I will never, ever stop loving Bill Atkinson’s dithering algorithm. If you cut your teeth on Macpaint or Hypercard, you probably recognize it without even realizing it.

There’s a great post for the supernerds in the room that goes into the nature of “dithering” and even explains the algorithmic nudges Atkinson Dithering uses to achieve its distinctive look: https://surma.dev/things/ditherpunk/

These days, dithering is usually encountered as an affectation or an artifact; we’ve got ridiculously high res deep color displays on our *wrists*. Back in the 80s when Atkinson was doing some of his most memorable work, though, it was the cutting edge of image display optimization.

Ditherpunk — The article I wish I had about monochrome image dithering — surma.dev

I always loved the visual aesthetic of dithering but never knew how it’s done. So I did some research. This article may contain traces of nostalgia and none of Lena.

@eaton Ha, I just stumbled upon that post when I went looking to see what algorithm Return of the Obra Dinn used. Sadly, as the post explains, Atkinson Dithering wasn't possible to use as it's a linear algorithm and the Obra Dinn needed a parallel algorithm so it could be rendered as a shader by the GPU. I don't think the downsides of the algorithms used were particularly apparent, though.

I kinda wish someone (doesn't *have* to be Pope) would do more dithered 3D games. I very much like the aesthetic of that game.