fstark

This is a 6502 assembly video player for the Commodore PET. Not fully finished, but I haven't really worked on it in the last 3 or 4 years.

Videos are encoded with a C++ Linux encoder, and played from a floppy drive emulator, at the incredible speed of 2.5K/s.

Yes, all the film covers shown are encoded. Due to a stupid encoder bug, films are still limited to 20 minutes...

Back in the day, I really liked the idea of standardizing class diagrams, but it became quite complicated at some point.

Then, I had a lot of architects doing complicated UML diagrams that no-one understood, then had the pleasure of managing team of developers of MDA applications, and the code generation maintenance mess was dramatic, and nothing from that enormous plumbing made any of the "real" code easier.

Happy to see that my disdain of UML is actually shared by one of the creators.

Hey that's cool, awesome, and completely outside of area of expertise! I love it!

That's kind of you, but no, I don't have a patreon nor need financial support. Having enthousiats users/lurkers if all that I need.

However, if anyone can help me getting my hands on some vintage hardware, that would be awesome (mac or non-mac, I have a few nasty software projects involving weird hardware).

[I'm ready to pay "normal" prices for those items, of course]

In particular, I am looking for a network card (for the next couple of years) for the SE/30, as I see streaming could be useful to a late 80's computer... :-) . I did found one, once, but the seller didn't ship outside of the US, and the time to organize, it went poof :-(

I also try to get my hands on a Performa/LC 575 motherboard to perform a Mystic upgrade of my Color Classic -- the goal being to see what kind of crazyness we could get on a top-of-the line color compact mac. Again, those things seems to be made of unobtainium, and probably hoarded by collectors...

A Turbo NeXT Cube would be awesome, but again, nowhere to be found...

Knowing people appreciate that made the oh-so-many hours worth it. Thx!

Thx!

Ouch.

You planted an idea in my brain that may lead to the complete re-development of the whole thing. 3 colors? That would be the middle link between the Original Mac and the Original NeXT !

Yes. This is absolutely insane, with image encoded into 6502 machine code, and PWM sound interleaced. It doesn't work on period hardware, thought (needs a special modern card, the CFFA3000, that is out of production).

I thought that this particular video, using the 1984 ad I used, was a reply to my earlier macflim video :-)

That red skirt made me feel like Constable against Turner... https://www.brightreddot.org/objective/ ...

Interesting. I tried some light posterization (splitting into discrete levels), but it made the image uglier. Your approach would make nice blacks and whites. Grays would still suffer, but it is an interesting take.

The dithering is performed by the C++ linux encoder. I could add it as an encoding stage option...

Are you sure?

I may be wrong, but I am pretty sure that Quicktime on a SE/30 was not able to display fullscreen videos at 24 fps. Also, the dithering used in QuickTime was an ordered dithering, which IMO is pretty ugly and eats details.

As long as I avoid flim about cyclimse, everything should be ok.

I looked at several approaches, but I absolutely wanted to do floyd-steinberg, as this is what were, for me, "realistic" images on my Mac back in the 80s.

The example on the website are identical to the ones in the first video, as the simple looping gif is a by-product of the encoding.

On the second video (the one with sound), you cannot compare, as the video is compressed and not all the parts of the image are updated. But the algo is the same.

The swimmy bits come from the fact that I encode images using the preceeding one, and use the pixels from the preceeding images to "control" where the error gets diffused, to try to get some temporal stability in error diffusion (I have a long blog post that explains that, but I never got around finishing it, it seems people were more interested by having me coding sound).

I am not completely sure why the swim effect seems to always be in the north-west direction (I understand why pixels go in that diagonal, but no why they always seem to crawl on the top-left, and never the bottom-right).

The dithering code can be found in the encoder, on github:

https://github.com/fstark/macflim/blob/main/flimmaker.cpp#L3...

If you have other dithering ideas, let me know. I am happy with the one I have, which matches what I was looking for, but we never know. Also, for the compressed version (the one with sound), the dithering have a huge impact on the ability to play on slow machines.

(Btw, I tried ordered dithering, but I have always found it awful looking. Maybe in motion it would fare better?).

Source code of the silent version is at https://github.com/fstark/macflim (Mac app source code, C++ encoder source code and instructions). The sound version (the new demo from yesterday's video https://youtu.be/YRe6I5AICJ0 is massively more complicated and I will release the binaries over the week-end and the source code later next week, probably).

I'd love to do a video with the explanations (or a talk), but I am still think about how to present this is a understandable and entertaining way.

It is an inside joke about a French movie made from barely legal cuts of hilariously dubbed Warner Bros extracts. I found th3e concept weirdly suitable for a tongue-in-cheek artistic experiment that will probably mostly be used to display extract of other people movies...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Classe_am%C3%A9ricaine

The floppyemu is awesome for floppy emulation or for old HD20-like hard drives. But they are too slow for macflim.

As I say on the link, you need either a real scsi disk, or, better an scsi emulator, like a SCSI2H https://store.inertialcomputing.com/SCSI2SD-s/100.htm, a RaSCSI https://www.tindie.com/products/landogriffin/rascsi-macintos..., a BlueSCSI https://gumroad.com/l/bluescsi-1b or a MacSD http://macsd.com/

The Mac(s) on the video have a SCSI2HD v5.5, with 4 2Gb partitions on a microsd. I can mount the first partition on my linux to copy stuff onto it (in general via the minivmac emulator).

Yep. Emulation is good, but using the real hardware is magical.

Fun fact: the reason why macflim had no sound originally is that my SE30s have bad caps (like most), and no sound. So many people asked for sound that I had to recap those surface mount caps (ouch my eyes!) so I could actually hack a version with sound :-)

Hi. I am the author of macflim.

This is the old video, I am finishing the techdemo that have sound, there is a video on youtube (https://youtu.be/YRe6I5AICJ0). I'll update the macflim.com website later today.

And yes, diskspace is one of the reason why it is impractical, but with a SCSI2SD, one can get 4 2Gb partitions on you mac for around $100.

And yes, it is bizarre and useles, hence absolutely necessary. If you have time, try the app, it is full of inside time-correct jokes.