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Comment by ealexhudson | Hacker News Reader

They don't really say very much. The Venus bitmap was a demo picture that shipped with Deluxe Paint (and the one they've published seems to be blank where the header/toolbox would be), and although they credited it to Warhol it doesn't appear he's done much than cut/paste a third eye in.

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.

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Minor Nit: IFF was released in Jan 85 [0], a few months before Amiga was released and several Amiga guys, including RJ, contributed to the spec. It was baked into the Amiga from the very start.

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...

"IFF" doesn't say all that much, of course, as it's just very basic framing. It's the chunk types that matters.. It does seem the images were in fact PLBM, so very similar to ILBM but "raw" bitplanes instead of interleaving row by row.

It's pretty much a memory dump of the window/screen bitmaps with a bit of extra data in front.

He used GraphiCraft for the demo, but of course it's possible he at some point later used DPaint. I do believe the reason GraphiCraft is present in the images, though, is because GraphiCraft early on did in fact use pretty much a memory dump. Several of the early graphics programs in fact didn't store a separate full copy of the bitmaps, but let you draw directly into an window on the screen, and relied on AmigaOS to preserve any sections temporarily covered by other windows.

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.

> it doesn't appear he's done much than cut/paste a third eye in.

To be fair, that third eye changes the picture in a very significant way, in artistic terms. Art is not about quantity of effort.

I mean, it can be. Just might not be tangible effort. Thought, planning is effort. Banksy, for a beaten to death example.

ugh

The original Amiga Venus image was created by Avril Harrison (The AH in the lower left corner. She did a lot of awesome work for LucasArts, too.)

http://amiga.lychesis.net/artist/AvrilHarrison/AH_Venus.html

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