Post B37xSIbyN3IahO2lDE by hakurokurokuroku@www.minds.com
(DIR) More posts by hakurokurokuroku@www.minds.com
(DIR) Post #B37muhuGoosTlLwgEK by RustyCrab@clubcyberia.co
2026-02-08T22:00:23.559465Z
4 likes, 1 repeats
I watched a long technical interview on myst one and apparently the reason it looked like ass despite being prerendered is be because every island was stuck having 256 colors for the entire thing and they couldn't swap the palette out without the screen going black (???) CDs back then could stream 150kbps apparently (not factoring in seek times)
(DIR) Post #B37nT0MogowarXeUt6 by RustyCrab@clubcyberia.co
2026-02-08T22:06:35.321023Z
1 likes, 1 repeats
It sounds like a lot of it was limitations on what they could do with hypercard https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2K1C5BZKP3I The kind of stuff you suffer from when you dont have a "real" language
(DIR) Post #B37p7JkY8zpOVyXW0e by niobleoum@nekosat.work
2026-02-08T22:25:05.612287Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@RustyCrab Imo it looks pretty decent for that time, proper piss filter was a standard until like mid 00's.
(DIR) Post #B37qEbdK9UejxcCPBI by RustyCrab@clubcyberia.co
2026-02-08T22:37:36.161799Z
1 likes, 1 repeats
@niobleoum yeah youd just think "what would be the limitation if its prerendered" but it turns out they had a mega jank computer cluster and the image compression was :niggaskull:Rand Miller said it took at least 4 hours to render each image
(DIR) Post #B37s1WNqYhT7p4qeK8 by hakurokurokuroku@www.minds.com
2026-02-08T22:53:22+00:00
1 likes, 0 repeats
Myst was awesome at the time. Prior to that we were running text-based games or games that looked like this:
(DIR) Post #B37s1XZa8YRxVlLXFo by RustyCrab@clubcyberia.co
2026-02-08T22:57:37.502795Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
@hakurokurokuroku i guess maybe im not aware of why the palette was so constrained. Maybe it had something to do with hardware limitations of video cards at the time. That sounds more likely than a memory limitation
(DIR) Post #B37wBhK58oXKSlCAHg by PurpCat@clubcyberia.co
2026-02-08T23:44:17.662380Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
@RustyCrab @hakurokurokuroku hypercard was kinda jank but like macromedia it was used a ton for weird Mac games as a generalized engine
(DIR) Post #B37xSIbyN3IahO2lDE by hakurokurokuroku@www.minds.com
2026-02-08T23:27:49+00:00
1 likes, 0 repeats
It was a long time ago but if I recall most applications on home PCs could only produce 256 colors? So most likely a hardware limitation, but whether that was in the RAM (I remember being excited when my PC in ‘93 had 4MB of memory and a whole 128MB of space on the hard drive. I don’t remember if it had a separate graphics card though as “gaming” on PCs was a really new concept compared to using an SNES or Sega.
(DIR) Post #B382KnebZUIUQgWBf6 by not_br549@jollyville.net
2026-02-09T00:53:11.689695Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
Yeah Liesure Suit was pre-jpeg .. each pixel in a byte of ram. I'm not sure how Myst was coded. 1 byte/pix dictates a 256-color palette. It looks so lame now.
(DIR) Post #B382yUNgeA30EsWvSq by RustyCrab@clubcyberia.co
2026-02-09T01:00:21.098145Z
1 likes, 1 repeats
@not_br549 @hakurokurokuroku well today we just load the palette into the memory with the 1 byte per pixel inage and that gets translated into an RGB buffer at display time. It makes more sense if the card itself has to render things as paletted and swapping that would trigger a black screen. It's entirely possible that Rand didnt understand the limitation himself as i dont think hes really a programmer
(DIR) Post #B384gI8xbg6Yys5nGa by not_br549@jollyville.net
2026-02-09T01:19:29.647342Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
Jpeg and similar encode the image as discrete cosine transforms. The card must do the heavy lifting calculating cosines.. And now, 3d rendering. Home computers did not have the horsepower until some time in the 90s. I had fun graphing Mandelbrot patterns but they were ssllooww. It's why GPUs are in demand now for crypto mining and ai. The CPU is a mere text interface with 0.01% or less of the number crunching ability..