Pixel Stuff


These are my pixel-overs of old game sprites. For me, it's not really about "fixing" the sprites - they often worked well enough on old screens. It's more that I have my own preferences and ways of expression. It's also a relaxing thing to do while listening to a book or documentary, and it's a fun puzzle to stay within the old restrictions and solve pixel problems.

Sometimes I stick to the original quirky palettes. In some cases old palettes have near duplicate colours. This could be because it's split into little ramps for various section's of the figure (like on e.g. Mega Man), but sometimes it's because they didn't care or kept changing the palette around to achieve colour and contrast balance. With 16 colours per sprite... well, it's not much of a restriction I think, it can be pointless to try to use all colours.

War of the Dead

I guess they had to keep the ROM small for this game. The enemies seemingly use just 8 colours (like aLttP). I think this type of "compression" would make more sense for the background tiles, which could likely be saved as 4 colours in many cases.

Hardware-wise, the PCE can do 16 palettes of 16 colours for tiles, and the same for sprites. This is very luxurious compared to the Amiga. However, the colour precision is only 3-3-3-bit (meaning: eight steps per slider compared to the Amiga's four). This makes the RGB steps multiples of about 36 (I think it's linear, and Megadrive is nonlinear). I used regular 24bit RGB for these pixel-overs though.

War of the Dead was released for the PCE (89), MSX (87) and PC-88 (89). The latter did the tall pixel dither thing, and had a much grittier look than the PCE version.

War of the Dead, Enemies and MC

Enemies and Main Character. Player anim is really static. I wonder how it'd look if more lively. I was able to free up some indices for the MC. Dark red and purple can often be merged. I used the new indices to add the blue boots. The original sprite has orange skin, but looking carefully, it actually has skin shading which was flattened to orange by changes to the palette.

The enemies here are downscaled from the PC-88 version. I'm trying to keep some of the noisy hues as it's a horror game. The enemies might need a little "Thing" type shiver with the tentacles... it would eat mem ofc.

War of the Dead, Portrait

PC-88 to 16 colour lowres, de-noise process.

War of the Dead, Church

As I understand it, rescued people are brought to the church. It looks different in each port so I mixed various elements. I toppled the cross just for atmosphere/theme, and sprinkled some homeless camp and dilapidation on top. My palette is kinda random and the whole setting is too noisy and needs to be more graphical, so it's a WIP

War of the Dead, side panel

An interpretation of the side panel skeletal cyborg creature. It's hard to make out what's going on with the PC-88 graphics. I added a snakey tube tentacle body.

Popful Mail

These are SEGA CD version pixel-overs. The other versions are not as interesting looking I think. I was gonna do MW IV but oddly enough there are no available sprite rips/dumps of that game.

Popful Mail

MC, Skeleton, Rhino-Ogre(?), Robot. I worked with the original palettes, changing only the odd purple which might be a rip error.

Popful Mail

There are a fair amount of enemies in the game it seems, but not all have been dumped/ripped. The palettes are similar between some sprites, and there are wasted near black indices, but I believe that's an editor workflow artefact. There's probably no reason to reuse a similar palette (blue-orange) for many of the enemies. Might have been an art choice.

Other

MMX, Actraiser, Valis

MMX (using my own MM suit design) and Actraiser (with Renaissance armour variant), and SNES Valis 4 pixel-overs. Holy flail woman has a quite difficult palette and could almost be 8 colours instead. Unsure if mech thing is a reference to something (MSN-02 Zeong?), but I made up details. Actraiser looks a bit thin due to TV aspect ratio stuff... so I tried making a wider version.

MSX Ellen Ripley

MSX restrictions Ellen Ripley.

Gourmet something

Garume Sentai BaraYaro, Ghost Sweeper Mikami. Could do a lot more with changes to the palette, but it's sort of fun to try to find solutions with the available values and hues. Mademoiselle sure has some booty.

Rusty

Rusty downscaled to lowres. A bit too noisy.

Claw...? I forgot what it was called.

The Guardian Legend boss, 8 colours.

Bomb Jack, Amiga mockup

Bomb Jack

Bomber Jack is a game which I don't remember playing back then. There's an official (kinda wonky) port from back in the day, and a new fan made port which is a lot more faithful to the arcade.

I had all sorts of ideas doing these enemies... I think when it comes to ports I'm in favour of changing things up a bit so there's something new, and maybe take advantage of some hardware quirk of the platform. I'm not really doing that here aside from using PAL screen height. The Arcade game which I used as reference game ran in CRT portrait (monitor on the side) mode afaik. The old Amiga (Elite) port seems to be NTSC letterbox/landscape.

I couldn't find the exact reference photo of the Sphinx (which apparently was pixeled by the sound designer). I tried to better match the cracks and stuff. The wig was propped up by support structures recently, as very early photos of it buried in the sand shows it without (the neck kind of precariously eroding). Makes it look a bit like a cobra. An ancient slab with still legible inauguration notes was erected between the paws. The sand protected it and the lower body. The Cheops Pyramid is also accurate, as is the perspective overlap from that angle. I cleaned it up and made use of some colour indices for pushing it back atmospherically.

The Castle level BG was apparently based on a straight-on aerial photo of Castle Neuschwanstein. It can also be viewed from the nearby hills/cliffs. I found some ref from a more attractive side angle and repixeled the entire thing, seen more from a ground/side level. One index to spare, which I might use for more high contrast foreground trees. Here my gray works as atmospheric green thanks to colour relativity.

I replaced the platforms with more figurative scaffolding.

I'd give the enemies more predictable patterns with tells, and ways of manipulation, so they don't just home in and bunch up.

I decided to go for 16 colours for bobs, plus particle sprites palettes. I'm well aware that the Amiga can do more than 16 colours, but I enjoy the restriction and the ST likes 16 colurs too.

Some indices are reserved for the background. I don't think I could use the dual playfield trick with 8+8 colours here, separating the BG and objects.

Copper skies (or stone hues) might be cool, but I think they’ll have to be subtle (not garish) to stay faithful to the original material.

I guess a Bomb Jack game wouldn’t stress an OCS Amiga too badly since there is no scrolling or projectile spam. Bombs and such can be part of the BG until picked up, and nonmoving slowly animated stuff (coins, power ups, active bomb) can just take frame turns to blit over their old selves keeping that to a minimum.

Sprites could be used for something outside of play (e.g. in the vertical UI, or larger 3 colour playfield effects like fireworks/explosions). IIRC sprites aren’t /completely/ free in terms of slowdown.

Sprites might be especially useful for decorative particle effects which tend to use less colours, and flicker would matter less for pure effects which might already be blinky. It's really a waste to do flat or low colour effects using bobs which then need to blit in 4 planes. I think with 50fps, one could alternate 8 three color sprites to get 16 transparent ones. Little explosions, Kirby-style GET debris/stars and sparks (8). Collision puffs and trails behind the player (2). And the pickup scores (4). Maybe Enemy/Boss bullets (2). A vertical boss beam could be done using a single sprite.

Some of the 4 sprite palettes could flash in garish colours for sparks, whilst the BG palette remains static (colour animation here would require expensive extra image frames unless certain blit modes can be used).

16 colour bobs are actually 4 + 1 bits deep, as they have a 1-bit mask used by the blitter. The Amiga stores the masks separately in a certain base memory location that you can carefully doke (16-bit wide) from AMOS. It's also useful when you want to fast-blit e.g. 12 pixels wide icon blocks fast. You doke 12 set bits into their masks at "Icon Base".

I didn't decide on a palette order yet. It takes some consideration, as there are fun things you can do with blit modes in AMOS. If you structure your palette carefully, you can do transparency, shadow and glow effects cheaply. Usually you have to order the colour indices in pairs of 2 or 4 for it to work though as we're dealing with bit logic. Might be doable as I have 2 reds, 2 yellows, 2 blues, and 4 grays including black. Might be able to do a 1-index-offset effect at least (e.g. a hit flash or pulse). I'll have to look at some feasible palette layouts.

The sky blue is not index 0 as that makes the overscan the wrong colour. Ah, yes, this is also why I doke. This way black can be index 0 and still opaque on objects! AMOS auto mask stuff wastes an index so I do masks manually via memory manipulation. It also doesn't save masks in banks. IIRC, I save my reference masks in a separate memory structure for quick doking.

I always set up my palettes manually because truncating to 4+4+4 bit can lead to some odd hue drifts, and dealing with reindexing done by Photoshop or DP is a bother. I also write my own asset loader/grabbers and bank handlers rather than using the utilities. For custom fonts I like to use FED. Fortunately AMOS handles spacings, kernings and such correctly.

I was thinking the copper could be used as a cheap laser attack by one of the bosses. It travels up and down, turning its side lasers on and off by setting a few scanlines to some laser colour. This way no line drawing or clearing has to be done. Maybe just some telegraph-attack chargeup muzzle plasmaballs. Player has to time a vertical transition between.

Chest and stone blocks are from NES MBJ.

More Misc

Girlbrush

A character vaguely in the style of Monkey Island.

Valley of Rains

11 colour (16-bit) pixel-over of Valley of Rains by Zosya Entertaiment for the ZX Spectrum 48K (2019).

SMB

If SMB worked like modern games with content streaming LoD pop-in.

SMW

Super Mario World. I find Nintendo graphics rather difficult imitate as the outline style is kind of all over the place. Still, it does work in-game against various backgrounds, whereas my preference for lost lines causes issues. And I tend to render away graphical flats. Also, I noticed that Mario doesn't have a full leg or arm animation (halving the amount of frames needed I suppose). His hands are also quite inconsistent but I don't think I noticed until I looked. The Dry Bones looks like an inconsistent mess but functions well enough in action.

SMB3

GBA SMB3. I found myself repreating some things from the SMW pixel-over and... well, I'd rather just do one Mario so this was kind of pointless.

LoV

Legends of Valor (FM Towns). I just edited the head and bikini. If I had time, I'd alter the musculature but I didn't touch it for now.

Wonder Boy MW4

Ported some Wonder Boy I enemies to Monster World IV style. I'm not really into this kind of outlining and feature distortion, but thought I'd try it.

Wonder Boy MW4

MWIV style change test from a while back. I used the ogre head with the visible jaw from the Gamegear design. Generally, I did slightly more realistic proportions and undershadow lining, but kept it SD. Not sure if too noisy. Obviously eyes and hands are less legible. Still, perhaps an even more realistic proportion lineless style could be interesting. Kind of... Prince of Persia but not as depressing and more bouncy.

I haven't played MWIV and I'm not sure what to think of it, just looking at videos. Some of the locations in the wild seem a bit barren and stretched thin. Player mostly running about isn't so interesting to watch. I think I prefer higher density maps, and enemies dropping the occasional fun item rather than just coins coins coins.

Dragon Buster

Dragon Buster. Unfortunately there are not a lot of screenshots of the cooler looking enemies. Hero has a strange torso twist, reaching for the sword I think. It has special frames for facing L/R. I matched head sizes a bit, which made it cuter.

Trojan, Arcade

Arcade Trojan.

You are retiring from being an action hero and move out to an inherited countryside farm. Not a man within miles. It's just you, empty roads, a picturesque lake, and your memories. In a barn you find a 1983 Harley-Davidson FXWG 1340 Wide Glide in good condition. Its old chrome engine still has the glint under the dust. You can almost hear it.

Then you take a hacksaw to the entire engine section and duct tape in a new orange plastic electric motor, just like you put a Gotek in your Amiga.

Amiga Related

Stormlord, Rodland, Lionheart

I felt like tackling Lionheart (Amiga OCS), which makes great use of copper palette tricks. It seems the player (&HUD) is a 16-colour sprite though (12 colours used), and the enemies use the terrain palette. Also, Rod-Land / Rodland. The Amiga version was 16 colours for playfield, plus 16 for the sprite side bar. The characters must be all bobs then. I think it did an overall decent job graphically. Also again, Stormlord. It had a very dark palette, with a single highlight which kind of breaks up the shapes into noise. I tried keeping the palette, for the sake of atmosphere/style. One could merge some of the darks I think and gain an index or two. However, if you curve up a screenshot, the shapes begin to solidify and the highlights stick out less. Perhaps it was pixeled that way. It's really quite a nice looking game.

Magic Pockets total redesign

A dumb Magic Pockets derail.

Various Amiga chars.

I've altered most of these palettes slightly.
Creature: Not too shabby GFX overall. I like the hero suit (not seen) which reminds me of Moontrap, though the backpack is a bit of a mess.
Myth: Very polished with interesting interactivity and depth of action.
Fly Fighter: This game plays with gender roles at the very end.
Vixen: Nice strut animation. The awful colours makes me think it was a DOS port. I changed bikini to match cover pinup.
Entity: Pretty nice enemies in this game. Strong DA erotic Poser (the 3D dress-up doll program) type character design vibes from main character.
Paradise Lost and Plexu: Very difficult palettes but I kept them sort of close. Paradise Lost has a quite nice engine, probably SotB inspired and smells more of demo scene game than game. Big enemies with some neat weird designs. Hero is a guy but kinda looks like Wonder Woman.

Ikari Warriors II : Victory Road

Ikari Warriors had a rather trippy sequel called Victory Road. The Amiga/ST version almost looks like 4 colours. I think maybe the artist had a very dark monitor/TV. Anyways, I reduced the Arcade colours down to 15 (remaining one could be a dynamic colour perhaps?) without much losses, and quickly pixeled over some stuff. The Arcade original is portrait mode so the home ports are a bit squished. There's some weirdness with swords happening.

Altered Beast

I remember kind of being some sort of interested in Altered Beast, having seen the Megadrive version in demo kiosks. The power level progression looked fun, at the time. It was quite novel I guess... not many game characters could do that, and the wooshiness and effects really drove the idea home. It was just so cool in general when stuff could happen in game worlds, and fascinating to explore or imagine the possibilities.

I think ports should bring something new to the table though, perhaps going as far as NES Rygar. It might be interesting to have the power draining, but if you're good you can keep it maxed by pickup pellets. Kinda like how Compile shmups keep you leapfrogging to power pickups.

For a 16 colour variant, I'd reduce sprite (bob) size, as this compacts colour banding and makes bad gradients less of an issue. I'd truncate the colours amore stylistic themed palette (Psygnosis/BitmapBros). Making it muddy helps to sponsor crossramp gradients. Perhaps with 16 colours the game could update a bit faster, enabling gameplay which requires fast multiway scrolling. Half-PAL framerate has always been okay with me though. I'd use sprites for simpler particle fx. Never been a fan of parallax, so I'd skip that and keep the backgrounds simple and flat.

With 32 colours I think the graphics could be quite faithful. Loss of colour could be compensated for with modern pixel art techniques which are less pillow-shadey. In the pic above I reserved 8 colours as dynamic background/level colours, 24 for characters. I changed the player character clothes to rags/leather as I had an idea that it starts out as a zombie for power level 1, then goes to this more healthy looking power level 2, then muscular (pink clothes?), then beast. Would be cool to have a more detailed crypt/sarcophagus to the left side that the character smashes out of.

Savage

WroooOOOO! SAVAGE! This sure is a colourful 32 colour palette. With just some tiny changes it becomes more pleasant to work with. There seems to be 31 colours used (sheet from spriters-resource). Maybe the 32nd was mask colour, or copper, or palette flash, or something for the backgrounds (which haven't been dumped). On the Amiga, the mask is not a colour on the image but a 16-bit wide structure (a special extra bit plane). 32 colour mode is really rather wasteful (for render speed and memory size) as individual figures use under 16. I noticed two rarely used colours which could be removed/replaced (palette anim for BG?). My animations are untested. I decided to add some gibs, and reduced the treasure size. Including original sprites (well, bobs) for reference.

Body Blows

Body Blows. Probably 16 colours for chars. I like working at platform game scales rather than at this size where I mostly spend time doing banding/gradients and details. I added a skin tone brown to palette so maybe a cyan or grey has to go.

Ghost Battle

Ghost Battle pixel-over. Perhaps it's sacrilege to change the arm pose. Mine's kinda Mario-like and flat. Here I just did my usual things. the process more of a form of relaxation for me. It seems I always place a highlight on the shoulders and legs. Thought a more Kamen Rider biker armour plastic chest plate would fit since it might be a manga type character (if the eye+hair is any indication).

Likely a 32 colour game. The palette is perhaps quite typical for a general purpose / global palette of that era. When I look at my own old DP stuff, and Amiga games in general, for some reason these kind of gradually-lighter colours are common. Also, I think DP's default black BG often lead to too many similar dark colours, as these would be readable against black but lost later.

Exolon

I haven't played Exolon for the ZX Spectrum, but it looks action packed, with an unstoppable one-man-army breaking through defensive formations. The armour has a slight... knight helmet and chainmail skirt thing going on. The Amiga version is apparently nigh unplayable. Graphics seem to be 16 colors, probably to match the Atari ST. Did a pixel-over anyways, improvising a new armour design with a heavy-siege breaker feel. Perhaps it should lean forward more though like the ZX character.

Pixel-over

Pixel-overs (1st image) of my old Not-Metroid project graphics (2nd big image), done in Deluxe Paint some years before Super Metroid, so maybe 93 or earlier. 8 colours made the game blit faster and use less memory per screen. I remember not having figured out infinite scrolling, so each corridor had to be a big screen with hardware pointer type scrolling. Back then I did some quite excessive blacklining, but I guess the dither is kind of functional. I used, and still use a muddy blue as BG when pixling. However, I didn't realize at the time that Bobs can use all 8 colours, so I played around a bit with that on my pixel-over. A dark gray or purple works.

Old project

Another old image. This is my general purpose 32 colour Deluxe Paint palette. Often had a gray-blue BG set up as it's neutral to work against. Review:
+ Fortunately somewhat focused on mid tones.
+ It does have /some/ hue slide but should be more interesting.
- Ramps are too long, I'd rather have more hues. Where are pinks and purples?

Amiga floppy disk label sheet (A4) WIP

Would prefer doing actual colour art for these, but didn't have time to sit down and paint. Original disks often had screen/pad-print and no label, or a simple white B/W label slapped on tilted. I've seen several disks use some variant of the Futura font for general text. Or Gill Sans. WB likely used Helvetica though.

For the Workbench 1.3 floppy labels I redesigned a bit, but kept the general look.

Utopia had three different label variants (Hall of Light often has some disk scans). One of the variants used Modula Tall rather than the box/title screen logo.

Volfied uses a pixel logo, but I converted the arcade/box one to line art instead. The Volfied port is quite good I think. Interesting enemies.

3D CONSTRUCTION KIT floppy label: My original disk is black but the gold print has nearly worn off, so I scanned the logos from the manual/box and made my own. Added the Freescape logo otherwise not on label. The Incentive Software logo is Eurostyle, of which Metrostyle is a close match. The condensed main logo font is perhaps Mekanik. Printing lots of black is a bit of a no-no so I inverted.

Scorched Tanks was a shareware title with no official label that I've seen, so I converted the title screen logo to cleaner pixel art, scaled up, blurred a bit to smooth jaggies, median noise to further smooth, then threshold. Worked pretty well. Perhaps the BG should be concentric circles instead, as it's a thing in the game.

The Paradroid 90 original label was just the Data 70 font... probably more suitable for C64 Paradroid.

Amiga floppy disk label sheet (A4) WIP

I didn't know Oil Imperium had such a stylish logo. I convert these to 1-bit and paint bucket for crisp cleanup. No a lot of hirez scans of this stuff and there's often box damage. Hall of Light is a good resource. Or sometimes atarimania.

Kickstart pixel over

Did anyone ever notice that the wrong hand is holding the floppydisk in Kickstart? The A500 drive is on the right side, so the hand should be something like this. But, apparently the hand was made for the A1000 (drive on the front) and they didn't bother changing the graphics.

This is the third time I've pixel-over'd the Kickstart hand. It's actually a vector drawing in ROM though, with part bitmaps for text.

Puzznic pixel over

32 colour Puzznic pixel-over, with the last 16 colours used for bricks and... skin tones. I muted and warmed icon colours a bit so they fall towards the skin tones / room temp.

Yeah, arcade Puzznic was actually a strip game. I had only heard of the NES version (stripped of strippers), but there was also an Amiga version which... really could've been close to arcade perfect with e.g. 32 colours since it's a static game. 16 colour Atari ST port looks different so maybe not the culprit here.

Fire & Ice

Fire and Ice is not a game I've even seen in action. Just fooling around with pixels here.

Rick Dangerous

I'd turn Rick Dangerous into a Syobon game if given the opportunity. One could have a lot of fun making and experiencing unexpected trap stuff and it'd really keep the tension up as you progress. Short, compact, hard levels, but infinite lives (still counted). I think it would be more interesting than traditional telegraphed ("solve/navigate this") puzzles and action.

Monster Land

Monster Land) re-do

Katakis

Katakis pixel-over with a new sub 16 colour palette. At some point I want to experiment more seriously with 32 colours... seeing how Fly Harder looks pretty snazzy. A lot of the Amiga shmups are a bit... "trudging". I remember enjoying Blood Money back in the day, but I don't think I was aware of how fast and busy Arcade shmups were. The Amiga has a whole bunch of unknown shmups which were probably made by small devs, maybe as their first big project. There are a few cool faster and more fluid ones, like Necronom and Ziriax. Mega Typhon is pushing a lot of objects on screen. Seems inspired by Raiden, but the BGs are too noisy which is a real shame (8 colour blits for terrain?). I never played Saint Dragon but it looks nice.

Zool

Zool was another one of those games I never played. I just wasn't into platform games on the Amiga as it wasn't the strength of the system. I changed the proportions and scale here. I think OCS BGs were 16 colours, and kinda garish. Sometimes it's fun to take things more in a Psygnosis or Bitmap Bros direction with longer ramps, less colours, sometimes muddier with some hue shifts so one can crossramp. I really despise candy, toy and other lazy theme levels so I'd avoid those if I were to take Zool anywhere. The engine seems quite competent. It’s just the theming which ruins it for me. Also, big centered character, fairly speedy movement, and no look/travel scroll-ahead made it claustrophobic. Not even sonic does proper scroll ahead… it’s so weird.

Rolling Thunder

Rolling Thunder! Man or a woman ~who knows? I changed the style to be more like RT2 with the shadow lining. I quite like the look of 2. MD version looks quite faithful. The Amiga might be able to get somewhat close visually in 32 colour mode but it's not really a game series I care much about so I won't try. The game seems o have a lot of anim frames so I think that'll eat all chipmem. I ended up with two similar teals... an opportunity for an extra colour.

Mega Typhoon

I looked into Mega Typhoon a bit, though I don't have the ADF so I couldn't investigate further. Speculation: It seems like it uses 8 colours for the background, then 7+trans for the enemies... so I'm guessing OCS/ECS Dual playfield 8+8 which might speed up moving blits.

I'm not sure if the game does image flipping on the fly (or scaling... but that could be Deluxe Paint artifacts), but it appears like terrain is not tile-aligned, but instead overlapping decorative chunks spam, kinda like in the Lemmings editor. The screen is less wide, which doesn't hurt a vertical shmup and probably lightens memory load. Possibly it uses the copper on the terrain and enemy layer to recolour areas.

The player ship might either be an attached 15 colour sprite (perhaps with the grays occupying the transparent indices?), or just stacked 3 colour sprites. The score and bullets use the same palettes, which sometimes change on the fly (weapon change and death/spawn). Not much bullet flickering... I guess the limit is 8 per scanline, but since it's vertical it can make some neat very spammy bullet columns (also packs 3 bullets into 1 sprite width and alternates sideways for sixtupled effect) (also, moving up/down doesn't compress or space the bullets). Pickups and Explosions might be a bob-sprite mix. Missiles are Bobs. Projectile speed probably helps to give the impression of more objects too.

Graphically it'd probably be more legible with more muted BG layer colours and less greebles.

No, I don't rob old ladies. Never have. Lies and slander.
*caught robbing old lady*
Lol, this is called working for your income, people. Not that you jobless lot would know, LOOOL (Laugh Out Out Out Loud... emphasis on not caring)
*caught eating baby*
Hey guys, I just pledged to make a sizeable donation (to my own charity).
*caught paying zero taxes (on lady robbing income)*
Gets astroturf articles published on how lady robbing, which while seemingly bad, actually contributes to society by creating important jobs for hospitals, home security experts and window glaziers. "~The Robbers Who Give~"
Five dumb bootlicking sycophants completely bought it and now dedicate the rest of their lives to being replyguys on social media.

Case Concepts

Amiga Cube

Amiga Cube from a while back. With a Larson Scanner on the front because why not? Specs unknown.

Amiga 1001

Amiga 1001 idea. The A1000 case design has grown on me. Here I wanted to chonkify & mix in some PC-8801 FE bits. Often I've thought that the Amiga could've used a chunky pixel mode but now when I think about it, the Amiga already had quite fancy pixel manipulation capabilities and slightly better performance which would've gotten dated fast anyways. I used my A1200 with a TV so the highrez modes were not useful, nor was the 256 colour mode as it was hard to make assets for.

So here I'm imagining a simpler A1200 released earlier, with just increased sprite capabilities, and an upgrade path to an IDE HD0 and more Fast Mem. More positioned to compete with the Megadrive and SNES which were released late in the EU. Still attractive as a computer and development platform, but not competing with wonky early 3D PC-DOS. Hard to say how to boost sprite capabilities though, as chip was already taxed. Maybe a new sprite GPU board with dedicated 512K VRAM... it'd be kind of okay if CPU access to sprite images was bottlenecked (though not the position&pal registers).

CPU and memory could use a small upgrade too. I've heard that in some respects the 68K wasn't much faster than the old 6502. Thought of a new logo, working in the A shape as a checkmark is kind of nonsense. Imagining it on a sort of Playstation boot screen with (generated) sound chime.

Toshiba

Slightly related to A1000, a strange Toshiba with a parking garage.

Cobra laptop

Cobra / Z-top. Getting screen height for neck. Didn't feel like drawing the keyboard keys but they're there.

MP3 gaming system

MP3 player micro handheld.

Camera gaming system

Camera gaming system.

Calculator Keyboard

Calculator which is also a piano/synth keyboard. They do exist, but are generally shaped like traditional calculators.

Sliderule Stuff

Speaking of calculators, sliderules are analog calculators that your parents or grandparents might have used in school, before electronic calculators were a thing. I suppose mobile phones (and search engines) might have replaced dedicated calculator devices now.

Just looking at one, it really overwhelms you with numbers, but it's actually trivial to use. It helps to think of it as a "Ratio Setter". If you slide the center stick to a 1 to 1.5 ratio (150%), that ratio holds true for all the numbers meeting up. When calculating a ratio on a calculator, you use either multiplication or division depending on what you need to find out. At any rate, if you want to repeat the operation you'll need to keep track of a scaler. One could say that a slide rule has a "memory cell" which can keep track of a floating point scaler value, e.g. 1.5.

Multiplication and division is done by merely looking at the numbers in a different order. The clear sliding plastic piece has a hairline marking on it to help you line up and read things. I'd call it a pointer... it's like putting your finger somewhere (it's sort of like another memory function I guess).

Sliderule Example

My slide rule, is a Faber Castell 52/82. It has two green scales, A-B (1-100) and C-D (1-10). CI is C Inverted. The other scales are simple lookup tables. The middle slider is not used for these, you just use the clear pointer to line up X with X^2 (squares) or X^3 *(cubes). On the back the angle math stuff works in a similar fashion.

Because a slide rule is analog, it's not precise to several decimals like a calculator. It also takes some time to read the value and perhaps adjust decimals.

Can a slide rule still be useful today? Actually, yes. If you need to rescale multiple values on a regular calculator, you might have to fiddle with the M+ MR buttons. On a slide rule, you just set the ratio and re-read the values. Also some calculators don't have cubic root buttons.

Sliderule Example

Practically a slide rule could be useful to me as an artist. For example, If I have drawn a human figure 3.5 cm tall, I can slide 1.69 (meters) against that. Now the slide rule knows that scale and it's easy to figure out how tall other characters on the paper are. I can also change my mind and decide the human figure is 1.90 meters tall and reread the values for the other guys.

Sliderule Example

I can also figure out the volumes of spaceships using my clay cube method. I set the ratio to how much longer a spaceship is than itself as the cube it was sculpted out of, e.g. C 1 against D 2.55. If the ship is 60 meters, I slide the pointer against D 6, and read... C as 2.35, which means 23.5 meters, which is the size it'd be as a cube. The volume of that cube can be found by sliding the pointer to X (same as D scale) 2.35 (a tenth of 23.5 as the scale only goes to 10) and then reading on the X^3 scale. 10.3 ... but we'll have to adjust the decimals with 10^3, so it's 13000 cubic meters.

This is not hard to do on a calculator, but it's interesting that it's fairly easy on a slide rule as well.

I bought 50 000 gallons of Champagne and poured it all down the SINK whilst making a schmuck face!
*104 million views encouraging similar videos*

We bought this stray dog a $12000 PRIME grade beef slab!
*Thumbnail: ragged dog with wacky cartoon googly eyes*

Last one to die in my HUMAN CENTIPEDE gets a MANSION!


Art by Arne Niklas Jansson

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