Some beautiful 256 colour cycling pictures for old skool Dpaint lovers....

[jd997uk]

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

[warpdesign]

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 ?

[whabang]

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.

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!

[rvo_nl]

thanks for this great link..

[Thorham]

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...

[Hattig]

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).

[whabang]

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.

[Amiga_Nut]

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.