Amiga.org

Amiga computer related discussion => General chat about Amiga topics => Topic started by: Amiga_Nut on August 18, 2010, 03:35:45 PM

Title: Some beautiful 256 colour cycling pictures for old skool Dpaint lovers....
Post by: Amiga_Nut on August 18, 2010, 03:35:45 PM
Well if you were with Amiga from the start you'll remember the awesomeness of Dpaint colour cycling (and Neochrome/Degas if you didn't have an Amiga!), someone else does and he did something about it with some HTML 5 colour cycled 256 colour images. The images are really nicely done even without the colour cycling.

Enjoy :)

http://www.effectgames.com/effect/article.psp.html/joe/Old_School_Color_Cycling_with_HTML5
Title: Re: Some beautiful 256 colour cycling pictures for old skool Dpaint lovers....
Post by: koshman on August 18, 2010, 05:35:09 PM
Man, those are are soo beautiful!! Somebody, please take them and make an adventure game based on them, that would be amazing. Stylewise the pictures remind me a bit of the gorgeous handdrawn backgrounds in Evil's Doom. And is it just me or do some of the landscapes look like a Zork game with graphics? To the west you can see a mountain range in the distance...
Anyway, f*** truecolor 3D graphics...
Title: Re: Some beautiful 256 colour cycling pictures for old skool Dpaint lovers....
Post by: Amiga_Nut on August 18, 2010, 10:55:09 PM
You can see the complex pallet cycling regions in the options tab too, some of the pictures are the most complex colour cycling I've ever seen and don't even look like simple colour cycling because they go over different colour areas faultlessly, like where fog is depicted.

I just wish he would allow people to download an original image with the pallet cycling tags intact so you could display them on an A1200 in Dpaint 4/5.
Title: Re: Some beautiful 256 colour cycling pictures for old skool Dpaint lovers....
Post by: Thorham on August 18, 2010, 11:23:46 PM
These are fantastic :) Downloading them now using a script on my A1200 :)
Title: Re: Some beautiful 256 colour cycling pictures for old skool Dpaint lovers....
Post by: Minuous on August 19, 2010, 01:09:10 AM
What's all this HTML crap, where are the actual IFF ILBM files to download!?
Title: Re: Some beautiful 256 colour cycling pictures for old skool Dpaint lovers....
Post by: odin on August 19, 2010, 01:19:31 AM
Get off my lawn!

Anyway, good to see someone else also remembers Evil's Doom. I'm still waiting for the full game to be released! =)
Title: Re: Some beautiful 256 colour cycling pictures for old skool Dpaint lovers....
Post by: Amiga_Nut on August 19, 2010, 02:14:58 AM
Quote from: Thorham;575313
These are fantastic :) Downloading them now using a script on my A1200 :)


Did you manage to download them and get them to work with Dpaint 4/5 etc or are the colour cycle pallet groups lost in the download process?
Title: Re: Some beautiful 256 colour cycling pictures for old skool Dpaint lovers....
Post by: ChaosLord on August 19, 2010, 02:29:36 AM
Quote from: Minuous;575322
What's all this HTML crap, where are the actual IFF ILBM files to download!?
+1

My 1500 Mhz FireFox computer is too slow to play this inefficient, cycle-wasting HTML stuff at full speed so the color cycling looks crap.  It looks like it is skipping frames or something.

I am certain that my Deluxe Paint 5 on my mighty Amiga 1200 would have no trouble playing them correctly.
Title: Re: Some beautiful 256 colour cycling pictures for old skool Dpaint lovers....
Post by: mechy on August 19, 2010, 03:52:51 AM
WOW,
  Those are incredible. what a artist..

mike
Title: Re: Some beautiful 256 colour cycling pictures for old skool Dpaint lovers....
Post by: basman74 on August 19, 2010, 04:44:57 AM
Excellent work!

Cheers Valentin
Title: Re: Some beautiful 256 colour cycling pictures for old skool Dpaint lovers....
Post by: lauri.lotvonen on August 19, 2010, 06:02:26 AM
I though colour cycling is just for simple waterfalls etc...
I'm just shocked how fantastic these "animations" are, just cycling the colours?? :eek:. A great works of art, thank you so much for sharing these.
Title: Re: Some beautiful 256 colour cycling pictures for old skool Dpaint lovers....
Post by: sledge on August 19, 2010, 08:07:21 AM
The original IFF-files wanted!!!!!

Does anybody have them?
Title: Re: Some beautiful 256 colour cycling pictures for old skool Dpaint lovers....
Post by: Thorham on August 19, 2010, 12:58:40 PM
Quote from: Amiga_Nut;575329
Did you manage to download them and get them to work with Dpaint 4/5 etc or are the colour cycle pallet groups lost in the download process?
No, they're java script text files, and have to be converted. Counting_pine on the FreeBasic forum as written a simple program to display them natively, but they still have to be converted back to IFF. See here: http://www.freebasic.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=16119 (http://www.freebasic.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=16119). Just scroll down to the CODE block.
Quote from: sledge;575356
The original IFF-files wanted!!!!!

Does anybody have them?
Nope, they're copirighted by various companies, and even the artist isn't allowed to publish them like that :(
Title: Re: Some beautiful 256 colour cycling pictures for old skool Dpaint lovers....
Post by: pVC on August 19, 2010, 02:05:16 PM
Quote from: ChaosLord;575331
+1

My 1500 Mhz FireFox computer is too slow to play this inefficient, cycle-wasting HTML stuff at full speed so the color cycling looks crap.  It looks like it is skipping frames or something.

I am certain that my Deluxe Paint 5 on my mighty Amiga 1200 would have no trouble playing them correctly.


Hmm... my 1500MHz OWB computer plays them smooth, beautiful. But CPU is at the max... in general it's pretty horrible how the overwhelming CPU power is wasted on the web nowadays ;)
Title: Re: Some beautiful 256 colour cycling pictures for old skool Dpaint lovers....
Post by: jd997uk on August 19, 2010, 02:59:16 PM
Quote from: pVC;575380
Hmm... my 1500MHz OWB computer plays them smooth, beautiful. But CPU is at the max... in general it's pretty horrible how the overwhelming CPU power is wasted on the web nowadays ;)


This won't be the 1st time that something originally from an Amiga (7mhz?) cannot easily be done on a more modern machine.
Similar to some of the Demos that have to be converted to video for the YouTube generation to view. All the horsepower to now run something that used to run from a floppy, back in the day
Title: Re: Some beautiful 256 colour cycling pictures for old skool Dpaint lovers....
Post by: warpdesign on August 19, 2010, 03:36:24 PM
Quote

This won't be the 1st time that something originally from an Amiga (7mhz?) cannot easily be done on a more modern machine.

This has nothing to do with the Amiga or 7mhz, or whatever... This is the difference between any paletted screen vs hi/truecolour screen.

On one case you just change the colour palette each frame... on the other you have to change every pixel's colour every frame: of course it takes quite a bit of CPU. Especially since it's running inside a browser with barely any hardware acceleration.

This is just called evolution: some tricks used back then because of the limitation of the hardware just can't be used anymore... But are they needed ?
Title: Re: Some beautiful 256 colour cycling pictures for old skool Dpaint lovers....
Post by: whabang on August 19, 2010, 03:56:16 PM
To be fair, those were made with the PC-version of Deluxe Paint, so they would probably run well on my 386 with a VL-bus card. :D

The sluggishness on modern systems is more due to the fact that palette cycling died out somewhere between Voodoo 3 and Savage 4.

Oh, and those pictures are bloody amazing!
Title: Re: Some beautiful 256 colour cycling pictures for old skool Dpaint lovers....
Post by: rvo_nl on August 19, 2010, 05:52:11 PM
thanks for this great link..
Title: Re: Some beautiful 256 colour cycling pictures for old skool Dpaint lovers....
Post by: Thorham on August 19, 2010, 06:41:55 PM
Eh, has anyone even bothered to check out the FreeBasic program I've posted to? With that I get about 40% CPU time used for the task on my 667 Mhz Pentium 3, and it uses FreeBasics built-in 256 color mode (yes, in a window on a 32 bit desktop)...

Basically, there's no reason at all why this kind of simple thing can't be fast on a new peecees, with a properly written indexed color engine. Also, don't peecee GFX cards have a 256 color mode? Yes, they do! Plenty of people are still playing Starcraft Broodwar and Diablo 2 on brand new machines, so this video mode is certainly still in use. With that the CPU usage for this program drops to below one percent...

The problem is simply the browsers fault, it's not the new hardware, that would simply be ridiculous. I mean, you can have full speed, highres 3D be smooth, but this can't? Yeah, right...
Title: Re: Some beautiful 256 colour cycling pictures for old skool Dpaint lovers....
Post by: Hattig on August 19, 2010, 06:55:04 PM
Quote from: jd997uk;575381
This won't be the 1st time that something originally from an Amiga (7mhz?) cannot easily be done on a more modern machine.
Similar to some of the Demos that have to be converted to video for the YouTube generation to view. All the horsepower to now run something that used to run from a floppy, back in the day


The demos are converted because that's a quick way to view them, rather than starting up WinUAE, etc.

And palette cycling is a nifty solution, I used it in Amstrad CPC pictures I created, so that's a 4MHz Z80 scraping 0.1 8-bit MIPS. That's because it's just updating some colour registers every frame, not exactly taxing.

When you suddenly have to do this in a browser, at a high level, and support IE7's slow Javascript (let's just say that it probably takes thousands of machine cycles to run each Javascript instruction, turning an xGHz machine into an xMHz in terms of power), you run into issues when updating 640x480 bytes of information every frame (especially with the blend-cycling used).
Title: Re: Some beautiful 256 colour cycling pictures for old skool Dpaint lovers....
Post by: whabang on August 19, 2010, 07:49:33 PM
Quote from: Thorham;575402
stuff


Well, most modern video cards just emulate 256-colour video modes in the video BIOS/video driver, but you're absolutely right: it's all about programming the viewers properly. :D
Title: Re: Some beautiful 256 colour cycling pictures for old skool Dpaint lovers....
Post by: Amiga_Nut on August 23, 2010, 12:36:52 PM
Ha ha it's just a sign of the times, that site is using HTML5, and well if you though playing videos in Flash via youtube try playing those lowly videos with the HTML5 codec....HTML5 IS a very CPU intensive way of doing things. It just shows both how powerful CPUs have become and also how inefficiently we use that CPU power these days. The antithesis of Amiga haha

The PC hardware isn't the issue, every graphics card today has a fall back legacy standard SVGA modes for 256 colours but the only way to use them is to write a bespoke Windows/Mac/Linux program to display the images full screen with native colour palette cycling on such a screen, just like Dpaint does on ST/Amiga/PC. It's just a way of making it format independent so people from just about every OS format can view them today.