Previously Unknown Warhol Works Discovered on Floppy Disks from 1985 (2014)
studioforcreativeinquiry.org
studioforcreativeinquiry.org
It must have taken around 6 or 7 years for the Macintosh and "IBM PC" computers to catch up. The graphic art capacity was head and shoulders about anything else outside of Silicone Graphics. Not to mention that VIM was developed on the Amiga.
I had a audio port so I could record through RCA cables and remix things. My church had the Video Toaster which was in use from 1987 to 2004. This actually led to me doing a lot of audio and video work that I still do today.
In the future I think the hardware architecture will resemble more of the Amiga as we hit the limits of computer chips. There will be more dedicated chips and cores for more specific things.
I had a computer with two different CPUs 6502 and Z80 that could actually ran them in parallel.
There is nothing new about the ability to have some functionality offloaded to another processing unit regardless of the architecture.
Thus, a system with an 8087 was capable of true parallel processing, performing one operation in the integer ALU of the main CPU while at the same time performing a floating-point operation in the 8087 coprocessor. Since the 8086 or 8088 exclusively controlled the instruction flow and timing and had no direct access to the internal status of the 8087, and because the 8087 could execute only one instruction at a time, programs for the combined 8086/8087 or 8088/8087 system had to ensure that the 8087 had time to complete the last instruction issued to it before it was issued another one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_8087#Design_and_developm...
Apple's heterogenous computing functions on iOS are higher-level and much easier to use. Instead of manually writing code to do FaceID on iOS, possibly involving graduate-degree levels of theory, you simply create a biometry type which abstracts much of the details, many of which developers aren't particularly interested in fine-tuning. This is how someone on a budget like Bank XYZ can use FaceID to unlock your bank app.
If a game is designed and written to more-or-less cater to a common denominator it is more straightforward to later port the game to other consoles or PCs- including platforms that might not exist at the time the original game was created- and mop up sales from those other userbases.
If you tailored a game to work within the memory footprint of a PS3 and did not take advantage of SPEs, a port is easy- you've aimed at a lowest common denominator. If you designed your game with the expectation that you'd have more RAM, you'll have to make some painful decisions to cut the game down to size. If you designed your game to actually take advantage of SPEs, there wouldn't necessarily be a comparable compute resource on the platform to which you would like to port.
We still did clever things like putting music in GPU memory and then streaming it back to system memory since the bandwidth wasn't large and read patterns were very predictable.
http://www.geekometry.com/2015/01/gamechangers-jay-miner-and...
Amiga had the best API. Even as a kid I could understand what I was doing with it.
The BIG issue will be programming to utilize these architecture and we haven't really hit anything yet that we see a HUGE increase when we have multiple of cpu cores let alone other components. The big issue will be API.
The issue wasn't that the PS3 was heterogeneous, it was that the X360 came first so everyone wrote for a system that had relaxed memory constraints. When the PS3 came along all of a sudden things that weren't vectorized didn't run slow, they just flat out didn't run at all.
Fun fact, the few engines that were developed for the PS3 first and X360 second ran circles around everyone else because all the vectorization work for PS3 meant they fit in caches really nicely and had zero cache misses. Easily 2-4x faster than titles doing equivalent work.
I wonder what format it was...
If these were system disks from a prototype Amiga, then it makes sense that these pictures came from an early version of Deluxe Paint, and that .pic was some intermediate / temporary / memory-dump type format before they adopted the .iff system.
Given the Amiga was quite different display-wise, a description of the file format would probably be quite instructive in terms of whether it was an Amiga-native data structure or something already existent somehow.
But DPaint at least let you paint under the title bar.
Later versions of GraphiCraft did use IFF, as Commodore wholly embraced the format once EA released it.
To be fair, that third eye changes the picture in a very significant way, in artistic terms. Art is not about quantity of effort.
So Commodore's Graphicraft was probably always using ILBM IFF, maybe with new and pre-release chunk types. :)
I'd be very surprised if they weren't alpha IFF or some such. I'd love to see a hex dump of the start of a file.
[0] http://static.lightwave3d.com/sdk/11-6/html/filefmts/eaiff85...
It's pretty much a memory dump of the window/screen bitmaps with a bit of extra data in front.
http://amiga.lychesis.net/artist/AvrilHarrison/AH_Venus.html
I found it quite amusing that they describe it as a "completely unknown file format" - it have taken them minutes to identify the paint program used if they actually read any of a number of accounts of the launch prep.
It's described on page 284 onwards of Commodore: The Amiga Years (Brian Bagnall), and many other places. (EDIT2: Note that specific book was not published when the article was written, but a very similar account is present in an older book by the same author - Commodore: The Amiga Years is the second volume of what started as a second edition of his previous account of Commodore)
EDIT: "Graphicraft" is even present in the images in the article..."
They mention Graphicraft was unable to load the images unless booted with a particular Kickstart version.
As a wild guess, one possible source of problems might be that GraphiCraft might have taken shortcuts in saving that might have e.g. assumed a certain offset into some data structure to copy the palette information from the file to that changed before release, as some of these early programs were known to basically pretty much dump memory straight to file and load it back in straight into some data structure with minimal parsing and validation.
The format for most of the others is described as "PLBM", which makes sense as P(L)BM is basically a cruder variation that'd allow dumping the screen/window content to the disc in planar format directly (native for all Amiga on-screen display prior to AGA or graphics cards) with minimal framing, while ILBM interleaves the bitplanes row by row (and can optionally use run-length encoding too), and so needs a bit more finesse.
It's kinda funny how they play up that the person who found this out "specializes in and is world-renowned for hacking and reverse engineering" - if you're remotely familiar with image file formats, it takes about 5 seconds of looking at these files in a hex editor to see that they're an IFF related format, and the chunk names are plain ASCII. I'm sure the person in smart - I'm not disputing that; but they're overplaying how much expertise is required for this.
Both ILBM and P(L)BM are formats you can write a basic decoder for in an hour or two - IFF contains chunk headers and length markers to let you extract each chunk, and you need the palette information and the bitplanes. ILBM also allows for basic run-length encoding. There's no complicated compression or anything else to make it hard.
But how did they know that before they were able to view the images?
That's reductionist. Warhol's craft was in recognising and willfully exploiting brand culture. He described the celebrity culture we now live with, and made a job out of being the one who understood how it worked. He wasn't just signing "worthy" stuff; he was showing people how the mechanisms of brand-building and celebrity culture actually work: by repetition and labelling/signing/appropriating. He branded the brands like brands branded the world, and he did it over and over with minor variations, exactly like they do.
He was not without his flaws, but he wasn't just some sort of "gatekeeper of cool". He obviously didn't think an artist exists to validate this or that brand; the validation was a side-effect of his artistic craft. This is why trying to "play Warhol" today, using different brands or imagery, is just stupid, in artistic terms: he's done it already, it's all there already and there is nothing else to say on that particular subject.
Had Amiga employed random interns to do the same thing, people would have gotten the impression that it was a silly child's toy. But Andy Worhol's doodles "immensely alter the composition and complexity of the source image".
http://www.nowseethis.org/invisiblephoto
Amiga games are so important to the history of game development and design. Could the brand could be resurrected if willing investors were to arise?
Amiga Documents: