python including Atkinson dithering, the MacPaint file format and MacBinary. You can get the code for free and do the conversions yourself without Retro Dither here:
Awesome! You can also find great art made with Deluxe Paint for the Amiga. The limitations from early computers in resolution and, most importantly, palette, create unique art styles:
They have more color but way less resolution, thus less detail. Pretty much what you would expect to see, given that the original Mac and Amiga came out around the same time.
Both Motorola 68000 machines, typically 512K-1024K of RAM. So similar underlying constraints, under which they made very different choices for how to prioritize graphics.
These seem to be made by artists trained on traditional drawing. All drawings show knowledge of cross-hatching or pointillism, correct use of values, perspective, and so on. That’s why it looks great today, these qualities are independent of how advanced the digital medium of the time was.
How do you even do that? Zoomed out it looks like a nearly photorealistic street scene, zoomed in I just see seemingly meaningless patterns of black and white. Magic. Unbelievable.
There's a few - including that one - that look like they're photos pulled through a transformation code. I'm probably wrong though - dithering seems to be incredibly difficult to get right, see e.g. https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=40832.msg136374...
This image in particular made me wonder if there was some type of tracing aid involved. Maybe the dutch-looking street reminded me of Vermeer's method. I wonder what input device they were using? I was using a pretty nice input surface for doing CAD work sometime around 1990-93 on a PC, and we had occasion to lay transparencies on top and trace on them. I don't know if Macs 5 years before that had this type of peripheral. And anyway, there were certainly some special artists I knew of back then who could do this with a mouse and enough time.
Definitely not a Dutch street. More likely a German, Austrian/Swiss, or Alsatian (France) one. Those kind of half-timbered houses are extremely uncommon in the Netherlands.
Dithering, for one. The parent also suggests pointillism, which was also a popular modern art technique for making detailed portraits using small, low-detail components.
I envy that small world, where people could be this genuinely enthusiastic about their computer products and companies, where most actors seeked the best interest of other parties.
Snark aside, that was my takeaway looking at the article. Why wouldn't they still look good? They were well done when they were made. The Mona Lisa still looks good. The tools don't define the quality, just the constraints. For grayscale pixel art, these are amazing pictures that hold up to the medium, regardless of if computers can do more now.
One thing I read a while back noted that the cave paintings were also painted under and for specific lighting - namely, dim, flickering fire - and that under those conditions the paintings took on an even more expressive character.
What’s wild is that would be true for every single human work up to about the mid-1800s. Art - and architecture - would be made to be seen either in sunlight, with its attendant shadows and shifts throughout the day, or by firelight, which flickers and shifts on its own.
(From page HTML source)
<!-- ******** HELLO OLD COMPUTER USERS ******** -->
<!-- This site is designed to be viewable at 640x480 resolution or higher in any color mode in Netscape/IE 3 or any
better browser, so if you're using an LC III or something, you're welcome. In fact, I really hope you are using such a machine,
because limiting the site to this level of simplicity wouldn't be worth it unless someone is. Please let me know if you are
using an old computer to visit the site so I know it is worth it to someone to maintain this compatibility. I do
apologize for the one javascript error that you may get on each page load, but I don't expect it to cause any crashes.
The major exception to all of this is Netscape 4. That thing sucks. -->
> Does anyone even remember why Netscape 4 was bad?
Netscape 4 is a broad set of releases over several years. It also wasn't necessarily "bad". It was just largely not mindblowingly better than Netscape 3 (for normal users) while using more CPU and RAM.
I also imagine in this context it's incomplete CSS support is problematic. Netscape 3 will ignore properly commented out CSS (mostly) while 4 will try to interpret what it can and choke on the rest. It's box model doesn't conform to where the CSS spec landed so even if you can give it CSS it can handle, your page is broken in every other browser.
I'm jealous of your memory capabilities, and I certainly remember that at some point it was nearly impossible to make website looks in similar way in Netscape and IE.
At the end, there was something like acceptable variation in page view for different browsers.
Thanks. Learning web development back then left some deep scars and lasting lessons. I can no longer imagine all the other stuff I haven't retained because I remember stupid browser quirks from nearly three decades ago.
Getting many designs working consistently between IE and Netscape was impossible. The 640px wide left-aligned table layout was popular for years because it was the easiest common denominator that looked acceptable in both browsers.
When back to this time the web was mostly a pain, especially for developers, there was also some magic.
Take for example VRML, particularly VRML 2.0. I don't remember the software name, but there was a chat system within a virtual world, perhaps running in a browser (1).
You're not wrong. IE seemed very much designed around the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish concept. It made it incredibly difficult to write cross-browser CSS.
Well, like the comment said, it crashed a lot when you tried to run JS on it. It was pretty annoying to binary-search for a bug in your JS when the symptom was a browser crash. Also, it used a lot more RAM than Netscape 3 and was slower, but I don't recall it being better in significant ways.
DHTML in Netscape 4 was also completely incompatible with DHTML in IE 4. In IE you had the DOM, which is an inconvenient and inherently very inefficient interface that you could coerce into doing anything you wanted. In Netscape 4 you had layers. Our team (KnowNow) was working on an AJAX and Comet toolkit at the time (02000). In order to not write separate versions of our Comet applications for the two browsers, we stuck to the least common denominator, which was basically framesets and document.write.
If I'm not mistaken Netscape Communicator was just a pack of different applications, including NN. The real issue seems to be was specific CSS and some style rendering.
From vague memories I remember NN4 on classic MacOS was, I recall, a total memory leaking / crashing shitshow. I worked in a shop that had a bunch of Macs and the rule was you couldn't run FileMaker (which they used a lot) and Netscape at the same time because the two would just run over each other memories. The glory days of lack of memory protection on MacOS 7.6.
The street scene is by Gerald Vaughn Clement, the inventor of MacGrid, a drawing program that used a sort of plastic grid to perform high detail drawing and digitization.
The lack of photorealistic fidelity gives your brain a bit of room to use imagination to fill in the blanks in your internal model. This fosters a certain type of engagement with the content that you don't get with photorealistic images.
I think that's part of the reason that a lot of indie games have converged around pixel art.
Obviously a large part of it is likely due to the fact that a lot of the creators grew up with the NES or SNES and just like that aesthetic, but I think you get a lot of "implied detail" when using pixel art, which is great when you're working on a limited budget.
This isn't to knock it, to be clear. I love good pixel art.
YOu both are missing something. TV fuzzy rendering blended pixels together and FFVI under the SNES (and Chrono Trigger) could look astoundingly great with amazing colours and sprite art.
I was born in ‘83 and a good chunk of my formative years were spent imagining the world through dithered pixels — playing games, creating art, writing, and exploring. Seeing these images evokes a rush of nostalgia, simply because they’re dithered.
Did not expect this post to get so popular - I added a bunch more images I found I was saving for a second post on a rainy day, so go back and reload the page for more 1-bit pixel art goodies :-)
At the end of the article they mention digging in to the Amiga scene. If you want to feel old, Deluxe Paint turns 40 this year. My mates had Amigas (I had an Amstrad) and the computing world just felt full of wonder and promise. It was a magical time of creation.
One of the mild tragedies of my youth is that when we switched from the Macintosh SE/30 to the IIci, my MacPaint art didn't make the transition. My dad told me that the files were incompatible. I don't think that's actually true, but I didn't know enough at that age to be able to question it or even explore it. There are many many creations throughout first half of my life that are lost for a lack of storage space at the time.
As an aside: Do your best to capture at least something in a way that will be preserved.
“Dithering” is the key — except this seems to have been done by hand.
When I was a kid, I owned a monochrome display that could only display at CGA resolutions “640x400” 1-bit (and 320x200). Many games and art and didn’t support that showed up garbled.
Then I got hold of Deluxe Paint that would load pictures in color and dither them with an algo called Floyd Steinberg. And the pictures that I saw on my friends VGA monitors suddenly looked beautiful on my monochrome screen.
I was just about to post the same link! Found his site today by pure happenstance.
Don't know this guy's technique, but the idea that people were drawing such elaborate pictures on tiny screens - with mice! not even tablets - boggles me. Every pixel a deliberate act.
The 2nd artwork ('A Door Somewhere " - Bert Monrov) had me really confused for a moment.
When I scrolled down to it, there was a sort of flickering effect, like as if it were a gif, with a flickering light adding ambience to the scene.
But no, it's just how that sort of black & white shading looks when you scroll past it - amazing effect!
Yes, I asked because I got curious about the effect and opened the link to see it but didn't notice it on mine, so I figured it must be specific to your display.
Really interesting. I’m wondering if there’s any LLM or image model on Hugging Face that has been trained specifically on low-res black-and-white images like MacPaint. Has anyone come across something similar or seen a fine-tuned model in this specific retro visual style?
It's like... someone gives you a gift, and then you ask "Wow! Can I have arbitrarily more of these, please?" It's a lack of appreciation for what we have - instead of enjoying it, you want to press a button to create arbitrarily more of it. That is truly no appreciation at all.
For me, there's a certain aesthetic to 1-bit bayer-dithered images, as well as images with visibly big coloured-halftone-dots, that makes it feel both retro and modern at the same time. I want to call it neo-retro, but I feel like that term already exists.
When I was a kid, I used to think that better tools would automatically make me good at art.
For example, I was making animations with EasyToon, and I only had a mouse, while the really good animators were using graphics tablets.
Clearly, if I bought a tablet, my own animation skills would drastically improve!
I guess I still kinda believe that, when I look at how fancy some of the newer computers are. If only I had one of those, my creativity would be unlimited!
The funny thing is that my fallacy sorta came true: my friend was showing me some insane stuff he rendered on his 5080 with a custom Stable Diffusion...
Better tools won't make you better, but they'll get in the way less, would you rather draw with a pencil or a bar of soap? A mouse is more like the latter than the former.
Okay but you will definitely be able to make better art with a graphical tablet. It's near impossible to have enough precision to draw with a mouse, regardless of practice or skill.
Taking this moment to promote 1-bit art! I run a couple accounts which promote 1-bit art and I’m trying to figure out how to expand what artwork is included. These are just personal accounts that retweet art from 1-bit artists on BlueSky and Twitter.
Btw what is current MacPaint successor? Is there any? Do I understand correctly it used to be shipped with the Mac?
Preview is great to some extent and does a lot of useful things for me but it's designed to modify existing images, and I'm still missing a software to draw a square, circle, some text etc.
Try Paintbrush (open-source MacPaint-inspired app), Pixelmator Pro (more advanced), Acorn, or even Apple's built-in Preview has basic drawing tools under the markup icon when viewing images.
I know; I mean to say they're larger file sizes—the PNG compression ratio is effectively less than one.
Take the first one, "acius.png", at 84,326 bytes. If you losslessly scale back to the original size (1/4th) and convert to 1-bit NetPBM, it's 51,851 bytes, without compression. I thought that was remarkable.
Love the old monochrome Mac game aesthetic. I played a lot of the original MacVenture Deja Vu game as a kid, and always thought that the art had a cool look to it, and as an adult I'm amazed at what they pulled off, despite the limitations.
These really need to be viewed with a CRT renderer IMO, as well as the Amiga art mentioned in this thread. The hard square pixels on the website aren’t quite representative of what these looked like on a contemporary monitor.
Up to a point, but the early Macintosh displays were quite crisp and clinical—certainly compared to something like a consumer NTSC or PAL CRT TV—as befitted a platform which was very focussed on WYSIWYG paper-document editing.
I suppose it's just nostalgia, but I get such a warm fuzzy feeling just seeing this art from the 80s. I can remember using tools like MacPaint. It was just such a fun time to be around computers.
What a nostalgia trip. Reminds me of sitting in the computer lab in the library in my elementary school in 1990. Some days, I'd give anything to go back.
This reminds me of the great tragedy of not exposing the Nokia SmartMessage extension to end users. It could have given a new lease of life to grassroots low resolution 1 bit art in the 90s and early 00s in the form of operator logos.
Instead it was gatekept for grifters in order to separate gullible teenagers from their allowance.
I dunno - artwork in this style did pretty good on ffffound back in the day. That's at least as early as 2007. I'm sure you could go back further in other forums and find appreciation for the same reason people like it here.
To contrast, a lot of content from clip-art collections at the time looked awful then and didn't age well at all.
Meh. It was nothing compared with PLATO systems at the university. And the CAD setups dad and his engineering team used for work then (Silicon Graphics?) also looked much better.
There's a term I read about a long time ago, I think it was "aesthetic completeness" or something like that. It was used in the context of video games whose art direction was fully realized in the game, i.e. increases in graphics hardware or capabilities wouldn't add anything to the game in an artistic sense. The original Homeworld games were held up as examples.
Anyway, this reminded me of that. Making these pictures in anything but the tools of the time wouldn't just change them, they'd be totally different artworks. The medium is part of the artwork itself.
The same holds true for everything from cave paintings to Roman frescos. It's part of human expression. The tools of that expression shape it.
For example, Bach's music was shaped by the fact that the harpsichord had no sustain. The piano changed that, but "upscaling" Bach's work to take advantage of this new technology would destroy them. You use the new technology to play them as they were written for the old. The beauty comes through despite the change.
Similarly, Liszt made full use of what modern, powerful pianofortes are capable of - although were he a man of our times, he’d probably have been fronting a heavy metal band.
Western classical music had a strong tradition of taking advantage of cutting edge technological advances, especially in metallurgy but also advanced woodworking techniques like lamination making large soundboards possible and pushing the bounds of acoustic amplification.
It wasn't until I think around the advent of recorded music and electric amplification that it settled into a fairly stable set of instruments & sounds produced by them.
Settled, or ossified? Sure, there’s modern classical with more adventurous instrumentation, but that’s not what the moneyed retirees down at the opera house want to hear.
The music of the classical canon is unbelievably fantastic, and it deserves respectful treatment, but the genre has lost the audience for cool new sounds. It’s very unfortunate.
Yeah I actually used that word as I wrote it, and then switched it so I wouldn't come across as judgmental or anticlassical or whatever. I think it's a valid view of it. But my perspective here is that this kind of music is basically german-french elite traditional ethnic music. And as I don't negatively judge for example gamelan or carnatic or gagaku music for being settled/ossified I shouldn't judge traditional european music for that either.
It's simply not the role of any one musical practice to be at the forefront of experimentation forever. What we now call classical passed its torch on generations ago, and rock & jazz have now settled in too. We have hip hop and electronic music taking this role now, and eventually they will bind up into their own conventions and some descendant of theirs will push on.
I have this same ontological debate with myself, I settle it by having a rather stricter definition of classical music. Classical music is popular music that has remained popular for longer than two generations of listeners. Music that follows that certain large scale form is orchestral music.(or whatever sub genre it is)
This annoying behavior does not win me any friends but remember that the great classical composers were the rock stars of their day.
> remember that the great classical composers were the rock stars of their day.
I don't have a source for this but I hear it a lot and I strongly suspect it is a historiographical myth. Pretty much only a very small minority urban (relative) elite had access to live professionally performed classical music during most periods when it was being composed. This is also the group whose writings form most of our current knowledge base about these periods, and whose writings are of course focused primarily on their own interests. We can't really see what they didn't see, or didn't care enough to write about.
But contemporaneous with this elite music there were european folk music traditions, taught and performed ad hoc by individuals or small ensembles in homes and gathering places of the vast majority of "normal" people (peasant farmers, later urban laborers), and including some traveling performers who were known by reputation.
So yeah the great classical composers were wildly popular among the people who listened to the kind of music that they composed, but that was an extremely small part of the population. We don't have very much information at all about what was going on musically with the greater part of the population, but it appears to have been a completely separate thing, it's doubtful the great composers had any name recognition among the vast peasant masses.
What does this hair split accomplish? We have to settle on something.
Why? Says who? Historians find that our understanding of the past is never complete, and always open to reevaluation based on new information or techniques. I agree with them.
Neither, I’d argue. The greats that we look back at were the outliers, the madmen at the fringe. For every Beethoven or Mozart there were a thousand thousand nobodies cranking out the same stuff that their grandfathers wrote. Rachmaninov was seen as nouveau trash in his time, Holst derided, Gershwin hackneyed. Eno perhaps falls into the same category.
Hell, in a century you’ll see string quartets banging out Aphex Twin at elegant soirées. The real connoisseurs, of course, nod knowingly and mutter that drukqs is “early period”.
Similarly, plainsong was seen as “classical” music for many centuries, and was also a largely rigid form, but there exist some absolute bangers in the canon, mostly unattributed because monks.
It’s hard to see the sweep of history from within it.
> but that’s not what the moneyed retirees down at the opera house want to hear.
The last (well only) time I was in an opera house the retirees were listing to Blue Öyster Cult.
Classical and jazz just stopped trying and standardized the instruments. Other types of music are more open to incorporating new instruments. At least that's how I feel.
FWIW the jazz tradition is still alive and well, it just isn't normally called that in the interest of not being confused with the still-extant "traditional" jazz and because many of the musicians consider themselves to be primarily part of some other community.
But there is an absolutely thriving collaboration- and improvisation-based music form grounded in jazz but open to novel & experimental instrumentation and ripe with influence from other contemporary forms like pop, hip hop, funk, reggaeton, metal. I'm thinking of people like thundercat, kamasi washington, nuclear power trio, tigran hamasyan, robert glasper, sungazer, domi & jd beck, louis cole etc.
If you like the sound of old school jazz, the standup bass the piano the brush drum shuffle, this stuff will be alien and hostile and won't feel like jazz to you. But if you like the musicianship of jazz, watching masters collaboratively invent new music in real time, this is where that ended up.
Switched on Bach is one of my favorite albums of all time.
Switched-on Bach is a revelation in part because the synth bass tones are more focused, distinct, and identifiable than when the same notes are played on acoustic instruments — allowing you to hear harmonic interplay which I believe is closer to what Bach heard in his head.
But here are lots of Bach synth albums and only Wendy Carlos’ work has the taste and obsessive fidelity to the original compositions to allow those ideas to come through. Most synth Bach falls into the trap of being idiomatic synth rather than idiomatic Bach, akin to playing Bach on the piano without considering how it would have sounded on the harpsichord.
I really like the 2 Bach synth albums by Marco Rosano.
Awesome, thanks. Had an inkling whatever Spotify came up with wasn’t right—thank you TIA for Wendy Carlos’s 1968 original!:
https://archive.org/details/wendy-carlos-witched-on-bach
(have to donate to Internet Archive again now…) anyway Wiki says this album essentially brought the Moog/synths from experimental to popular music. In a lovely fashion, my ears do say.
Update:
Wendy Carlos is still with us at 85 years of age, but apparently hasn’t been able to press CDs for two decades, and hasn’t licensed her music for streaming. Her site links to CDs on Amazon, w/o new copies available. She sounds dope, even being an “accomplished solar eclipse photographer” per Wiki.
If anyone knows her I’m curious if someone could help her preserve/distribute these beautiful sounds. (Maybe they’re all preserved but just not distributed, and maybe she’s chillin’ and doesn’t need another cent so it’d just be hassle—wanted to throw it all out there for y’all.)
—
…thanks OP for the great art btw, since I haven’t mentioned it yet. Stood the test of time!
Well, it’s either mental issues, or this is the way she wants it. I assume the latter. She had connections. There are people even today who would throw themselves at her feet to make it happen. She was instrumental in helping Bob Moog make the synthesizer workable for musicians, according to Bob Moog. She did the original Tron soundtrack.
Awesome.
& I’m going with your assumption! Thanks for the positive perspective & background.
You should take a listen to Tomita as well then! There is so much beautiful music in the world
I definitely listened to a lot of Tomita as a kid, I used to check out vinyls of his albums from my local library. The one that sticks with me most distinctly is his very unique rendition of Golliwog’s Cakewalk. https://youtube.com/watch?v=dPQ9d10fnko But yeah, lots of other great stuff from him too.
Oh wow! I have not heard that name in a while! ( and yes, I know I still haven't heard it outside my own head, but that is just a nit to pick..)
Mars. That track is so great! All of them are, but that one shows off so many great synth techniques. One passage is noise that ramps. The spectral distribution changes, from emphasis on low notes to emphasis on high notes while the overall energy remains close to the same.
I remember it because I have never heard anyone else do that in a composition.
Recommendation seconded!
Way too much, in fact, if we go by daily Spotify uploads.
This reminds me of how the pixel version of Chicago font looks great but the vector version doesn't.
https://x.com/susankare/status/1599662756252483585?s=46
Understanding this point about cave paintings is crucial to not being a human piece of garbage.
It’s interesting to think about the intersection of cultural, technology and aesthetic.
Gaming embraces most of its historical aesthetics while say movies do not. There aren’t serious attempts to replicate the aesthetic of 50’s tv (which are tied in heavily with the culture of the time) similarly, jn the eighties and I imagine prior, I’ve been watching Miami vice and you can tell lots of the rooms are cheap sets with pretty minimal props. This is on the one hand definetly not full formed, but on the other hand I’ve grown to appreciate that aesthetic, And again other art forms like painting and video games seem to appreciate all eras of aesthetics in their modern versions in a Way tv and movies don’t. (Maybe just due to expense?)
I was also considering the effect of how silent computing used to be. It created a tension and expectation when waiting for an image to appear like waiting for a curtain to open on a play. So when the artwork appeared, the artists worked to make it beautiful. It was almost pushing the edge of what these systems could do, and so as a viewer placed you in an engaging experience right at the state of the art.
I have to imagine that fully realizing a vision can only truly take place when the artists are not working at the limits of the present day tools. I’m thinking of something like games today that choose an art style and run with it, rather than trying to push the hardware as hard as possible.
Was this the artist’s vision, or were they simply making the best of the tools they had?
I'd say that the nearly opposite is often true: the limitations shape art and even make it art. The masterful handling of limitations, and doing apparently impossible, is a legitimate part of art.
Academic Western poetry shed the metre and the rhyme in an attempt to be free from limitations and more fully express things. Can you quote something impressive? OTOH rap, arguably the modern genre of folk poetry, holds very firmly to the limiting metre and rhyme, and somehow stays quite popular. If rappers did not need rhyme as a tool of artistic expression, they probably would abandon it, instead of becoming sophisticated at it.
Same with pixel art, and other forms of pushing your medium to the limits, and beyond.
Pixel art is very much still around today, even though it's far from "pushing" the limits of current hardware. It's pursuing a rather consistent "vision" of maximizing quality while staying within the bounds of a predefined level of detail (i.e. resolution) and color depth.
I think most indie developers choose pixel art (and low-poly 3D) today because they still can’t produce high-quality high-detail art, and high-quality pixel art is prettier than low-quality high-detail art.
It’s still a case where the developer can’t truly express their vision, but they can express it behind a filter, in this case pixelation, that makes our brains charitably fill in the missing details.
Although I’m sure for some games it is part of their vision, because there’s something intrinsically pretty about pixel art and low-poly 3D. Likewise there are 2D games like Cuphead that emulate “cartoon” style, and 3D games like Guilty Gear that emulate 2D anime; those are much harder than making a 2D or 3D game with traditional modern graphics.
I think a slightly different way to think about it is that it’s not always contest for maximum detail. Apple’s new liquid glass look is impressive, but is it necessarily better UI than System 9? I think you could have a reasonable debate about that.
Games from Neo Geo were pixel art of very high quality. Just check Garou.
Right. This is kind of what I’m talking about. Someone choosing pixel art today is making a choice; they have a vision. 40 years ago, they were limited by the system. The choice was largely made for them.
Old video games come to mind. The box art would be drastically different than the look of the game. The box art was the vision, the game was what they ended up with after compromises due to the hardware of the day. I think it’s only been in the last decade or so that some game makers have truly been able to realize the visions they had 40 years ago.
I think of the box art and physical manual of a video game like Diablo from 1996, compared to the game itself. The manual had several detailed drawings of monsters and otherworldly creatures with a very "evil" look, but the game itself they were represented as blocky sprites with fairly comical movement, as characters moved on a isometric chessboard-style grid, with abrupt turns and limited speed. Ultimately the gameplay is what mattered, the box art, in-game music and sound effects all created an atmosphere that wouldn't have been as immersive with just graphics.
A point of comparison would be to the game Quake, which came out the same year, and whose graphics felt light years ahead . But Quake mostly became a multiplayer hit, as the single-player story and overall atmosphere weren't very compelling.
I am not a game purist and modern games are just fine, but I do not see the point of AAA games employing 300 artists to model blades of grass that have no gameplay effect. Sure, the screen shots lot great but unless you are making GrassSimulator2000 it would have been better to use those resources for something else.
As a person who spent a great deal of time restoring a long neglected backyard to include a small lawn to play on, I am interested in playing GrassSimulator2000.
When id was pushing the envelope of technology (mid to late 90s) and creating more and more startling games, I remember thinking that none of them really had the appeal of many of the earlier games. And apparently Carmack thought that the story etc. of the game wasn't important. Reading masters of DOOM and watching my 8 year old play DOOM on an emulator made me reconsider. He had a jumpscare in a way that would have been impossible unless the game was so immersive and that is a technological feat. I do agree with you that one can go too far but it's not wholly a pointless side quest.
There's a solid chance GTA VI will include a lawn mowing minigame.
Rockstar already did it in Bully https://bully.fandom.com/wiki/Lawn_Mowing
Maybe recency bias cause I’m playing it right now, but Breath of the Wild comes to mind
It might be but it's hard to tell because it's such a recent game. The Wind Waker might be a better example because it's now 20 years old and still renders and plays basically as if it's current gen on modern hardware.
Except Wind Waker is actually a good and a bad example. Its art style has not aged but the HD remaster (on Wii U) is still better looking.
I don't know, I think some improved hardware would greatly improve the aesthetics of the Lost Woods, which severely drops in frame rate when docked. Handheld, the diminished fidelity at 720p buys back some frames.
I'd be inclined to agree about some older Zelda games though, namely Wind Waker. I replayed it on GCN recently, and can attest that HD Wii U version really didn't add anything to the aesthetics.
The Switch 2 update seems to have resolved every performance complaint I had with TotK, if you're willing to pay the price of admission.
Do the swords still break every 39 seconds?
To be fair, they did say "performance" complaints. :)
Thats an interesting concept. Considering it, the big first party titles certainly had stellar presentation art-wise. Doesn't seem like they were limited in achieving their vision in say, sonic the hedgehog. Even the later games with pseudo-3d the art direction makes it feel complete and like it fits the aesthetic.
And even the new ones that have gone back to that style have the same 'look'(obviously because they're trying to be like those old games) but the graphical fidelity doesn't seem to change much beyond more pixels.
Vib Ribbon is one example I can think of that also exhibits that property.
A lesser known title that I think hit that perfectly is Rez. So much so that the re-release almost 15 years later was for the most part, just higher resolution and cleaner rendering. But the overall style was not touched one bit.
Do you think you could find the article? It sounds super interesting.
I tried Claude and it mentioned the term might actually be „Aesthetic sufficiency“, but I couldn‘t find an essay with Homeworld on it.
maybe https://www.gorzek.com/nonfiction/essays/homeworld/ which I found via https://duckduckgo.com/?q=aesthetic+completeness+%22homeworl....
Yes indeed! "The medium is the message" - Marshall McLuhan. Although you could also argue that "The interface is the message"
Sounds like they're describing Interstate 76.
Hm, are you sure that there is not some nostalgia at play here?
To me they look horribly pixelated and at least some would improve aesthetically a lot for me with a higher resolution.
Even today these pictures have an almost perfect resolution for showing on a compact e-paper display. The viewing area on the original Mac models was not that much bigger, either. They only look "horribly pixelated" when artificially upscaled for a modern big screen.
(A pixel-art specific upscaling filter would mitigate that issue, of course.)
I was viewing them via a small mobile screen, not high DPI, not fullscreen. And to me, they simply don't look good the way they are.
But if you folks enjoy them, go for it. Otherwise taste is subjective I think.
It's amazing what people achieved with the resources of the '80s, creating fairly enjoyable visuals using extremely limited technology.
Another example from the early '90s is MARS.COM (1) by Tim Clarke (1993). Just 6 kilobytes and 30+ fps on a 12MHZ 286 (2).
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zSjpIyMt0k
2. https://github.com/matrix-toolbox/MARS.COM/blob/main/MARS.AS...
It is definitely amazing what they pioneered and achieved with the given limits.
But that doesn't mean I would enjoy a pixelated image now more than a high resolution image of the same motive.
Taking this parallel further, perhaps oil paintings are not as sharp as digital photos of the same subject.
Of course there's a subjective element, but I was born about a decade after these were created and I find them to be beautiful. I love the mural with the tree, it's amazing how it creates a sense of openness that wants me to go outside, even with such a limited palette.
Your opinion isn't popular, but I agree with you. Taking just the first image as an example... this is a digital recreation/modification of a Saul Steinberg cover for the New Yorker originally done in 1976. This cover created a extremely popular subgenre of stylized map drawing at the time, but the Mac version looks like mostly clip art images all splodged together with no real sense of composition or perspective. There are many other examples in here which I feel were made by people who happened to have access to the technology, but did not necessarily have great artistic ability.
That being said, although there are also some extremely good examples in here (in my subjective opinion), I absolutely think there is a nostalgia element at play. I worked on these machines in the 80s and feel that nostalgia myself.
Many new games are released today with pixel art because that's the aesthetic they want to portray.
Some games, like Borderlands or Wind Waker, use aggressive cell shading. They age like wine, because the game has a distinct art style that gives it character.
You have no idea on how charming these games look.
Looks like return of the obra dinn! Which was obviously targeting this look on purpose.
There are also some great blog posts by the obra dinn guy about 1-but dithering. They make the rounds on HN once in a while
Or I do, because I played them?
But that was my not well received point about nostalgia ..
I get your point. Truth is on both ends though. There truly are games which peaked in their visual style and even with modern power at their disposal nothing could be added that would make them look better. The medium they used, some of them, they used it to its maximum potential. I'd take pixel art's swan song game of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Modern rendition of it with let's say more detailed graphics, even vector one, would just make it look worse. It's perfect the way it is and I'd argue if you were to do it today and you chose the same art style, it'd come out the same with only smaller differences (like overall high resolution but still "subdivided" into smaller ones, effectively still being lower resolution).
I get the aesthetics of pixel art games. And I would likely not enjoy modern remakes of them. My point above was just, that I do admire those arts as great of their time - but looking at them today like in the picture above, I simply don't like the pixel style as an art style on its own.
There's one, soon to be released, which is highly anticipated https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkMFYMG3QLw
I didn't play them. but I owned a Game Boy in late 90's and I emulated 8-16 bit microcomputer/console games in 2001-2005, and I really appreaciated them.
If you want to make MacPaint drawings that incorporate your modern photos then I make a program for that. Retro Dither on the Mac App Store dithers and exports photos to MacPaint (wrapped in MacBinary for transport):
https://oaksnow.com/retrodither/
There’s also a chapter in my new book explaining how to write the same program in Python including Atkinson dithering, the MacPaint file format and MacBinary. You can get the code for free and do the conversions yourself without Retro Dither here:
https://github.com/davecom/ComputerScienceFromScratch
The book is here:
https://nostarch.com/computer-science-from-scratch
Awesome! You can also find great art made with Deluxe Paint for the Amiga. The limitations from early computers in resolution and, most importantly, palette, create unique art styles:
https://amiga.lychesis.net/applications/DeluxePaint.html
There was an article posted here not too long about with a similar sentiment about the NEC PC-98
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44076501
These seem worse IMO. Not sure if it’s the medium (eg more saturated colours, the particular website) or if I just like the compositions less.
They have more color but way less resolution, thus less detail. Pretty much what you would expect to see, given that the original Mac and Amiga came out around the same time.
Both Motorola 68000 machines, typically 512K-1024K of RAM. So similar underlying constraints, under which they made very different choices for how to prioritize graphics.
Weird there were no hires images. Amiga's horizontal hires resolution was >720 pixels.
Of course, in order to get square pixels, you needed to enable interlace as well.
The usual case of looking at pictures what was made on and for a CRT monitor (or even TV).
You can try Screenitron to imitate something like this.
https://littlebattlebits.xyz/screenitron
some better ones here
https://amiga.lychesis.net/applications/AmigaDealer.html
Loved this dive on one such Deluxe Paint piece: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4EFkspO5p4
The colour palette of Amiga is really appealing to me. I used to love watching game screenshots printed in games magazines available in my country.
That's how I fell in love with Monkey Island and Flashback
Using colour cycling to achieve animation-like effects is so hot.
Can't mention that without linking the master of the effect
http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/ (hit "Show Options")
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcJ1Jvtef0
These seem to be made by artists trained on traditional drawing. All drawings show knowledge of cross-hatching or pointillism, correct use of values, perspective, and so on. That’s why it looks great today, these qualities are independent of how advanced the digital medium of the time was.
Look at this one for example - my mind is blown: https://blog.decryption.net.au/images/macpaint/lesson3d.png
How do you even do that? Zoomed out it looks like a nearly photorealistic street scene, zoomed in I just see seemingly meaningless patterns of black and white. Magic. Unbelievable.
There's a few - including that one - that look like they're photos pulled through a transformation code. I'm probably wrong though - dithering seems to be incredibly difficult to get right, see e.g. https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=40832.msg136374...
This image in particular made me wonder if there was some type of tracing aid involved. Maybe the dutch-looking street reminded me of Vermeer's method. I wonder what input device they were using? I was using a pretty nice input surface for doing CAD work sometime around 1990-93 on a PC, and we had occasion to lay transparencies on top and trace on them. I don't know if Macs 5 years before that had this type of peripheral. And anyway, there were certainly some special artists I knew of back then who could do this with a mouse and enough time.
They could have been cleaning up a scan of a photo, ThunderScan came out real early in the Mac's life.
Scanned drawing + painting over it with dither patterns is an option too.
Definitely not a Dutch street. More likely a German, Austrian/Swiss, or Alsatian (France) one. Those kind of half-timbered houses are extremely uncommon in the Netherlands.
> How do you even do that?
Dithering, for one. The parent also suggests pointillism, which was also a popular modern art technique for making detailed portraits using small, low-detail components.
Can’t believe this doesn’t include our friend Pinot who is still churning out unreal MacPaint pixel art
https://www.cultofmac.com/news/pinot-w-ichwandardi-flatiron-...
I envy that small world, where people could be this genuinely enthusiastic about their computer products and companies, where most actors seeked the best interest of other parties.
Similarly, some cave paintings still look awesome.
https://www.bradshawfoundation.com/lascaux/
Snark aside, that was my takeaway looking at the article. Why wouldn't they still look good? They were well done when they were made. The Mona Lisa still looks good. The tools don't define the quality, just the constraints. For grayscale pixel art, these are amazing pictures that hold up to the medium, regardless of if computers can do more now.
One thing I read a while back noted that the cave paintings were also painted under and for specific lighting - namely, dim, flickering fire - and that under those conditions the paintings took on an even more expressive character.
What’s wild is that would be true for every single human work up to about the mid-1800s. Art - and architecture - would be made to be seen either in sunlight, with its attendant shadows and shifts throughout the day, or by firelight, which flickers and shifts on its own.
"Design is about constraints" - Charles Eames
The constraints of the original Mac and MacPaint have resulted in an art form specific to the time and place.
Then we should probably mention
http://macpaint.org
(From page HTML source) <!-- ******** HELLO OLD COMPUTER USERS ******** --> <!-- This site is designed to be viewable at 640x480 resolution or higher in any color mode in Netscape/IE 3 or any better browser, so if you're using an LC III or something, you're welcome. In fact, I really hope you are using such a machine, because limiting the site to this level of simplicity wouldn't be worth it unless someone is. Please let me know if you are using an old computer to visit the site so I know it is worth it to someone to maintain this compatibility. I do apologize for the one javascript error that you may get on each page load, but I don't expect it to cause any crashes. The major exception to all of this is Netscape 4. That thing sucks. -->
Does anyone even remember why Netscape 4 was bad?
> Does anyone even remember why Netscape 4 was bad?
Netscape 4 is a broad set of releases over several years. It also wasn't necessarily "bad". It was just largely not mindblowingly better than Netscape 3 (for normal users) while using more CPU and RAM.
I also imagine in this context it's incomplete CSS support is problematic. Netscape 3 will ignore properly commented out CSS (mostly) while 4 will try to interpret what it can and choke on the rest. It's box model doesn't conform to where the CSS spec landed so even if you can give it CSS it can handle, your page is broken in every other browser.
I'm jealous of your memory capabilities, and I certainly remember that at some point it was nearly impossible to make website looks in similar way in Netscape and IE.
At the end, there was something like acceptable variation in page view for different browsers.
> I'm jealous of your memory capabilities,
Thanks. Learning web development back then left some deep scars and lasting lessons. I can no longer imagine all the other stuff I haven't retained because I remember stupid browser quirks from nearly three decades ago.
Getting many designs working consistently between IE and Netscape was impossible. The 640px wide left-aligned table layout was popular for years because it was the easiest common denominator that looked acceptable in both browsers.
When back to this time the web was mostly a pain, especially for developers, there was also some magic.
Take for example VRML, particularly VRML 2.0. I don't remember the software name, but there was a chat system within a virtual world, perhaps running in a browser (1).
1. https://csdl-images.ieeecomputer.org/mags/cg/1999/02/figures...
The rendering differences were at least as much IE’s fault as Netscapes. It took several versions before IE was (mostly) standards compliant.
You're not wrong. IE seemed very much designed around the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish concept. It made it incredibly difficult to write cross-browser CSS.
Well, like the comment said, it crashed a lot when you tried to run JS on it. It was pretty annoying to binary-search for a bug in your JS when the symptom was a browser crash. Also, it used a lot more RAM than Netscape 3 and was slower, but I don't recall it being better in significant ways.
DHTML in Netscape 4 was also completely incompatible with DHTML in IE 4. In IE you had the DOM, which is an inconvenient and inherently very inefficient interface that you could coerce into doing anything you wanted. In Netscape 4 you had layers. Our team (KnowNow) was working on an AJAX and Comet toolkit at the time (02000). In order to not write separate versions of our Comet applications for the two browsers, we stuck to the least common denominator, which was basically framesets and document.write.
Indeed, browsers learned how to hurt people from their earliest days.
Browsers were changing quickly back then, but if anybody remembers, it became Netscape Communicator and tried to expand to do everything..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Navigator#:~:text=Thi...
If I'm not mistaken Netscape Communicator was just a pack of different applications, including NN. The real issue seems to be was specific CSS and some style rendering.
From vague memories I remember NN4 on classic MacOS was, I recall, a total memory leaking / crashing shitshow. I worked in a shop that had a bunch of Macs and the rule was you couldn't run FileMaker (which they used a lot) and Netscape at the same time because the two would just run over each other memories. The glory days of lack of memory protection on MacOS 7.6.
But I also don't think 3 was much better.
I think it was a total rewrite, similar to why Winamp 2 was great, fast, not bloated but Winamp 3 was slow, adding extraneous features nobody wanted.
True, Winamp 2 was much solid. Unless I'm mistaken Winamp 3 introduce skins and after absolute madness starts.
NN4 tended to crash more than NN3, it may have been due to the rushed development during the browser wars.
There was problem with styles and tables.
https://sbpoley.home.xs4all.nl/webmatters/netscape4.html
The street scene is by Gerald Vaughn Clement, the inventor of MacGrid, a drawing program that used a sort of plastic grid to perform high detail drawing and digitization.
https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/macgrid
Incidentially /r/VintagePixelArt often has discussions about this sort of thing.
The lack of photorealistic fidelity gives your brain a bit of room to use imagination to fill in the blanks in your internal model. This fosters a certain type of engagement with the content that you don't get with photorealistic images.
I think that's part of the reason that a lot of indie games have converged around pixel art.
Obviously a large part of it is likely due to the fact that a lot of the creators grew up with the NES or SNES and just like that aesthetic, but I think you get a lot of "implied detail" when using pixel art, which is great when you're working on a limited budget.
This isn't to knock it, to be clear. I love good pixel art.
YOu both are missing something. TV fuzzy rendering blended pixels together and FFVI under the SNES (and Chrono Trigger) could look astoundingly great with amazing colours and sprite art.
Sure, but I was referring to how modern indie games, that have no worries plans to run on an old CRT TV, will still use pixel art.
I was born in ‘83 and a good chunk of my formative years were spent imagining the world through dithered pixels — playing games, creating art, writing, and exploring. Seeing these images evokes a rush of nostalgia, simply because they’re dithered.
That first one looks like a parody of 'View of the World from 9th Avenue' but I don't know what Acius was!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View_of_the_World_from_9th_Ave...
I wish I knew what Acius was or is too!
From a search for "acius mac": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4th_Dimension_(software)
Software outfit founded by a French guy, as hinted by the drawing with Paris visible ...
(Those "view from ..." were plentiful at the time)
Did not expect this post to get so popular - I added a bunch more images I found I was saving for a second post on a rainy day, so go back and reload the page for more 1-bit pixel art goodies :-)
Love it.
At the end of the article they mention digging in to the Amiga scene. If you want to feel old, Deluxe Paint turns 40 this year. My mates had Amigas (I had an Amstrad) and the computing world just felt full of wonder and promise. It was a magical time of creation.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deluxe_Paint
As one of the images states: “Happy Computing to all, And may all your computing be a Delight!”.
That street scene is some of the best pixel art I have ever seen.
https://blog.decryption.net.au/images/macpaint/lesson3d.png
One of the mild tragedies of my youth is that when we switched from the Macintosh SE/30 to the IIci, my MacPaint art didn't make the transition. My dad told me that the files were incompatible. I don't think that's actually true, but I didn't know enough at that age to be able to question it or even explore it. There are many many creations throughout first half of my life that are lost for a lack of storage space at the time.
As an aside: Do your best to capture at least something in a way that will be preserved.
Good thing I backed up my precious memories to Jaz cartridges.
Thanks for finding this! A relic from a more civilized age.
The UXN people did similart art too: https://xxiivv.com
https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/noodle.html
This dithering is somehow so pleasing. It’s like “sand dithering”.
“Dithering” is the key — except this seems to have been done by hand.
When I was a kid, I owned a monochrome display that could only display at CGA resolutions “640x400” 1-bit (and 320x200). Many games and art and didn’t support that showed up garbled.
Then I got hold of Deluxe Paint that would load pictures in color and dither them with an algo called Floyd Steinberg. And the pictures that I saw on my friends VGA monitors suddenly looked beautiful on my monochrome screen.
See examples https://surma.dev/things/ditherpunk/
Games like Monkey Island were also ditherered for monochrome displays and they looked great.
If you enjoy this art-style, definitely check out the game Return to the Obra Dinn.
There’s a ditherpunk artist in Moscow named Uno Morales that I’m quite fond of: https://unomoralez.com/
I was just about to post the same link! Found his site today by pure happenstance.
Don't know this guy's technique, but the idea that people were drawing such elaborate pictures on tiny screens - with mice! not even tablets - boggles me. Every pixel a deliberate act.
The 2nd artwork ('A Door Somewhere " - Bert Monrov) had me really confused for a moment. When I scrolled down to it, there was a sort of flickering effect, like as if it were a gif, with a flickering light adding ambience to the scene.
But no, it's just how that sort of black & white shading looks when you scroll past it - amazing effect!
As the neighbour mentions, it's only a case of your display having ghosting. This effect is not present on eg. OLED screens.
What monitor do you have?
This was on an OLED Samsung phone, screen running at 120Hz
Yes, I asked because I got curious about the effect and opened the link to see it but didn't notice it on mine, so I figured it must be specific to your display.
Really interesting. I’m wondering if there’s any LLM or image model on Hugging Face that has been trained specifically on low-res black-and-white images like MacPaint. Has anyone come across something similar or seen a fine-tuned model in this specific retro visual style?
Not sure why you're being downvoted. I'd like to see this, too. Just for fun.
It's like... someone gives you a gift, and then you ask "Wow! Can I have arbitrarily more of these, please?" It's a lack of appreciation for what we have - instead of enjoying it, you want to press a button to create arbitrarily more of it. That is truly no appreciation at all.
I think it is downvoted because it would potentially harm the creative value of the original works.
Reminds me of the youtube video where Ahoy recreates one of the classic 4 Byte images from the 80's 4-Byte Burger https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4EFkspO5p4
For me, there's a certain aesthetic to 1-bit bayer-dithered images, as well as images with visibly big coloured-halftone-dots, that makes it feel both retro and modern at the same time. I want to call it neo-retro, but I feel like that term already exists.
When I was a kid, I used to think that better tools would automatically make me good at art.
For example, I was making animations with EasyToon, and I only had a mouse, while the really good animators were using graphics tablets.
Clearly, if I bought a tablet, my own animation skills would drastically improve!
I guess I still kinda believe that, when I look at how fancy some of the newer computers are. If only I had one of those, my creativity would be unlimited!
The funny thing is that my fallacy sorta came true: my friend was showing me some insane stuff he rendered on his 5080 with a custom Stable Diffusion...
Better tools won't make you better, but they'll get in the way less, would you rather draw with a pencil or a bar of soap? A mouse is more like the latter than the former.
Okay but you will definitely be able to make better art with a graphical tablet. It's near impossible to have enough precision to draw with a mouse, regardless of practice or skill.
Taking this moment to promote 1-bit art! I run a couple accounts which promote 1-bit art and I’m trying to figure out how to expand what artwork is included. These are just personal accounts that retweet art from 1-bit artists on BlueSky and Twitter.
https://bsky.app/profile/1bitdreams.bsky.social
https://x.com/1BitDreams
Btw what is current MacPaint successor? Is there any? Do I understand correctly it used to be shipped with the Mac?
Preview is great to some extent and does a lot of useful things for me but it's designed to modify existing images, and I'm still missing a software to draw a square, circle, some text etc.
Try Paintbrush (open-source MacPaint-inspired app), Pixelmator Pro (more advanced), Acorn, or even Apple's built-in Preview has basic drawing tools under the markup icon when viewing images.
Yeah as I said preview covers 99% of my needs but not for graphics from the scratch.
Thank you, will try! I'm kinda missing this ms paint feel on some specific situations
I think the .png images on this website are larger than the uncompressed originals (1-bit depth, 1 bit per pixel).
Yep, I upscaled them by 400% so they’re easier to view on modern displays.
I know; I mean to say they're larger file sizes—the PNG compression ratio is effectively less than one.
Take the first one, "acius.png", at 84,326 bytes. If you losslessly scale back to the original size (1/4th) and convert to 1-bit NetPBM, it's 51,851 bytes, without compression. I thought that was remarkable.
The PNG files seem to be very poorly compressed.
The review at the time was if you weren't a particularly good artist, MacPaint wouldn't change that.
Semi-related, a fantastic recreation/"digital restoration" of a classic but if pixel art from the Amiga days
https://youtube.com/watch?v=i4EFkspO5p4
Wow, at first glance, my initial reaction is that these trigger some sort of nostalgia - they are really comforting in some odd and interesting way
I can think of a few reasons why this may be the case, but I’m looking forward to chewing on it for a bit
Love the old monochrome Mac game aesthetic. I played a lot of the original MacVenture Deja Vu game as a kid, and always thought that the art had a cool look to it, and as an adult I'm amazed at what they pulled off, despite the limitations.
Zen and the Art of the Macintosh: https://archive.org/details/mac_Zen_the_Art_of_Macintosh1986
I remember when this style was current, though some of these images are slightly older than I am.
Also, "a door somewhere" reminds me of old album covers. For whatever reason I'm thinking of Lou Reed's "take no prisoners".
These really need to be viewed with a CRT renderer IMO, as well as the Amiga art mentioned in this thread. The hard square pixels on the website aren’t quite representative of what these looked like on a contemporary monitor.
Up to a point, but the early Macintosh displays were quite crisp and clinical—certainly compared to something like a consumer NTSC or PAL CRT TV—as befitted a platform which was very focussed on WYSIWYG paper-document editing.
Some of them (such as the street scene) wouldn't fit on the monitor and presumably were intended to be printed for viewing.
I suppose it's just nostalgia, but I get such a warm fuzzy feeling just seeing this art from the 80s. I can remember using tools like MacPaint. It was just such a fun time to be around computers.
I wonder if the face icons where intended for the X-Face header.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Face
Bert Monroy (the 2nd image, of an alleyway) is still quite active as a digital artist: https://www.bertmonroy.com
This is amazing. Thank you for sharing!
What a nostalgia trip. Reminds me of sitting in the computer lab in the library in my elementary school in 1990. Some days, I'd give anything to go back.
That hendrix one goes unfathomably hard. crazy how we took art like this for granted back then.
Hendrx art goes hard. Sad to think we we took for granted art like that back then.
These look gorgeous. The thing really was a bicycle for the mind.
People that can do these drawings would make awesome art for play.date games!!!
Crazy to see 4D in there, is it actually a 4D poster with the big 4 in there?
Why did Denis have to fuck up Jimi's headstock like that
rembrandt paintings from the 17th century still look great today
Yeah. Seems that art might be... timeless.
The loading time for this artwork has a quality all of its own.
Constraints of the medium enhance the artwork.
Constraints of the medium enhance artwork.
Love the “apple periferals” truck!
so does roman mosaics :-)
This reminds me of the great tragedy of not exposing the Nokia SmartMessage extension to end users. It could have given a new lease of life to grassroots low resolution 1 bit art in the 90s and early 00s in the form of operator logos.
Instead it was gatekept for grifters in order to separate gullible teenagers from their allowance.
The Amiga is quite another beast, especially showing photos in HAM mode, giving 4096 colors.
It looks great today, but if you asked someone in the 90s or even 00s they’d probably say it looks like ass. Or, like, totally wack, dude.
We like it today because of the nostalgia/retro factor.
I dunno - artwork in this style did pretty good on ffffound back in the day. That's at least as early as 2007. I'm sure you could go back further in other forums and find appreciation for the same reason people like it here.
To contrast, a lot of content from clip-art collections at the time looked awful then and didn't age well at all.
this is awesome!
Not really?
Meh. It was nothing compared with PLATO systems at the university. And the CAD setups dad and his engineering team used for work then (Silicon Graphics?) also looked much better.
So maybe for some values of "great." Maybe.