Old School Color Cycling with HTML5
effectgames.com
effectgames.com
I suspect there's a market for a lovingly created adventure game, although not a really big one.
Does anyone know which game these screens originally come from? It's not mentioned on the site.
The resolution is 640*480 at 256 colors, which is better than VGA. That would suggest something fairly recent (perhaps 1994-96).
Lacking an official standard, 640 * 480 with 256 colors was usually marketed as a "Super VGA" mode in the early '90s.
To some extent mobile computing may revive this sort of sentiment. The 'demo scene' is another place where people still do absolutely amazing things with very restricted systems and/or environments.
Maybe there could be some kind of revival of this, webpages under 1K in size or something like that.
The art shines and becomes visible only through the limitations; that's why many artists choose to limit their technique, be it pointillist painting, writing 6510 assembly, drawing 32-color bitmaps, or programming a computer which has limitless limitations for the programmer to choose from.
You could replace painting realistic-looking objects with simply taking photographs, which seemingly does the same: reproduce an original setting in most realistic-looking way. But that isn't painting anymore, that takes away the art. In fact, photography is a whole another art: while it shares many basic principles with painting, the art of photography is very different from what makes painting an art.
I especially like this guy: http://www.foolstown.com/
"Perhaps some new internet tool will come out that allows us to show these old drawings to you in motion. ... Not this month though. Sorry."
Someone should tell him...
Truly a wonderful piece of art.
EDIT: Actually, Braid.
An 8 bit display meant that you basically had a lookup table of size 256, and each entry mapped to an 18 bit colour (6 bits each for R, G & B IIRC). These days it's kinda normal for a bit geek to have numbers like 1024, 1048576, 16777216 and 4294967296 permanently burned into your brain. Back then we also had 262144 burned in -- the number of colours we had access to.
The best part about palette cycling was that you didn't have to wait for the VBLANK to make your changes. For most frame changes, you'd have to wait until the cathode ray hit the bottom of the monitor and was slowly making its way back up to the top to scan through again. You had to make all writes to video memory at this time to avoid screen fuzz, ie, half a screen with the old frame and half with the new frame. Palette cycling could happen at pretty much any time, so you'd just hook it up to the timer interrupt and let it go.
http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article373.asp
which also tells you why Michael Abrash is God
And it's a very slow process, hard to automate. So as games got bigger, it was hard to have that many individual paintings. You're basically doing an animated movie when you've got 2D pixel graphics.
That's why mainstream games can't make too much money with that, and why on the other hand, pixel-based games have seen renewed popularity with the advent of downloadable indy games for major console platforms.
Much of the "pixel art" made even at ~320x200x256 is sourced from oil paintings, cels, 3d, or photography and cleaned up with pixel editing. Cleanups can work wonders for any source material at that resolution, but if you look at games from the later 90s which applied these methods to 640x480 and above, the art taken from other sources tends to look like a paper cut-out once composited, because the alpha is colorkeyed, not per-pixel, and no amount of cleanup could hide that. Now that we can use per-pixel alpha everywhere and apply shader effects, 2D is a lot more flexible than it used to be.
It's like saying, "This software is Mac compatible!... inside a VMware instance running windows XP"
Personally I'd have preferred a blunt "This page does not work in MSIE", but I understand that's still a risky thing to do, despite the market share figures having improved somewhat.
Hey, that sounds like FlashDevelop, which actually claims to be "Mac OSX/Linux compatible using virtualization software (VirtualBox, VMWare, Parallels)"