 |
|
|
|
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
>> OK, that's just absurd. The sofa and the rug are *exactly* the same
>> colour. How the hell can the machine tell them apart? Additionally, how
>> on earth can it tell what colour they were originally? That's
>> impossible...
>
> Except it clearly isn't impossible, because it was done.
Well yeah, OK, I rephrase: It defies explanation.
> Adjusting the white
> balance of the photo involves picking out something that actually is/was
> white (like the white on the baby's shirt). That gives the computer a
> reference to make the adjustments from. When photos age, they tend to
> age consistently and the colours adjust with consistency. The computer
> basically is doing an "undo" on the age effect applied by real life.
But surely no scanner on Earth has sufficient resolution that you can
amplify a signal by many orders of magnitude and not be swamped by
noise? The photo posted contains almost no blue whatsoever, so you'd
have to apply a ridiculous amount of gain to that channel...
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
Post a reply to this message
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
On Tue, 22 Jul 2008 19:13:38 +0100, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>>> OK, that's just absurd. The sofa and the rug are *exactly* the same
>>> colour. How the hell can the machine tell them apart? Additionally,
>>> how on earth can it tell what colour they were originally? That's
>>> impossible...
>>
>> Except it clearly isn't impossible, because it was done.
>
> Well yeah, OK, I rephrase: It defies explanation.
See my explanation below. :-)
>> Adjusting the white
>> balance of the photo involves picking out something that actually
>> is/was white (like the white on the baby's shirt). That gives the
>> computer a reference to make the adjustments from. When photos age,
>> they tend to age consistently and the colours adjust with consistency.
>> The computer basically is doing an "undo" on the age effect applied by
>> real life.
>
> But surely no scanner on Earth has sufficient resolution that you can
> amplify a signal by many orders of magnitude and not be swamped by
> noise? The photo posted contains almost no blue whatsoever, so you'd
> have to apply a ridiculous amount of gain to that channel...
Except that's clearly not the case. There is blue in the photo, though -
that's clearly visible by looking at a breakdown of the RGB channels
using something like the GIMP. There's certainly more red and green in
the photo, but just look at the outfit the baby's wearing and tell me
there's no blue there - on the shoulders and the matching "pants" (don't
know the word for that part of the outfit). Along the baseboard to the
left of the chair - that's a purplish colour there, blue is a component
of that.
Jim
Post a reply to this message
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
Invisible <voi### [at] dev null> wrote:
> >> Ah, OK. Spending 20 minutes waiting for Access to load each time I
> >> wanted to work on my assignment at college must be a false memory then...
> >
> > Microsoft Access for the AmigaOS was hugely popular, I suppose.
> Nope. But other database products were.
Yeah, and they are comparable like Blender and Paint are completely
comparable.
--
- Warp
Post a reply to this message
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
On 22-Jul-08 15:33, scott wrote:
>> The resolution doesn't really compare, but the Amiga was targetted at
>> normal TVs. The Amiga's 640x480 is quite near to modern DVD's 720x564.
>
> The video chip on the Acorn was actually pretty cool, it was completely
> programmable so you could pretty much drive anything you wanted from a
> TV to a high resolution monitor. Even when I got my first LCD monitor I
> plugged it in and it worked! If you found some weird monitor that
> didn't quite work, chances were that someone could help you out and
> write the config file for you.
>
>> Thing is, up until this point, computer graphics had always been
>> blocky things made out of a dozen flat colours. Computer graphics
>> *looked* like computer graphics. Computer sound *sounded* like
>> computer sound.
>
> Well, to be honest, I don't see the *huge* leap between my BBC B from 10
> years earlier that could do 640x256 and 16 colours to 640x480 and 32
> colours. I would have expected a lot more.
It is not only the number of colours, There was also the hardware to
animate them at 25 frames per second.
Post a reply to this message
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
andrel wrote:
> It is not only the number of colours, There was also the hardware to
> animate them at 25 frames per second.
Or, indeed, 576 scanlines per frame. ;-)
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
Post a reply to this message
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
On 22-Jul-08 13:54, John VanSickle wrote:
> Invisible wrote:
>
>> Unfortunately, then the Amiga's hardware stood still for 20 years.
>> While it was once a shining example of hardware far ahead of its time,
>> it has long since been left in the dust. I don't really understand how
>> it happened, but Commodore ended up in all sorts of financial trouble.
>> Commodore was good it making great hardware, but hopeless at marketing
>> it.
>
> The management at Commodore should take all of the blame for the fall of
> Commodore. Developing killer new technology should have been top
> priority. Hindsight being 20-20, they should have designed the OS with
> the highest possible degree of resource management (IE, not assume that
> all graphics would be 8-bit forever), and then opened up the hardware
> architecture and allowed clones.
>
> As it was, some of the later CEOs did nothing more than collect their
> salaries.
The Amiga was the de facto standard for television quality broadcasting,
as many have also mentioned. What they should have done was pair up with
one of the groups that were defining HDTV and force a new TV standard.
That should have gotten rid of the deadlock that nobody was buying HDTV
sets because there was no broadcasting. Just make the displays first for
computers in that format. Create movies in that format that can be
played on that machine. Then build a settop box that can receive
broadcasts. I still think we could have had HDTV 10 years ago in this
way with a logical path to internet connectivity. Today, TV standards
are still a mess and not ready for the 21rst century.
Post a reply to this message
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
That was a compelling monologue. You brought us from the pits of
computational hardship all the way to the clear mountaintops of current
home computing. Good job!
Invisible wrote:
> Then there were ground-breaking AF coverdisks like Imagine 2, Real3D,
Ugh, not Real3D! That was my *first* introduction to 3D graphics, and
let me tell you I was *not* impressed. Back in '97-'98 it had no
raytracing support, and the other features were all very disappointing.
'Refraction' was simply an environment map applied to the inside of an
object... no attempt was made to distort pre-rendered objects behind the
refractive one. And then there was the problem of surfaces shadowing
themselves. Strange, dark-gray lines running along a surface when you
want it to be smooth can really piss you off, especially when it takes
so long for the program to compute and render the image in the first place.
> - Sophisticated image processing software such as The GIMP can be
> obtained *for free*!
>
> - 3D graphics rendering requires nothing more than a copy of POV-Ray.
>
> - Complex sound editing software such as Audacity is *free*.
Thank goodness for the open-source movement!
> In fact, it seems that only high-end, professional audio and video tools
> actually cost money any more. (I'm thinking... Cubase, Cakewalk,
> Photoshop, Renderman, and so forth.)
Since you mention Cakewalk in your list of commercial apps, let me
mention JazzWare as a free alternative to it. ModPlugTracker is another
one, though it's quite different.
Sam
Post a reply to this message
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
stbenge wrote:
> That was a compelling monologue. You brought us from the pits of
> computational hardship all the way to the clear mountaintops of current
> home computing. Good job!
Why thank you! I'm glad somebody enjoyed me slacking off for the entire
morning as much as I did. ;-)
> Invisible wrote:
>> Then there were ground-breaking AF coverdisks like Imagine 2, Real3D,
>
> Ugh, not Real3D! That was my *first* introduction to 3D graphics, and
> let me tell you I was *not* impressed. Back in '97-'98 it had no
> raytracing support, and the other features were all very disappointing.
> 'Refraction' was simply an environment map applied to the inside of an
> object... no attempt was made to distort pre-rendered objects behind the
> refractive one. And then there was the problem of surfaces shadowing
> themselves. Strange, dark-gray lines running along a surface when you
> want it to be smooth can really piss you off, especially when it takes
> so long for the program to compute and render the image in the first place.
Mmm, interesting. I never had any problems with it. I still have the
coverdisk laying around somewhere I think. And the little manual they
gave away with it. (Written by Amiga Format, not Real Software Inc.) It
was my first introduction to ray tracing and CSG. (And basically
modelling without triangles.)
Of course, using a point-and-click interface, it's not possible to do
POV-Ray style tricks like positioning a sphere exactly at the end of a
cylinder... the CLI has plus points! ;-)
Unfortunately I can't find it anywhere online, but Real3D had a rather
nice set of glassware showing off the refraction capabilities.
Now Imagine 3D was another matter. You had to add objects to the scene
in a certain order (!!) in order for them to reflect. As in, the
reflective objects had to be added last. Any object added after the
reflective one would cast no reflections. God only knows what happens if
you want recursive reflections...
> Thank goodness for the open-source movement!
Yeah - I'm still puzzled by all that. The Amiga had a strong "shareware"
scene, but I'm puzzled by this sudden new craze of giving away
fully-supported commercial-grade software (sometimes that *was*
commercial!) for free. It suddenly seems to be the "trendy" thing to do,
and I'm not really sure how that happened.
Not that I'm complaining about it mind you!
>> In fact, it seems that only high-end, professional audio and video
>> tools actually cost money any more. (I'm thinking... Cubase, Cakewalk,
>> Photoshop, Renderman, and so forth.)
>
> Since you mention Cakewalk in your list of commercial apps, let me
> mention JazzWare as a free alternative to it. ModPlugTracker is another
> one, though it's quite different.
I already own Cubase, but thanks. ;-)
Actually, if anybody knows of a good freeware software synthesizer and
sequencer that's easy to set up (ideally zero-install) and runs on
Windoze, I'd be interested. Sometimes when you're using a strange PC,
it's nice to be able to just throw out a few bars of music using only
what you have on your USB stick...
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
Post a reply to this message
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>> Invisible wrote:
>>> Then there were ground-breaking AF coverdisks like Imagine 2, Real3D,
>>
>> Ugh, not Real3D!
>
> Mmm, interesting. I never had any problems with it.
Oops, my bad. I was thinking of "Extreme 3D," by Macromedia. That's the
one. It's horrible. I don't think I've ever crashed a program so many times!
> Now Imagine 3D was another matter. You had to add objects to the scene
> in a certain order (!!) in order for them to reflect. As in, the
> reflective objects had to be added last. Any object added after the
> reflective one would cast no reflections. God only knows what happens if
> you want recursive reflections...
I'm glad there are so many choices these days. I don't ever want to
resort to using faked raytracing effects, unless of course, I'm making a
video game or something.
>> Thank goodness for the open-source movement!
>
> Yeah - I'm still puzzled by all that. The Amiga had a strong "shareware"
> scene, but I'm puzzled by this sudden new craze of giving away
> fully-supported commercial-grade software (sometimes that *was*
> commercial!) for free. It suddenly seems to be the "trendy" thing to do,
> and I'm not really sure how that happened.
>
> Not that I'm complaining about it mind you!
When the result is something like what Blender has become, who can
complain? Oh yeah, those people who hate Blender's interface; they
complain. I don't think it's that horrible...
> Actually, if anybody knows of a good freeware software synthesizer and
> sequencer that's easy to set up (ideally zero-install) and runs on
> Windoze, I'd be interested. Sometimes when you're using a strange PC,
> it's nice to be able to just throw out a few bars of music using only
> what you have on your USB stick...
Have you tried searching for browser-based apps in that category? It's a
slim chance you'll find one, but it's worth trying.
Sam
Post a reply to this message
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
At some point in prehistory, you may all recall the level of hysteria
around a revolutionary technology known as "multimedia". For several
years, suddenly everything was multimedia-this and multimedia-that. I'm
not sure exactly why, but after a while everybody sort of forgot about
it and went back to their normal lives. But anyway, the Amiga at one
point had several "multimedia construction kits".
One well-known one was Scala. This started out as a simple (but
"powerful") video titling system, to be used with a genlock device.
(Look that up if you don't know what it means.) It later evolved into a
complete system where you could script sounds and animations together to
produce interactive multimedia applications. (Or just do more
complicated video editing, if you desire.)
I recall there was a Scala coverdisk, but I couldn't figure out how to
make it do anything Oh well!
Then there was a program called Vista. (No! Wait! Come back!!) This was,
quite simply, a fractal landscape generator and renderer. You import a
"DEM" (Digital Elevation Map) and Vista adds some fractal noise to
generate a landscape. Vista will then either output this as a polygon
mesh the size of a small planet, or it will render it for you itself.
The native renderer wasn't fantastic, but it was OK. The images
certainly were nothing like "photorealistic", but in later versions of
the software, they started to come moderately close. Indeed, the last
few versions even had trees and other vegetation, and streams running
down the valleys, etc. (The trees were, of course, fractally generated
once again.)
Again, there was a coverdisk containing an early version. While the
graphics it produced weren't sensational, they were fairly fast (e.g.,
10 minutes to render a vast complex landscape), and it was quite fun to
"explore" the islands you created. (The program could *build* DEMs as
well as import real ones, IIRC. But that was disabled in the coverdisk.
Well they gotta make you buy the real thing somehow!)
(Unfortunately, I don't have any images to show you. Suffice it to say
that only later versions featured polygon smoothing, and I don't think
any version had texture mapping or radiosity.)
And then there was AMOS (AMiga OS). I forget how many different editions
were produced - AMOS, Easy AMOS, AMOS Professional, etc. In spite of the
name, it wasn't actually an OS at all. It was a a programming language.
When you buy AMOS Professional, what you get is
- An interpretter for the AMOS language.
- An extensive IDE.
- A set of multimedia tools inclusing almost everything but the kitchen
sink, *all* written in AMOS itself.
- No less than *seven disks* stacked full of multimedia files and demo
programs.
Technically, AMOS is just another dialect of BASIC. It doesn't have line
numbers, does have GOTO and GOSUB, and has procedures and functions,
uses "$" and "#" to distinguish variable datatypes, and IIRC has local
variables if you want them. The core language is no more powerful than that.
However, it has VERY strong multimedia capabilities. If you imagine the
most feature-encrusted lump of software possible, AMOS was like that,
but with bells on.
Want to load a Protracker module and put it on looping play? Two
commands. Want to load an IFF image and cycle the colour map? Two
commands. Want to create 3 independent framebuffers and overlay them?
That's 3 commands. Want to load an animation and play it until the user
presses a mouse key? That's one command.
The thing comes with a paperback manual the size of a Linux bible. (!!!)
One time I did sit down and count the number of commands in the command
index. I checked twice; 809 unique commands, not including the multiple
syntaxes for each command. (!)
There was an entire seperate sublanguage called AMAL (ANimAtion
Language) just for moving sprites around the screen. There was a tool
for capturing and editing mouse movements to make a flight path, and
AMAL could then animate one or more sprites along that path. AMOS also
implements "software sprites", a trick that allows the 8 hardware
sprites to be multiplexed into two-dozen apparently independent elements
onscreen. Automatically.
(Alternatively, BLOBs (BLitter OBjects) do the same thing, with a
different set of restrictions, using the Amiga's specialised BLITER
(BLock Image TransfER) hardware.)
There was also a sprite editor, supporting sprite animations and so
forth. Both the path editor and sprite editor were written in AMOS.
There was also another completely seperate language called... actually,
do you know, I can't even remember! But basically, there was a large,
complex GUI painter tool (written in AMOS), and you could attach short
scripts in this UI sublanguage to every possible mouse event on the GUI.
You paint your GUI, save it, and code your application to load it and
attach scripts to it (by putting the scripts into strings). The scripts
could change visual elements (e.g., make a button change colour when you
click it) and invoke AMOS procedures and so forth.
The vast library of software that came with it included a sprite editor
and animator, a fairly sophisticated sample editor, a GUI painter, an
animation path capture and edit tool, a "resource editor" (you could put
program strings into a file to enable easy localisation), and probably
several other things I've forgotten.
They also apparently ran a competition for users to submit interesting
AMOS programs, and AMOS Professional comes with several disks full of
the results. There was several fractal generators (L-system and
Mandelbrot/Julia), parallax scrolling demos, infinite ball trails... One
natty little program loaded a song and played it, showing some animated
VU meters. (There was a function to get the current intensity of any
channel. Unfortunately, this is just the note on/note off signals, not
actual audio loudness...)
Another even more snazzy program drew a set of disco lights and made
them flash to the rhythem of the music. I immediately took the code
apart to see how it managed to work so well... I discovered that the
colours of the lights were actually *completely random*, and their
apparent synchronisation with the music was completely psychological!
It's amazing what the human brain can do, eh?
There were also at least 3 complete computer games written in AMOS.
- There was a standard "fly a space ship through a cave without getting
killed" thing. (But half way through, the ship rotates and the direction
of scrolling changes. And the levels are actually very large!)
- There was a straight-fowards Tetris clone. (But with some neat
graphical touches. In particular, the screen showed several hundred
colours using Copper trickery that AMOS could do for you automatically.
And as you played the game, these colours slowly scrolled, looking
something like a sunset in the background.) There was even a savable
high-score table!
- There was a board game called Quatro. I forget how you play it, but it
featured an AI that was actually quite hard to beat!
There might even have been more games than this, I can't remember.
AMOS was explicitly designed to allow 3rd party "extensions" to be
written. (In fact the user manual contains detailed step-by-step
descriptions of all the main AMOS data structures involved.) My dad
purchased a few of these:
- CRAFT (Colours, Requesters, Animations, Fractals, Text) added commands
for automatically generating colour blends (think FractInt's palette
editor) and colour-cycling multiple subranges simultaneously. It also
added the ability to invoke AmigaDOS requestors with arbitrary text. But
most of all, it added built-in commands for rendering Mandelbrot/Julia
fractals. (And, obviously, very much faster than interpretted AMOS
code!) There were also some string-processing commands added.
- TOME (which we never actually owned) was ment to provide a tile-based
level editor and commands to make it trivial to build platform-style
computer games.
- IntOS added the ability to use the Amiga's native Intuition UI system
rather than AMOS's own system. (AMOS was very nice, but it basically
took over the whole machine for itself while running, and wouldn't play
nice with other applications.)
Later the makers releated AMOS The Compiler, which my dad bought. It
came with a selection of compute-intensive demos, which all sped up
drastically when compiled. It also ment you could give your AMOS
programs to people who don't have AMOS. (But the program will basically
hog the whole machine while it's running.)
In the other corner was Blitz Basic. I never really used this very much,
but I did try out an AF coverdisk containing a stripped down version.
While AMOS liked to control the machine itself, Blitz had an explicit
command to completely disable the OS and hit the metal directly. (Hell
only knows what would happen on a modified Amiga!)
As the name somewhat implies, Blitz was designed to be *fast*. There was
a Doom clone written in Blitz at one time. It was called Gloom.
http://www.mobygames.com/game/amiga/gloom/screenshots/gameShotId,71050/
As you can see, the graphics utterly sucked. I actually bought this
game, and was very dissapointed by it. The Amiga Format review praised
the game for being a technical milestone, but basically had nothing else
positive to say about it. I think it got a rating of about 49% overall.
For comparison, the excellent Flashback got 97%.
http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/flashback-the-quest-for-identity/screenshots/gameShotId,74063/
http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/flashback-the-quest-for-identity/screenshots/gameShotId,2983/
http://www.mobygames.com/game/jaguar/flashback-the-quest-for-identity/screenshots/gameShotId,27498/
http://www.mobygames.com/game/snes/flashback-the-quest-for-identity/screenshots/gameShotId,117925/
On a blurry old TV, those shots look pretty amazing. And the character
animation is rotoscoped - the first time an Amiga game had had this. The
resulting movement is increadibly fluid and life-like even to this day!
[Yes, I know none of those are Amiga shots. They don't have any. Trust
me, it looked more or less the same.]
The later Universe game was similar:
http://www.mobygames.com/game/amiga/universe/screenshots/gameShotId,32843/
http://www.mobygames.com/game/amiga/universe/screenshots/gameShotId,32844/
Looks horribly dithered now, but on my dad's old TV it really looked
like half a million colours. I was astounded that it could look so
real... how times have changed, eh? (I only played a short demo from a
coverdisk.)
And then there was The Settlers.
http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/serf-city-life-is-feudal/screenshots/gameShotId,74247/
http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/serf-city-life-is-feudal/screenshots/gameShotId,147479/
(Again, the Amiga shots don't show any actual gameplay, but this is more
or less what it looked like.)
Man, you could spend *hours* playing that game! It was rated Gold by
Amiga Format, and rightly so. There have since been several PC versions,
which me and my dad still play. (Although sadly since going to a
dual-core PC, none of them function for me any more... It was becoming
quite buggy and unreliable anyway.) I still dream that some day I'll
write my own game along these lines...
More nostalgia as I think of it!
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
Post a reply to this message
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
