[HN Gopher] MacPaint Art from the Mid-80s Still Looks Great Today
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MacPaint Art from the Mid-80s Still Looks Great Today
Author : decryption
Score : 705 points
Date : 2025-07-12 08:45 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.decryption.net.au)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.decryption.net.au)
| aidos wrote:
| 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
| xgkickt wrote:
| As one of the images states: "Happy Computing to all, And may
| all your computing be a Delight!".
| gxd wrote:
| 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
| keyringlight wrote:
| 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
| ekianjo wrote:
| some better ones here
|
| https://amiga.lychesis.net/applications/AmigaDealer.html
| andrepd wrote:
| Loved this dive on one such Deluxe Paint piece:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4EFkspO5p4
| dan-robertson wrote:
| 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.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| 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.
| jameshart wrote:
| 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.
| vardump wrote:
| 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.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| 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
| mock-possum wrote:
| Using colour cycling to achieve animation-like effects is so
| hot.
| corysama wrote:
| 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
| reconnecting wrote:
| 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?
| numtel wrote:
| 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.
| reconnecting wrote:
| True, Winamp 2 was much solid. Unless I'm mistaken Winamp 3
| introduce skins and after absolute madness starts.
| jfim wrote:
| NN4 tended to crash more than NN3, it may have been due to the
| rushed development during the browser wars.
| reconnecting wrote:
| There was problem with styles and tables.
|
| https://sbpoley.home.xs4all.nl/webmatters/netscape4.html
| spydum wrote:
| 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...
| reconnecting wrote:
| 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.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| 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.
| giantrobot wrote:
| > 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.
| reconnecting wrote:
| 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.
| mr_toad wrote:
| The rendering differences were at least as much IE's fault
| as Netscapes. It took several versions before IE was
| (mostly) standards compliant.
| giantrobot wrote:
| 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.
| giantrobot wrote:
| > 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.
| reconnecting wrote:
| 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...
| kragen wrote:
| 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.
| reconnecting wrote:
| Indeed, browsers learned how to hurt people from their
| earliest days.
| Mizza wrote:
| 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...
| decryption wrote:
| I wish I knew what Acius was or is too!
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| 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)
| perihelions wrote:
| I think the .png images on this website are larger than the
| uncompressed originals (1-bit depth, 1 bit per pixel).
| decryption wrote:
| Yep, I upscaled them by 400% so they're easier to view on
| modern displays.
| perihelions wrote:
| 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.
| encom wrote:
| The PNG files seem to be very poorly compressed.
| $ oxipng -o max --strip all -avZ --fast acius.png
| Processing: acius.png 2304x2880 pixels, PNG
| format 8-bit Indexed (2 colors), non-interlaced
| IDAT size = 84251 bytes File size = 84326 bytes
| Transformed image to 1-bit Indexed (2 colors), non-
| interlaced Trying filter None with zopfli, zi = 15
| Found better result: zopfli, zi = 15, f = None
| IDAT size = 24466 bytes (59785 bytes decrease)
| file size = 24541 bytes (59785 bytes = 70.90% decrease)
| 24541 bytes (70.90% smaller): acius.png
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Thanks for finding this! A relic from a more civilized age.
| RayBarfing wrote:
| rembrandt paintings from the 17th century still look great today
| spankibalt wrote:
| Yeah. Seems that art might be... _timeless_.
| nntwozz wrote:
| The loading time for this artwork has a quality all of its own.
| poisonborz wrote:
| 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.
| anthk wrote:
| The UXN people did similart art too: https://xxiivv.com
|
| https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/noodle.html
| fifticon wrote:
| so does roman mosaics :-)
| promiseofbeans wrote:
| 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!
| donkeybeer wrote:
| What monitor do you have?
| SSLy wrote:
| As the neighbour mentions, it's only a case of your display
| having ghosting. This effect is not present on eg. OLED
| screens.
| seabombs wrote:
| 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.
| lukan wrote:
| 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.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| 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.)
| lukan wrote:
| 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.
| reconnecting wrote:
| 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...
| lukan wrote:
| 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.
| fwipsy wrote:
| 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.
| anthk wrote:
| You have no idea on how charming these games look.
| lukan wrote:
| Or I do, because I played them?
|
| But that was my not well received point about nostalgia ..
| anthk wrote:
| 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.
| Keyframe wrote:
| 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).
| lukan wrote:
| 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.
| chamomeal wrote:
| 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
| al_borland wrote:
| 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?
| zozbot234 wrote:
| 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.
| al_borland wrote:
| 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.
| rchaud wrote:
| 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.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| 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.
| anthk wrote:
| Games from Neo Geo were pixel art of very high quality.
| Just check Garou.
| qgin wrote:
| 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.
| nine_k wrote:
| 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_.
| timoth3y wrote:
| 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.
| dahart wrote:
| Switched on Bach is one of my favorite albums of all time.
| rectang wrote:
| 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.
| sovietswag wrote:
| You should take a listen to Tomita as well then! There is
| so much beautiful music in the world
| copperx wrote:
| Way too much, in fact, if we go by daily Spotify uploads.
| dahart wrote:
| 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.
| Barbing wrote:
| 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.
| Barbing wrote:
| 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!
| madaxe_again wrote:
| 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.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| 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.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| 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.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| 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 soirees. 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.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| 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.
| somat wrote:
| 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.
| mr_toad wrote:
| > 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 Oyster Cult.
| copperx wrote:
| 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.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| 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.
| libraryatnight wrote:
| Understanding this point about cave paintings is crucial to
| not being a human piece of garbage.
| drewlesueur wrote:
| 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
| xgkickt wrote:
| Vib Ribbon is one example I can think of that also exhibits
| that property.
| anton-c wrote:
| 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.
| techpineapple wrote:
| 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?)
| bane wrote:
| 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.
| mattbettinson wrote:
| Maybe recency bias cause I'm playing it right now, but Breath
| of the Wild comes to mind
| tinco wrote:
| 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.
| pjerem wrote:
| 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.
| z3c0 wrote:
| 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.
| easton wrote:
| 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.
| AndrewStephens wrote:
| 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.
| dehrmann wrote:
| There's a solid chance GTA VI will include a lawn mowing
| minigame.
| bredren wrote:
| 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.
| SlowTao wrote:
| 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.
| Hilift wrote:
| The review at the time was if you weren't a particularly good
| artist, MacPaint wouldn't change that.
| lowwave wrote:
| Crazy to see 4D in there, is it actually a 4D poster with the big
| 4 in there?
| taylorius wrote:
| 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.
| tombert wrote:
| 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.
| anthk wrote:
| 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.
| tombert wrote:
| 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.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Similarly, some cave paintings still look awesome.
|
| https://www.bradshawfoundation.com/lascaux/
| eddieroger wrote:
| 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.
| roughly wrote:
| 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.
| Dante690 wrote:
| 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?
| sgt wrote:
| Not sure why you're being downvoted. I'd like to see this, too.
| Just for fun.
| amelius wrote:
| I think it is downvoted because it would potentially harm the
| creative value of the original works.
| JSR_FDED wrote:
| This dithering is somehow so pleasing. It's like "sand
| dithering".
| wenc wrote:
| "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.
| kjellsbells wrote:
| 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.
| Max-q wrote:
| The Amiga is quite another beast, especially showing photos in
| HAM mode, giving 4096 colors.
| drewcoo wrote:
| 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.
| cjcenizal wrote:
| 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.
| rswail wrote:
| "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.
| layer8 wrote:
| 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.
| leoc wrote:
| 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.
| card_zero wrote:
| Some of them (such as the street scene) wouldn't fit on the
| monitor and presumably were intended to be printed for
| viewing.
| vman81 wrote:
| 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
| ekunazanu wrote:
| 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.
| cubefox wrote:
| That street scene is some of the best pixel art I have ever seen.
|
| https://blog.decryption.net.au/images/macpaint/lesson3d.png
| marhee wrote:
| If you enjoy this art-style, definitely check out the game Return
| to the Obra Dinn.
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| There's a ditherpunk artist in Moscow named Uno Morales that
| I'm quite fond of: https://unomoralez.com/
| aresant wrote:
| 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-...
| hcarvalhoalves wrote:
| 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.
| akie wrote:
| 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.
| bigyabai wrote:
| > 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.
| time0ut wrote:
| 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.
| tombert wrote:
| 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.
| sircastor wrote:
| 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.
| xattt wrote:
| Good thing I backed up my precious memories to Jaz cartridges.
| andai wrote:
| 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...
| egypturnash wrote:
| 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.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| 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.
| _kidlike wrote:
| People that can do these drawings would make awesome art for
| play.date games!!!
| brap wrote:
| 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.
| oasisbob wrote:
| 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.
| whiteboardr wrote:
| Love the "apple periferals" truck!
| dietrichepp wrote:
| 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
| neel-openai wrote:
| this is awesome!
| asveikau wrote:
| 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".
| encyclic wrote:
| Bert Monroy (the 2nd image, of an alleyway) is still quite active
| as a digital artist: https://www.bertmonroy.com
| jamesgill wrote:
| 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.
| gnarbarian wrote:
| Constraints of the medium enhance artwork.
| gnarbarian wrote:
| Constraints of the medium enhance the artwork.
| cpach wrote:
| I wonder if the face icons where intended for the X-Face header.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Face
| decryption wrote:
| 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 :-)
| BaculumMeumEst wrote:
| Why did Denis have to fuck up Jimi's headstock like that
| WoodenChair wrote:
| 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
| ltbarcly3 wrote:
| Not really?
| h8ngryDev wrote:
| That hendrix one goes unfathomably hard. crazy how we took art
| like this for granted back then.
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