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.
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.
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?)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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):
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:
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :-)
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.
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.
“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.
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!
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?
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Btw what is current MacPaint successor? Is there any? Do I understand correctly it used to be shipped with the Mac?
Preview is great to some extent and does a lot of useful things for me but it's designed to modify existing images, and I'm still missing a software to draw a square, circle, some text etc.
Try Paintbrush (open-source MacPaint-inspired app), Pixelmator Pro (more advanced), Acorn, or even Apple's built-in Preview has basic drawing tools under the markup icon when viewing images.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This reminds me of the great tragedy of not exposing the Nokia SmartMessage extension to end users. It could have given a new lease of life to grassroots low resolution 1 bit art in the 90s and early 00s in the form of operator logos.
Instead it was gatekept for grifters in order to separate gullible teenagers from their allowance.
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.
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.
seabombs|7 months ago
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.
timoth3y|7 months ago
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.
techpineapple|7 months ago
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|7 months ago
al_borland|7 months ago
Was this the artist’s vision, or were they simply making the best of the tools they had?
AndrewStephens|7 months ago
mattbettinson|7 months ago
anton-c|7 months ago
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.
xgkickt|7 months ago
SlowTao|7 months ago
st_phan|7 months ago
I tried Claude and it mentioned the term might actually be „Aesthetic sufficiency“, but I couldn‘t find an essay with Homeworld on it.
tonijn|7 months ago
commandersaki|7 months ago
lukan|7 months ago
To me they look horribly pixelated and at least some would improve aesthetically a lot for me with a higher resolution.
WoodenChair|7 months ago
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
gxd|7 months ago
https://amiga.lychesis.net/applications/DeluxePaint.html
keyringlight|7 months ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44076501
dan-robertson|7 months ago
ekianjo|7 months ago
https://amiga.lychesis.net/applications/AmigaDealer.html
andrepd|7 months ago
p0w3n3d|7 months ago
That's how I fell in love with Monkey Island and Flashback
mock-possum|7 months ago
pwillia7|7 months ago
[deleted]
manoDev|7 months ago
akie|7 months ago
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.
aresant|7 months ago
https://www.cultofmac.com/news/pinot-w-ichwandardi-flatiron-...
poisonborz|7 months ago
HPsquared|7 months ago
https://www.bradshawfoundation.com/lascaux/
eddieroger|7 months ago
roughly|7 months ago
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.
rswail|7 months ago
The constraints of the original Mac and MacPaint have resulted in an art form specific to the time and place.
reconnecting|7 months ago
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?
giantrobot|7 months ago
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.
kragen|7 months ago
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.
spydum|7 months ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Navigator#:~:text=Thi...
cmrdporcupine|7 months ago
But I also don't think 3 was much better.
numtel|7 months ago
jfim|7 months ago
kjellsbells|7 months ago
https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/macgrid
Incidentially /r/VintagePixelArt often has discussions about this sort of thing.
taylorius|7 months ago
tombert|7 months ago
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.
cjcenizal|7 months ago
Mizza|7 months ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View_of_the_World_from_9th_Ave...
unknown|7 months ago
[deleted]
decryption|7 months ago
decryption|7 months ago
aidos|7 months ago
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|7 months ago
cubefox|7 months ago
https://blog.decryption.net.au/images/macpaint/lesson3d.png
sircastor|7 months ago
As an aside: Do your best to capture at least something in a way that will be preserved.
xattt|7 months ago
zozbot234|7 months ago
anthk|7 months ago
https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/noodle.html
JSR_FDED|7 months ago
wenc|7 months ago
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.
marhee|7 months ago
Eric_WVGG|7 months ago
promiseofbeans|7 months ago
But no, it's just how that sort of black & white shading looks when you scroll past it - amazing effect!
SSLy|7 months ago
donkeybeer|7 months ago
Dante690|7 months ago
sgt|7 months ago
vman81|7 months ago
ekunazanu|7 months ago
andai|7 months ago
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|7 months ago
iLoveOncall|7 months ago
dietrichepp|7 months ago
https://bsky.app/profile/1bitdreams.bsky.social
https://x.com/1BitDreams
p0w3n3d|7 months ago
Preview is great to some extent and does a lot of useful things for me but it's designed to modify existing images, and I'm still missing a software to draw a square, circle, some text etc.
ethan_smith|7 months ago
perihelions|7 months ago
decryption|7 months ago
Hilift|7 months ago
jedimastert|7 months ago
https://youtube.com/watch?v=i4EFkspO5p4
unknown|7 months ago
[deleted]
tombert|7 months ago
gxs|7 months ago
I can think of a few reasons why this may be the case, but I’m looking forward to chewing on it for a bit
asveikau|7 months ago
Also, "a door somewhere" reminds me of old album covers. For whatever reason I'm thinking of Lou Reed's "take no prisoners".
mjmsmith|7 months ago
layer8|7 months ago
leoc|7 months ago
jamesgill|7 months ago
cpach|7 months ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Face
encyclic|7 months ago
time0ut|7 months ago
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.
unknown|7 months ago
[deleted]
h8ngryDev|7 months ago
h8ngryDev|7 months ago
_kidlike|7 months ago
lowwave|7 months ago
noufalibrahim|7 months ago
BaculumMeumEst|7 months ago
RayBarfing|7 months ago
spankibalt|7 months ago
nntwozz|7 months ago
gnarbarian|7 months ago
gnarbarian|7 months ago
whiteboardr|7 months ago
fifticon|7 months ago
Tabular-Iceberg|7 months ago
Instead it was gatekept for grifters in order to separate gullible teenagers from their allowance.
Max-q|7 months ago
brap|7 months ago
We like it today because of the nostalgia/retro factor.
oasisbob|7 months ago
To contrast, a lot of content from clip-art collections at the time looked awful then and didn't age well at all.
neel-openai|7 months ago
ltbarcly3|7 months ago
TacticalCoder|7 months ago
[deleted]
hugh1st|7 months ago
[deleted]
mikebuds1|7 months ago
[deleted]
k2xl|7 months ago
[deleted]
zozbot234|7 months ago
drewcoo|7 months ago
So maybe for some values of "great." Maybe.