Rigel Seven Up

My first computer was purchased in December 1984. It was an Atari 800XL with 64K of RAM.

My second computer was bought some months later (maybe May 1985). It was an Atari 130XE, which was basically the same machine as the 800XL but with better video output and 128K of RAM. The extra RAM was useless for programs, but could be configured as a “RAM Disk” which made some tasks easier.

Some the of the earliest software I purchased for these computers were art and animation tools. These were easy to get because by that time the Atari 8-bit computer line was going on five years old.

The third computer was purchased in August 1985. It was an Atari 520ST, a low-cost 16-bit marvel with a staggering 512K of RAM built-in. I was an early adopter. Hell, I got one the first week they were available! I recall it cost me $937.50 for the computer, one single sided 3.5″ floppy drive, and and SC1224 color monitor.

The trouble with buying a brand new computer model, especially one with a new operating system, is that upon release there’s typically scant software to accompany it. Such was the case with my brand new ST. I had a computer many times more powerful than my other ones, but I had so little software that it was barely useful for anything much for the first few months I owned it.

Fortunately, one of the few programs that shipped with the ST was an early version of a paint program called NeoChrome, so at least I could work on improving my computer graphics skills as I waited for something approaching an animation tool to arrive.

I posted one of my earliest ST graphics yesterday and the day before, but the most elaborate image I drew in those early days of the ST was the following recreation of a scene from the first Star Trek pilot: an abandoned fortress on the planet Rigel VII.

What I remember about drawing this image was how hard it was to do.

1. It was an attempt to recreate digitally a very colorful matte painting using only 16 colors.
2. My source was a tiny screenshot on the back of a book, less than 2″ wide.
3. The NeoChrome program was v.0.5, which means not even a full-featured paint program, and amongst those missing features were any tools for drawing arcs, ellipses or circles!

So, how to draw a giant moon looming on the horizon sans a circle drawing tool? I knew eyeballing it would be an exercise in futility, so what I did was use a protractor to draw a circle of the right size on paper. I then cut out the circle so I had a stencil, stuck it onto the monitor, and—one pixel at a time—drew in one-quarter of the outline of the circle. I then used the cut and paste tool to duplicate and flip this to complete the circle. Insane, but it worked!

Below is a screen-grab of the original matte shot. The book I was working from had the colors way oversaturated, so I got that wrong. Still I think I didn’t do badly for 16 colors out of a palette of 512 possible. Heck, the image was good enough that when I used it to illustrate an article on graphics I wrote for ANALOG Computing Magazine they used it on the cover of their ST-Log Magazine insert for issue number—you guessed it—seven.

A Pixel Is Not A Little Square

(With apologies to Dr. Alvy Ray Smith and his technical memo of the same name.)

Yesterday I posted about some of my early graphics work and included a couple of images illustrating how differently graphics would be drawn with relatively modest improvements of computer display capabilities. I noted that the images displayed weren’t necessarily true representations of how the original looked because of changes in display technology. While that’s true, it’s an incomplete explanation, as not only does the display type affect the appearance of the image, but there’s the issue of aspect ratio of the pixels that make up the image.

Because of how CRT TVs and monitors like them worked, pixels were never truly square. On the Atari 8-bit computers I was first working on each pixel of the display in the mode used (160×192) was roughly 1.8×1, and later on the 16-bit Atari ST (low-resolution 320×200 pixels) each pixel was roughly .9×1 As such, any graphic drawn to look correct on such a display ends up looking slightly distorted on modern system with truly square pixels. To better illustrate what these graphics looked like back in their day I’ve rescaled them to correct for the aspect ratio and blurred them a bit to give a better sense of how they displayed.

Twice something is four times something

Some months back I posted about doing some of my earliest computer graphics work.

My first computers were Atari 8-bit machines, and the most widely supported graphics mode for “art” purposes was had a resolution of 160×192 pixels, and in that mode I could have precisely FOUR colors on screen picked from a total palette of 128 colors. Below is a very early image I drew in that mode, probably created in the first few months of 1985.

Early pixels. 160x192 in 4 colors.

Now, the things about computer tech is that it’s always changing, and by the time I got my first Atari its days were numbered. Eight months later Atari released a 16-bit computer with much better graphics. Instead of 160×192 pixels with 4 colors from a potential palette of 128, this new machine allowed for 320×200 pixels with 16 colors from a potential palette of 512 (eight levels each of red, green, blue). The older computer used two bits per pixel, meaning there were four possible combinations of zeroes and ones (00 01 10 11), thus any pixel could be one of four colors. The newer computer used 4 bit per pixel, meaning there were 16 possible combinations of zeroes and ones (0000 0001 0010 0011 0100 0101 0110 0111 1000 1001 1010 1011 1100 1101 1110 1111) ergo sixteen possible values per pixel. In the case of binary, doubling the number of bits squares the possible combinations. So, 2 bits = 4, but 4 bits =16. Twice something is four times something.

Anyway, one of the first things I did when I got a simple paint program for it was to see how much of an improvement the resolution and more colors on screen would permit. I did this by recreating an early image from the older Atari on the new one.

What I could do with twice as many pixels and four times as many colors.

By modern standards it doesn’t look like much. But still, just having four times as many colors not only allowed me to add a background, but also to have enough colors to make the energy bolt animated via color cycling. The animated GIF here doesn’t cycle these colors anywhere near as fast as the Atari would, so the strobing effect the original had is somewhat lost, but you get the idea. Yes, it looks gaudy as Hell, but then these modern flatpanel monitors don’t have the same softening effect the older CRT monitors did, so every pixel stands out more sharply than it did back in the day.

I’m still amazed that these two images were created within nine months of each other.

But I still had a lot to learn.

The Monty Lisa

Some more of my old computer artwork. In this instance, I had this scan of the Mona Lisa which I reduced to 14 colors out of the 16 total the Atari ST could normally display in this graphics mode, leaving two colors with which I could work to make a sort of Terry Gilliam take on the material.

Scanned image of the Mona Lisa

Monty Lisa, by Maurice Molyneaux, 1988

As with the Bugatti image yesterday, this was one of several images I created for Epyx Inc. as box-art for the Art & Film Director product. The scanned image was altered using Art Director on an Atari ST computer at 320×200 resolution in 16 colors out of a palette of 512 possible.

Bugatti

Some more of my old computer artwork. This was one of several images I created for Epyx Inc. as box-art for the Art & Film Director product. The image was drawn using Art Director on an Atari ST computer at 320×200 resolution in 16 colors out of a palette of 512 possible.

Bugatti, by Maurice Molyneaux, 1988

By this point I’d been doing computer art for several years and I’d gotten fairly proficient at how to work with the limited palettes of the machines of that era.  Despite only having 16 colors to work with, I still managed to use them in such a fashion that the reflection in the pool is actually somewhat darker than than what it’s reflecting.

Roads Not Traveled…

I was poking through some old data CDs and DVDs tonight and ran across these two:

These animations run at different speeds on different computers, so I apologize if they look too fast or too slow!

They were created on an Atari ST at 320×200 pixels in a whopping 16 colors each!

The animated GIFs seen here are tests I created in 1990 and 1992 when I was—as I did several times—dabbling in doing computer animation. This was a test at replicating a visual effect I’d seen on TV.

Around this time I toyed with trying to find work doing animated mockups for visual effects shots for TV and film. I was using relatively crude tools, but I’d seen what some other companies were passing off as such “animatics” (known as pre-vis these days) and knew that some of the work I’d done already was of higher quality than some of the professional work.

At the time I was going through a lot of personal crises and wasn’t focused or driven enough to have pursued this as I should have.

I don’t know if I’d have found any success in that business, but looking back it’s an interesting what-if.

I’ll try to dig up some more of this stuff and relate what I was thinking when I was doing it.