1-Bit Hokusai’s ”The Great Wave”

[statico]

This site design is one of the best retro Mac site designs I've seen. The author really nailed the pixel perfect fonts — it looks perfect on my low-DPI and high-DPI displays.

If anyone's interested, there's an active HyperCard community with some fun projects. There's a Discord server, too. https://hypercard.org/

I found that community through the Avara community, a port of the classic Mac multiplayer networked mech shooter from Ambrosia: https://github.com/avaraline/Avara

Also, if you're into retro Mac stuff or just want nostalgia, the Infinite Mac project is amazing. You can run all the major Mac OS Classic releases right in the browser, you can drag and drop files from Macintosh Archive or Macintosh Garden onto the window, and you can even create an AppleTalk network between browsers: https://infinitemac.org/

[lmm]

> The author really nailed the pixel perfect fonts — it looks perfect on my low-DPI and high-DPI displays.

It has some weird rainbow effect to it on mine, and the background flickers when I scroll.

[birracerveza]

The website is really good but the font is blurry on my windows machine, only in this blog post.

If I adblock the (beautiful) “Great Wave” image, the font reads perfectly.

[vertis]

How I miss Escape Velocity and Ambrosia Software. It was the first game I bought. Had to call the US at some weird hour from Australia and pay with Dad's credit card over the phone.

I'm aware there are similar games like Endless Sky (which I've played quite a bit).

I really wish the people behind Ambrosia could be encouraged to open source everything.

[mouse_]

It's beautiful, but unfortunate that the font is trying to use cleartype, which screws up the aesthetic bigly.

[calibas]

When viewing the site in Firefox, the font in the paragraphs has a very subtle rainbow effect. Here's a screenshot of it zoomed in: https://i.imgur.com/ir0MmPq.png

I was wondering how they achieved that effect, but it doesn't seem intentional. It's not part of the CSS, and I only see it in FF, doesn't happen in Chrome.

It goes away if I switch fonts, it looks like it's some weird result of how Firefox renders the site's "BitGeneva12" font. Another odd thing, it goes away when I used FF's "Take Screenshot" feature. Also only happens when the font is 12px in size.

[wesleychen]

It's probably due to anti-aliasing. A similar thing happens on some versions of Windows with ClearType turned on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ClearType

[MivLives]

I assumed this was intentional to sorta look weird and retro. Sorta wild it's just Firefox messing it up.

[bobbylarrybobby]

Sub pixel antialiasing gone wrong?

[Cthulhu_]

On your screenshot I can only see the fonts aren't quite sharp, the rainbow effect is probably from your display trying to render these subpixel differences.

[shrx]

Looks fine in firefox on Linux: https://imgur.com/lmxTyrt.png

[WoodenChair]

If you're interested in showing photographs and paintings on a classic Mac, I actually made an app for that. It takes modern images, dithers them to 1-bit, and then exports the results to MacPaint format (encoded in MacBinary for easy transport). It works on modern versions of macOS: https://oaksnow.com/retrodither/

[lukas099]

I wish I could run my entire display in retro dithering mode.

[regularfry]

There's something very... right about the black and white rendering from those early macs. Can't exactly put my finger on it but they seem very natural in a way that I can't readily identify in any other setting.

[JKCalhoun]

My own sense is that black and white forced an economy of pixels. For glyphs, icons, artwork, I could labor over the placement of every single pixel.

A crisp, high contrast display and neat, little square pixels just reinforces that kind of regenerative feedback loop.

[ddingus]

Yes. For me, part of it is the display tech in use. Those monochrome CRT displays look great! And that "white" phosphor helps augment the whole thing in a way an LCD misses the mark on, but just slightly.

Still looks great.

For what it is worth, an e-ink display will look fantastic! I have one and will view this eye candy on it soon enough.

[robga]

Bill Atkinson of Apple developed a new dithering algorithm for early Macs. I wonder if it was used for this rendering.

https://beyondloom.com/blog/dither.html

[Someone]

The author says “Software-wise I use Aldus SuperPaint 3.0”, so I expect it was drawn 100% by hand.

[tjpnz]

I took my father to see the original in Tokyo today. It's a sight to behold and worth a look next time you're here. You can also watch a Sumo match nearby.

[perilunar]

It's a woodblock print — there were thousands printed, and ~100 known to still exist. I've seen the British Museum's copy.

[yardshop]

I saw an original copy yesterday in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, along with the 50,000 piece LEGO version! They have a large exhibit about Hokusai, along with many of his contemporaries such as Hiroshige, works from his students and teachers, and many many examples of how the Great Wave has been reflected in art and culture over the years. They didn't have this beautiful little 1-bit piece though.

[robga]

It must have been a thrill to see a PowerBook 100!

[smcl]

I thought he made and sold many prints of each piece, so that identifying the original one wouldn't really be possible.

[dekhn]

When I was getting started with my laser engraver, I used the Great Wave as my template image. It translates to black and white quite nicely. Since the laser has a power range, you normally use grayscale but dithering also works. The stucki and jarvis options are both very good.

To me, dithering reminds me of early Macs (just like the link).

[selimthegrim]

Of possible relevance: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/24_Views_of_Mt._Fuji,_by_Hok...

[sgu999]

Is it worth reading? :)

[aaron695]

Hokusai (1760 - 1849) also did tentacle porn

NSFW art -

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dream_of_the_Fisherman%2...

Book -https://pulverer.si.edu/node/277/title

[tgv]

Of course, you can close the blog post (top left corner of the window), or click the floppy icon, which will reveal more posts. There aren't more Hokusai posts, though.

[injb]

I don't understand- in what sense is this "1 bit"?

[masswerk]

Generally, "n bit" describes the color depth of an image by the number of bits used to store the color information of a pixel.

Some common formats:

  1 bit .... b/w  (foreground or background color set per pixel)
  4 bit .... 16 colors (indexed color palette or 16 shades of grey in 1 channel)
  8 bit .... 256 colors (indexed color palette or 1-channel greyscale image)
  12 bit ... 16 x 16 x 16 colors, 3 color channels at 4 bits for 4,096 colors total
  24 bit ... 256 x 256 x 256 colors, 3 color channels at 8 bits for 16,777,216 colors total
  32 bit ... as above, but including an extra alpha channel (mask) for 256 levels of transparency

There are also high-resolution color modes (e.g. in Photoshop) using either 16 bits or even 32 bits per color channel. (So 8-bit, 16-bit or 32-bit may also describe the depth for each individual color channel in imaging software.)

"8-bit" is also used for graphics on 8-bit computers, most often a palette of 8 or 16 indexed colors in some sort of sub-palette (e.g., 2 bit = 4 out of 8 or 16 colors), in rare cases even 128 colors (like on the Atari 2600). Here, "8-bit" relates to the platform and not to image depth or a specific implementation.

[Synaesthesia]

Every pixel has 1 bit of color depth, basically black or white.

[sebastianz]

2 colors per pixel - black or white.

[ggm]

If you transmitted it one pixel at a time left to right top to bottom scan, or boudestrophon l r l r l r if you prefer then the pixel stream would equal a 1 bit value toggling on or off.

[Am4TIfIsER0ppos]

The property that a good font should have: on or off, present or not present.

[asynchronous]

Very cool drawing, as a side note I’ve seen Stable Diffusion be able to achieve very good pixel art with some Loras and textual embeddings plus some skill. Also seen it able to do amazing img2img art like pictured here.

[TiredGuy]

Does anyone know of any modern linux desktop environments that are specifically designed for 1-bit or grayscale? I really like the nice clean look as demonstrated here.

[ddingus]

I love 1bpp pixel art and the whole site looks great! Nice work, or shall I say labor of love?

On a whim, I picked up an e-ink display, 1800x1400 that has 16 grey shades, though I am unclear whether that is per pixel. Should know soon.

As I learn to use the display, throwing some of this art on it should look great.

That is all really. Just wanted to say nice work from one bit per pixel lover to another.

[hypertalking]

Thanks! :-)

[ftxbro]

I know this isn't the point, but if anyone wants to make pictures like this automatically you can use dithering.

[nxpnsv]

You’re going to miss the pixel perfect lines. There’s a whole subtle esthetic in this version from the careful manipulation of pixels…

[nxpnsv]

I love how it’s still beautiful…

[passion__desire]

"Return of the Obra Dinn" game gives similar vibes.

[wiz21c]

When I have a bit of time, I'll compare dither algorithms to that human version. Would be cool to see how they compare !

[rcarmo]

Holy cow, that web site takes me back...

[tesseract]

Holy dogcow, even!