[HN Gopher] Four-Byte Burger [video]
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Four-Byte Burger [video]
Author : DamnInteresting
Score : 312 points
Date : 2023-04-21 14:50 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| andrepd wrote:
| Ahoy is an incredible channel. This video about tracker music is
| amazing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roBkg-iPrbw
| M4v3R wrote:
| This video is one of my favorites from Ahoy, what a great job
| preserving this awesome piece of retro music history.
| pwrrr wrote:
| Very cool thanks!
| who-shot-jr wrote:
| This is computing heritage.
|
| _wipes tear from eye_
| 2809 wrote:
| I love how the 3.x Workbench still feels so close to a modern OS.
| stewx wrote:
| This is delightful. The attention to detail is astounding.
| umvi wrote:
| Did Ahoy compose the background music?
| senkora wrote:
| I would love to have a print of the reproduction as wall art.
| p1mrx wrote:
| http://xboxahoy.com/images/four-byte-burger.png
| blakespot wrote:
| I don't suppose there's a version that is not scaled to 1.2x
| height, for conversion and display on an Amiga CRT, avoiding
| the need to scale the PNG and lose quality. (Ahoy, if you're
| reading this.) I'd love to have such a version.
| zokier wrote:
| Just opening it in GIMP and scaling back down to 200x320
| seems to work fine, I don't notice any weird artifacts or
| anything.
| drewtato wrote:
| https://i.imgur.com/sXiDtCg.png
| moron4hire wrote:
| How are there JPG artifacts on a PNG?
| scrollaway wrote:
| imgur is terrible and compresses png to jpg in some cases
| xmonkee wrote:
| Damn, just looking at this image for a minute can trigger an
| intense wave of nostalgia for my childhood.
| joezydeco wrote:
| Jack Haeger is still around, working for a pinball company
| outside Chicago:
|
| https://www.pinballnews.com/site/2021/02/15/jack-haeger-join...
|
| Maybe someone can ask him about the art?
| tomcam wrote:
| Thanks. I submitted a form on that page yesterday after reading
| your post. No luck so far I guess?
| msie wrote:
| Shocked that there was no "save" functionality at the time.
| Inspiring actually: Just do it.
| rzzzt wrote:
| Just freeze and save the entire contents of memory, paint
| program included, using an equivalent of an Action Replay
| (provided one existed for the Amiga at that time).
| pham803 wrote:
| Datel didn't come out with an Action Replay cartridge for the
| Amiga until the A500 (ie, a few years after this). I still
| have my ARII- a truly amazing piece of hardware. In addition
| to letting you freeze a program and dump memory to disk, the
| cartridge had a ripper option that let you graphically pan
| through memory to look for images to save (another option
| searched for music trackers).
| mattl wrote:
| I had a Multiface for my CPC and it was an amazing piece of
| hardware.
| [deleted]
| tomcam wrote:
| Captivating. I mostly had to listen to it as a podcast,
| occasionally sneaking a glimpse at the screen while waiting at a
| red light, and his descriptions were so precise and vivid I had
| no trouble following along. Love the documentarian voice and dry
| humor.
| marcodiego wrote:
| Once he got the color palette, resolution and aspect ratio, why
| didn't simply automated the conversion, eg. using nearest
| neighbor in color space to determine the color of each pixel? Why
| did he do it "by hand" instead?
| lovasoa wrote:
| Because he's an artist, not a programmer.
|
| But I have to admit that, after finding the video on hacker
| news, I was quite surprised when he opened Photoshop too
| Arnavion wrote:
| Also that wouldn't have let him do the animation at the end
| of the video.
| wyldfire wrote:
| Just need to throw in some clever CV segmentation ;)
| VikingCoder wrote:
| I absolutely love this.
|
| However... I was wishing the recreation had been done in software
| rather than in Photoshop.
|
| I was hoping that some clever image processing would result in a
| Github Repository of a program that could take any photograph of
| a pixel image, and reproduce the original pixels. Handling all of
| the distortions along the way...
| UltimateEdge wrote:
| After using the scanlines to determine the grid size, I bet you
| could apply a pass of some filter in the frequency domain to
| remove the artefacts created by the CRT screen! Like here [1],
| where the author removes a moire pattern created by the process
| of printing a photo.
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28663719
| chefandy wrote:
| Doing the cleanup to get the kind of accuracy he was shooting
| for would take as long as creating it by hand.
| UltimateEdge wrote:
| I meant cleaning up the scanlines to make it easier to
| sample the pixel colors.
|
| After running a Fourier transform you only need to paint
| over the obvious bright spots to remove these regular
| artefacts (see the linked article for a demonstration).
| chefandy wrote:
| I mean, I'm not about to run any tests but I think you're
| underestimating how much work the human eyes do to iron
| out the little inconsistencies. I've done a lot of work
| with processing digitized images, and algorithmically
| converting a brand new 600dpi industrial flatbed scan of
| well-preserved black-and-white typed page into a 1-bit
| black-and-white tiff would often yield noisy, and
| sometimes unusable results for relatively clean looking
| images because our eyes see right through artifacts that
| most algorithms can't. I'm sure you could easily do the
| first 90% algorithmically- which is probably good enough
| for most developers-- but for an artist to get the
| accuracy he was looking for, that last 10% would almost
| certainly take longer than the few hours he put into it.
| UltimateEdge wrote:
| Fair enough! Considering the LCD vs CRT comparison video
| game graphic posted elsewhere in the thread, you're
| probably right.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| "Wow, amazing accomplishment, I just wish you did it a
| different way"
|
| HN is wild.
| VikingCoder wrote:
| I'm not going to spend a day and a half reproducing old pixel
| art in Photoshop. I celebrate an artist who will take the
| time to do that, and I think their final result is fantastic.
|
| If there were a tool that would help me do this, there are
| situations where I would use it.
|
| I actually wrote a tool that took a PNG and helped me break
| out the original sprites, backgrounds, and fonts from an old
| video game. But I recognize that doing this from a photograph
| is a couple orders of magnitude more difficult.
|
| If anyone is looking for a technical challenge, and has the
| relevant skills, here I am highlighting how amazing I think
| it would be.
| gorjusborg wrote:
| The effort the author is willing to put in is a main reason
| why this content is entertaining to me. The other main
| component is that he followed through and did it.
|
| Commentary by those who don't care enough to invest a day
| doing it, that also haven't done it, and that are being
| critical of the work seems pathetic and sad.
|
| The work itself is inspiring and joyful.
| codetrotter wrote:
| "I'm not going to spend a day and a half reproducing old
| pixel art in Photoshop"
|
| ..instead, I will spend a month and a half writing a piece
| of software to reproduce the pixel art for me.
|
| :^)
| mock-possum wrote:
| Edit: nevermind, misunderstood
| kmoser wrote:
| That was my first thought: write software to find each pixel
| and put it in an array based on its color value. Then find the
| 32 densest clusters in the array (i.e. the 32 most frequently
| used colors), determine the average color value of each of
| those clusters, and that's your palette.
|
| Then run through each pixel again, and set it to the closest
| matching value from your palette. Done!
| VikingCoder wrote:
| I think "find each pixel" is a lot harder than you and I are
| describing it. (I've done some of this work before.) Without
| knowing the intrinsic parameters of the camera, and how the
| photo from the camera was cropped, it's pretty rough...
|
| ...but on the other hand, with a high enough quality
| photograph, and a low enough resolution original image... it
| sure seems possible.
| chaorace wrote:
| Just spitballing a high-level implementation:
|
| 1. Color correct for the CMYK printing process
|
| 2. Load image as a pixel matrix
|
| 3. Unwrap pixel matrix into a pixel vector
|
| 4. Convert the pixel vector to HSV representation
|
| 5. Group each pixel into a palette slot by plugging the H/S
| dimensions into K-means with 32 as the target (ignoring L
| for clustering to account for scanlines/flicker)
|
| 6. For each palette slot, calculate the "true" HSV value by
| taking the group's median H/S values and the mean V value
|
| 7. Convert HSV representation to 12-bit RGB colorspace
| chefandy wrote:
| Sure, it's easy to write out the steps like that, but the
| devil is in the details. It's not super difficult for a
| human eye to figure out where the original pixels aught
| to go, but you just can't take a photograph of a
| photograph of a screen that was half-toned and printed
| with an offset printer or whatever they used and grab a
| clean original pixel matrix out of it with color accurate
| to even other parts of the image. The closer you get, the
| mushier it gets. Reducing the resolution using a nearest
| neighbor or bicubic algorithm would give you a cleaner
| pixel representation, but it still require a lot of
| cleanup to get the kind of accuracy he was going for, and
| inaccuracies would be a lot harder to spot in that
| context. I've worked on image-processing software for
| some big digital archival projects, I'm a long-time
| digital artist, and was a graphic designer having worked
| in print media. I would set myself a _good long chunk of
| time_ to get that right and doing it for one single image
| rather than a necessarily reproducible process would not
| be close to worth it.
| zokier wrote:
| Having visible scan-lines should help a lot?
| wdfx wrote:
| I was at least hoping he had an example image both in
| digital and print form from which to derive a mapping which
| could restore the pallette of four byte burger more
| accurately.
| russellbeattie wrote:
| I disagree - we know the grid used. So the scan will just
| go through and pull out the average color found within each
| pixel area in the grid array, then those colors are
| adjusted to the nearest 32bit version (as explained in
| parent). I've done this sort of thing to convert photos
| into "pointillist" style images.
|
| The first pass might be off - I can imagine adjusting the
| grid size to skip the scan lines for more accuracy. But the
| final result will be very close with 5% of the work
| involved. The guy has spent a day and a half for a task
| that should take less than an hour at most.
| VikingCoder wrote:
| In the arbitrary case, the grid can look really skewed.
|
| Even non-fisheye lenses have some distortion, but look at
| how wacky the grid can appear here:
|
| https://docs.nvidia.com/vpi/image-003.jpg
|
| And it gets worse if you only see the grid, and don't
| know how it was cropped out of the photo it was taken
| from (if it was off-center).
|
| But yeah, I think we're all on the same page that some
| entrepreneurial image processing expert could make fairly
| quick work of the problem.
| kmoser wrote:
| I happen to have the premiere issue of Amiga World
| magazine and looking at the original printed image, I can
| tell you that the vertical scan lines are straight as an
| arrow, and line up perfectly with the (cropped) sides of
| the image.
|
| Even if they were distorted by a fisheye lens, it should
| be easy to use something like Photoshop's "pinch" filter
| to create an undistorted image to work from.
| zokier wrote:
| do you happen to have scanner to get nice scan of the
| picture? I can't seem to find one on the internet; IA
| only has a very low-res version:
| https://archive.org/details/amiga-world-
| premiere-1985/page/n...
| VikingCoder wrote:
| In case you didn't see - someone found a great
| resolution:
|
| https://www.flickr.com/photos/blakespot/50926604693/sizes
| /o
| VikingCoder wrote:
| This is the highest resolution image I could fine - do
| you know a higher resolution one?
|
| https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/50926604693_1e6b65f13
| b_b...
| RileyPatcher wrote:
| Here's the larger 2000x2585 version from the link you've
| given.
|
| https://www.flickr.com/photos/blakespot/50926604693/sizes
| /o
| kingcharles wrote:
| If anyone wonders what it is like to be born British, this is the
| answer. We can't help ourselves. This is the burden we live with
| on a daily basis.
| donatj wrote:
| I feel like it'd be easier to write some software to do this
| rather than by hand in Photoshop.
|
| I somewhat wonder if there were actually at least 2 shades of
| blue in the background of the original given how much visible
| noise it contains.
| M4v3R wrote:
| Yeah the background of the original also seemed to contain some
| kind of slight texture.
| atum47 wrote:
| A long time ago I was fiddling with code to "reconstruct" pixel
| art [1]. After watching this video I am tempted to try to restore
| this image using code. by the way, I first discovered ahoy back
| in 2016 and I've been a subscriber since. great videos of the
| highest quality.
|
| 1 - https://github.com/victorqribeiro/pixelRestorer
| Raicuparta wrote:
| The restored pixel art in every example is blurrier than the
| original jpegs, I guess because it didn't align perfectly with
| the original pixel grid. So it doesn't seem very useful.
| icelancer wrote:
| Ahoy's channel is amazing. If you haven't delved into Iconic Arms
| and all the Retro videos, man, you're in for a treat.
| lvl102 wrote:
| What are some other iconic digital images from this era? Feel NFT
| crowd really missed the boat on the Four-Byte Burger.
| codetrotter wrote:
| > NFT crowd really missed the boat on the Four-Byte Burger.
|
| It would be cool if the creator of the original four-byte
| burger made an NFT version of it.
|
| Similar to an exchange I had the other day. Someone was asking
| what kind of things we'd like to see as NFTs. After a little
| bit of thinking I said, I would have liked to see eBoy make
| NFTs. They are among the OGs in the pixel art world.
|
| > Their complex illustrations have been made into posters,
| shirts, souvenirs, and displayed in gallery exhibitions. They
| were founded on May 2, 1997. "We started working with pixels
| because we loved the idea of making pictures only for the
| screen. It's the best way to get really sharp and clean looking
| results. Also, handling pixels is fun and you are forced to
| simplify and abstract things, which is a big advantage of this
| technique." eBoy is based in Berlin and Los Angeles.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBoy
|
| It turned out that in fact, eBoy did make some NFTs. The price
| was higher than I could afford however.
| rdlw wrote:
| > It would be cool if the creator of the original four-byte
| burger made an NFT version of it.
|
| It would not be cool if the creator of the original four-byte
| burger made an NFT version of it.
| zokier wrote:
| Does anyone have good scan of the original? Would be nice for
| playing along
| wodenokoto wrote:
| It's hard to say what is CRT and camera artifacts, but it looks
| to me like the background isn't flat.
| throw7 wrote:
| Leaving the monitor on its side overnight gets rid of the
| discoloration??? Ok, somewhere here must know why... or we're
| being bamboozled.
| kmoser wrote:
| I can confirm that turning a monitor on its side does result in
| distorted colors, especially on the edges. When I experienced
| this with a Commodore 1701 monitor (we're talking early to
| mid-1980s) the only other electronic device nearby was the
| Commodore 64 it was attached to, so it's unlikely caused by
| _other_ devices.
|
| This thread explains that you need to degauss the monitor after
| turning it on its side:
| http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=84041.0
|
| I suspect leaving the monitor off overnight effectively
| degausses it.
| throw7 wrote:
| Hmmm, in my vague memory I do remember some monitors having a
| "degausse" button...
| hnbad wrote:
| I believe that came later. I do recall my early IBM PC
| compatible having a monitor with a degauss button that
| would give a satisfying FOOMP sound (accompanied by a
| twitch of whatever was on the screen) if the monitor had
| been sufficiently gaussy before.
| richyfreeway wrote:
| I'm working from old memories here but iirc the degaussing
| circuits in TVs and monitors only work after they've cooled
| down. He didn't have to leave it all night, maybe an hour if
| that would have done.
| kmoser wrote:
| The degauss buttons on CRTs worked almost instantly.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Monitors use electromagnets to steer an electron beam. The
| earth has a more or less constant magnetic field in a certain
| orientation. Rotating the monitor changes the magnetic flux the
| electron beam experiences and might distort which subpixels the
| electron beam is hitting.
| Arrath wrote:
| Interesting! I would have thought the field was too slight to
| have an effect in a case like this.
| CrLf wrote:
| I had a Samsung 19-inch pseudo-flat CRT that showed
| discoloration in the corners just by rotating it
| horizontally. Turning it off and on again fixed it (I
| supposed it degaussed on startup).
| JohnFen wrote:
| Maybe for the same reason that you shouldn't mount chips
| upside-down lest all of the electrons fall out?
| retrocryptid wrote:
| This is crazy. And I mean that as a complement. It mixes geeky
| obsession with high production values to produce a tour-d-force
| of 80s nostalgia and personal accomplishment.
|
| Well worth watching, even if you're unfamiliar with the 1980s,
| the Amiga or the original artwork.
| Lev1a wrote:
| AFAIK Ahoy has been pretty famous for his high production
| values using well-done research, slick graphics and nice
| animations for a number of years.
| FireInsight wrote:
| Ahoy is a very high quality channel! Highly recommend watching
| the video about Polybius, and the one about the first video
| game.
| nickt wrote:
| Stu makes great videos - truly the David Attenborough of video
| game history.
|
| In case you've missed it, he has some other channels, including
| the brilliant DrinksAhoy [1], Krush Dev Diary [2] and music on
| Bandcamp [3]
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/@DrinksAhoy [2]
| https://www.youtube.com/@krush8272/featured [3]
| https://xahoy.bandcamp.com/album/four-byte-burger
| daguava wrote:
| [dead]
| blakespot wrote:
| XboxAhoy linked me his IFF, and here it is on my Amiga 1000 and
| 1080 CRT. (Obviously that old 1080 doesn't like to lie on its
| side...)
|
| Std:
| https://www.flickr.com/photos/blakespot/52835711339/in/album...
|
| Rotated:
| https://www.flickr.com/photos/blakespot/52834954342/in/album...
|
| So lovely in phosphor!
| djmips wrote:
| Looks like you didn't wait so it would auto-degauss for the
| vertical.
| causality0 wrote:
| An underrated aspect of digital image preservation in general is
| that you are not looking at it the way it was designed and
| intended to be viewed. These images were designed by someone
| working on a CRT to be viewed on a CRT. In some cases such as
| retro game emulation, the translation to LCD or OLED displays
| badly mangles the intended look.
|
| https://twitter.com/CRTpixels/status/1357132408634630144/pho...
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| I was an amateur digital artist in the 90s, and I can tell you
| that although we did work with what we had, no-one liked CRT
| artifacts. We were always trying to get a sharper, clearer,
| better picture. The first LCD monitors were so stunningly sharp
| and clear that it was obvious we would never go back.
|
| At least, that's what I thought. It's funny now to see people
| glorifying CRTs as some kind of "ideal" display device for low-
| res art. Past-me would have laughed.
| zokier wrote:
| I don't know if I'd call it underrated anymore nowdays that crt
| filters/shaders are mainstay in emulator community. Especially
| with 4k displays you can do quite a lot of tricks to get that
| CRT look. You have also products like Analogue Pocket that do
| incredibly detailed display emulation (although lcd instad of
| crt..).
|
| https://docs.libretro.com/shader/crt
|
| https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/12/analogue-pocket-revie...
|
| Some closeup shots of Analogue Pocket display
| https://www.reddit.com/r/AnalogueInc/comments/rikszr/analogu...
|
| edit: found also this lengthy article on setting up Amiga
| emulation with CRT shaders, which includes comparison shot with
| real CRT: https://blog.johnnovak.net/2022/04/15/achieving-
| period-corre...
| [deleted]
| VikingCoder wrote:
| Also: https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term
| wholinator2 wrote:
| Hmm, Twitter seems to be fully down currently. Even just
| twitter.com won't load
| mbork_pl wrote:
| Yes! I remember reading a long blog post or something about
| this very thing a few years ago, with photographs. The
| difference between a CRT and an LCD was amazing. Sadly, I
| couldn't find that post (and I did search...)
| hnbad wrote:
| Yeah, that's why he finally presents the reconstruction on a
| similar device, CRT and all.
|
| Some emulators now try to emulate the visual artefacts of CRT
| or phosphor monitors, scanlines, bleed and all. Of course doing
| so artificially takes considerable computation time.
| vivegi wrote:
| This made my day. What a trip down memory lane!
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(page generated 2023-04-22 23:02 UTC)