Ellis Pritchard

@ellispritchard@cyberplace.social
23 Followers
98 Following
149 Posts
A green geek, condemned to code software in a cluttered attic for evermore.
Pascal was the first language taught on my undergraduate course in 1990, and I ended up using it for a couple of years 'for real' in the form of Turbo Pascal in my first post-graduate job, for Radar configuration and maintenance software. A few years later. the course switched to Modula-2...

"Remembering Niklaus Wirth: father of Pascal and inspiration to many": https://hackaday.com/2024/01/05/remembering-niklaus-wirth-father-of-pascal-and-inspiration-to-many/

(includes a great programming language joke)

Remembering Niklaus Wirth: Father Of Pascal And Inspiration To Many

Although perhaps not as much of a household name as other pioneers of last century’s rapid evolution of computer hardware and the software running on them, Niklaus Wirth’s contributions…

Hackaday
Tackling the nonsense talked about the national debt, and its cost https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2023/12/31/tackling-the-nonsense-talked-about-the-national-debt-and-its-cost/. Politicians are ending the year talking total nonsense about the national debt and its implications. Let me shatter a few myths about both its size and cost, both of which are being dramatically overstated right now.
Neoliberalism is consuming our well-being

As The Guardian has noted: Britain is on track to become a “National Health State” where half of all public spending is allocated to the NHS and social care by the end of the decade, according to a leading thinktank. They added: As the chancellor came under pressure on Thursday to defend her...

Funding the Future

In case you intended to get some work done today:

https://c64.krissz.hu/online-playable-games/

I grew up playing many of those games. Also nice job on the CRT emulation.

#c64 #emulation

Online playable Commodore 64 games

Play with your favorite Commodore 64 games online! Enjoy the greatest classics of your childhood!

Commodore64 retro

Michelle Donelan was in Brussels yesterday to formally sign-up to the UK re-entering the EU's #Horizon research programme.

Now, the Govt. is going to spend up to £10k per organisation to help them (re)attract #scientists & prepare bids for the rest of the programme's duration.

So essentially, we've held out for a better deal (which we didn't get), but due to #RishiSunak's dithering, we now have to 'pump prime' appplicants who are out of the habit of applying and/or have lost key staff

idiocy!

I can finally reveal some research I've been involved with over the past year or so.

We (@redford, @mrtick and I) have reverse engineered the PLC code of NEWAG Impuls EMUs. These trains were locking up for arbitrary reasons after being serviced at third-party workshops. The manufacturer argued that this was because of malpractice by these workshops, and that they should be serviced by them instead of third parties.

1/4

I don’t know if any time of my life has blurred together more than the last four years

Carbon Bombs, https://www.carbonbombs.org/.

Transparent data and visualization about the world's biggest fossil fuel extraction projects, and their links with companies and banks.

Example with TotalEnergies, https://www.carbonbombs.org/companies?name=TotalEnergies+SE

- 17 carbon bombs
- 43.6 GtCO₂ emissions
- 55.7 $B financed since Paris agreement

Top banks financing TotalEnergies:

- Crédit Agricole
- BNP Paribas
- Société Générale

And so on.

Pretty useful. Banks have a gigantic impact. Choose a better bank.

#carbon #ecology

CarbonBombs.org

CarbonBombs.org is a tool to follow the evolution of carbon bombs in the world.

CarbonBombs.org
What the hell is happening in the Antarctic?
#climatechange
#climatecrisis

Can we all just sit here and gaze upon this mastery by Rick Parks in 16 colors? No scanning, done by hand in Deluxe Paint on an Amiga. It's almost photographic in its perfection.

Rick worked at Westwood Studios and worked on Eye of the Beholder I & 2, Dune 2, Kyrandia and other classics.

Rick died in 1996. His incredible creativity lives on.

#pixelart #commodore #amiga #80s #90s #retrocomputing

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Can we all just sit here and gaze upon this mastery by Rick Parks in 16 colors? No scanning, done by hand in Deluxe Paint on an Amiga. It's almost photographic in its perfection.

Rick worked at Westwood Studios and worked on Eye of the Beholder I & 2, Dune 2, Kyrandia and other classics.

Rick died in 1996. His incredible creativity lives on.

#pixelart #commodore #amiga #80s #90s #retrocomputing

@amigalove absolutely great art piece
@amigalove some good work with halfbrite there too I guess 😁

@tinheadned It's just hi-res interlace (704x480) at 16 colors.

But Rick took exceptional draftsmanship skills combined with a deep understanding of classical painting techniques and applied them to pixel art in ways that make me bend the knee.

@amigalove @tinheadned

Looks like dithering, not just interlace. Which is how you typically make use of a limited color palette.

He made some judicious color choices, too. Here's the complete palette from that image:

000000
606060
704000
808080
905010
A00000
A06030
A07060
A0A0A0
B0A0A0
C00000
C07060
C08050
D0D0D0
F0B080
F0F0F0

Notice also that he is using a 12-bit color space to choose from.

@Professor_Stevens Yeah, but for the 480 lines you need interlace on classic Amigas. This combined with the dithering creates the illusion of more colors on a CRT. Not so much on our LCDs and OLEDs...

@root42

I don't see how interlace simulates more colors. It's due to the fact that the original NTSC frame rate of 29.97 is below the visual flicker threshold. Alternating odd/even filled the screen with half an image 59.94 times per second, which is above the flicker threshold. But it doesn't affect color perception.

Modern displays still use dither (it's built into some paint programs, like GIMP's gradient tool). But that's because 256 shades isn't enough for them.

@Professor_Stevens Depends on how close you sit to the monitor. First and foremost Interlace will increase vertical resolution, but if your CRT is a bit blurry, the lines will actually blend a bit. This can give more shades. On PAL machines you will have even weirder effects, like PAL mixing (not due to interlace):
https://kodiak64.com/blog/non-standard-hues-PAL-NTSC-C64.php

@root42

Interlace and vertical resolution are not related to each other.

@Professor_Stevens @root42 Huh? They were very much related on the original Amiga, where the vertical resolution achievable with interlace was twice that of non-interlaced video (e.g. 512 vs 256 on PAL Amigas not using overscan). Contemporary Amiga monitors shared that limitation, as did typical consumer TVs of the time (which was of course where the idea of using interlace to double the vertical resolution originated). Interlace was optional for low vert. resolution, but mandatory for high.
@amigalove holy crap I thought that was a photo.
@amigalove absolutely bonkers. Thank you for sharing
@amigalove When we were interviewing engineers at Westwood, I'd invariably give them a tour of the studio. Rick's office was the undoubted highlight of the tour. Amazing talent and such a modest guy too. ❤️
@amigalove That's super impressive ! I REMEMBER seeing that picture first time on an Amiga 1000. Had no idea who was who made it nor that he passed away. That's sad, that image is a masterpiece !
@amigalove WOW! At first I thought he designed the Mickey on the glass and then I zoomed in 🤯
@amigalove I thought this was just a photograph damn
@amigalove yeah that IS a really nice print onto that glass, which I unquestioningly assumed was real before zooming in
@amigalove I literally thought: Where is the painting? Why is there a photograph of a Mickeyglass?
@amigalove I kept on wondering why he was designing the thing to put onto the glass before I noticed you meant the whole image, wow, that's amazing :)
@amigalove WHAT
i thought if was a photo!
@amigalove Though I never produced anything so stunning, Deluxe Paint was my first introduction to creating computer graphics with a mouse (not that one). That introduction has given me a 25+ year career in design. #ThankYouAmiga