With modern consoles offering gamers graphics so photorealistic that they blur the line between CGI and reality, it's easy forget just how cartoonishly blocky they were in the 8-bit era. In his new book, Creating Q*Bert and Other Classic Arcade Games, legendary game designer and programmer Warren Davis recalls his halcyon days imagining and designing some of the biggest hits to ever grace an arcade. In the excerpt below, Davis explains how the industry made its technological leap from 8- to 12-bit graphics. Santa Monica Press©2021 Santa Monica PressBack at my regular day job, I became particularly fascinated with a new product that came out for the Amiga computer: a video digitizer made by a company called A-Squared. Let’s unpack all that slowly.The Amiga was a recently released home computer capable of unprecedented graphics and sound: 4,096 colors! Eight-bit stereo sound! There were image manipulation programs for it that could do things no other computer, including the IBM PC, could do. We had one at Williams not only because of its capabilities, but also because our own Jack Haeger, an immensely talented artist who’d worked on Sinistar at Williams a few years earlier, was also the art director for the Amiga design team.Video digitization is the process of grabbing a video image from some video source, like a camera or a videotape, and converting it into pixel data that a computer system (or video game) could use. A full-color photograph might contain millions of... Continue reading at 'Engadget'
[ Engadget | 2021-12-25 16:30:11 UTC ]
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New YA books hitting shelves this week in hardcover and paperback for your holiday week reading delight. Continue reading at Book Riot
[ Book Riot | 2024-07-01 15:30:00 UTC ]
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Top book news stories include a new installment in the Hunger Games universe, Costco scaling back book sales, and more highbrow-raising layoffs in publishing. Continue reading at Book Riot
[ Book Riot | 2024-06-06 16:34:34 UTC ]
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A satirical confession, from an imagined designer who unleashed the style of book cover with “amorphous shapes of suggestive colors” on the world. I’ve created a monster. I’m the designer who first created the colorful blob book cover. You know the ones: the vaguely egg-like, kidney-bean-like... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2024-05-08 17:07:26 UTC ]
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The market for bédé visual storytelling almost doubled over the course of the pandemic, but can the birthplace of Asterix continue to nurture creators?Like thousands of French people, Sylvie Pinault discovered comic books during the pandemic. Though bandes dessinées – literally meaning “drawn... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2024-02-06 14:00:36 UTC ]
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In the anthology “Critical Hits,” gamers like Hanif Abdurraqib, Alexander Chee and Larissa Pham explain what the medium means to them. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2023-11-20 10:00:28 UTC ]
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Siri and Alexa were only the beginning. As voice recognition and speech synthesis technologies continue to mature, the days of typing on keyboards to interact with the digital world around us could be coming to an end — and sooner than many of us anticipated. Where... Continue reading at Engadget
[ Engadget | 2023-10-15 14:30:20 UTC ]
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You didn't actually believe all those founder's myths about tech billionaires like Bezos, Jobs and Musk pulling themselves up by their bootstraps from some suburban American garage, did you? In reality, our corporate kings have been running the same playbook since the 18th century when... Continue reading at Engadget
[ Engadget | 2023-09-11 20:50:45 UTC ]
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You didn't actually believe all those founder's myths about tech billionaires like Bezos, Jobs and Musk pulling themselves up by their bootstraps from some suburban American garage, did you? In reality, our corporate kings have been running the same playbook since the 18th century when... Continue reading at Engadget
[ Engadget | 2023-09-10 14:30:56 UTC ]
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Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow overtook titles by David Walliams and Colleen Hoover to become the UK’s number one bestseller. The author, booksellers and fans reflect on how it became a literary phenomenonTomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow’s distinctive cover, with its image of Hokusai’s... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2023-08-11 10:00:35 UTC ]
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The problem with studying the universe around us is that it is simply too big. The stars overhead remain too far away to interact with directly, so we are relegated to testing our theories on the formation of the galaxies based on observable data. Simulating these celestial bodies on computers... Continue reading at Engadget
[ Engadget | 2023-06-18 15:30:05 UTC ]
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You get free stuff, you get free travel, you get the nifty cool title of "brand ambassador," what's not to love about being an internet influencer? There's the consequences, for one. Not even just the warranted consequences of your actual actions, mind you, but also those arriving unbidden based... Continue reading at Engadget
[ Engadget | 2023-06-11 14:30:57 UTC ]
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We Americans love to have ourselves a big old time. It's not just our waistlines that have exploded outward since the post-WWII era. Our houses have grown larger, as have the appliances within them, the vehicles in their driveways, the income inequalities between ourselves and our neighbors, and... Continue reading at Engadget
[ Engadget | 2023-06-04 14:30:20 UTC ]
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Some of us do our best thinking in the shower, others do it while on the toilet. Renee Descartes, he pondered most deeply while ensconced in a baker's oven. The man simply needed to be convinced of the oven's existence before climbing in. Such are the quirks of the most monumental minds humanity... Continue reading at Engadget
[ Engadget | 2023-05-28 14:30:30 UTC ]
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Seemingly overnight, Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX, went from cryptocurrency wunderkind to wanted for questioning by the FBI. After years of unfettered success, the walls of SBF's blockchain empire came crumbling down around him as his tricky financial feats failed and his generalized... Continue reading at Engadget
[ Engadget | 2023-05-14 14:30:33 UTC ]
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Maria Isabel Sánchez Vegara’s book, illustrated by Matt Hunt, is the first of the Little People, Big Dreams series to top the standingsA children’s biography of King Charles III has topped the UK book chart before the coronation on 6 May.Maria Isabel Sánchez Vegara’s King Charles is part of the... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2023-05-05 09:57:25 UTC ]
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"Birds fly South for the winter and North for the summer," has historically proven to be only slightly less reliable a maxim than the sun always rising in the East and setting in the West. Humanity has been fascinated by the comings and goings of our avian neighbors for millennia, but the why's... Continue reading at Engadget
[ Engadget | 2023-04-02 14:30:53 UTC ]
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Science is the reason you aren't reading this by firelight nestled cozily under a rock somewhere however, its practice significantly predates its formalization by Galileo in the 16th century. Among its earliest adherents — even before pioneering efforts of Aristotle — was Animaxander, the Greek... Continue reading at Engadget
[ Engadget | 2023-03-12 14:30:52 UTC ]
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Deep Brain Stimulation therapies have proven an invaluable treatment option for patients suffering from otherwise debilitating diseases like Parkinson's. However, it — and its sibling tech, brain computer interfaces — currently suffer a critical shortcoming: the electrodes that convert electron... Continue reading at Engadget
[ Engadget | 2023-03-04 15:30:03 UTC ]
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Some of us are destined to lead successful lives thanks to the circumstances of our birth. Some of us, like attorney Bruce Jackson, are destined to lead such lives in spite them. Raised in New York's Amsterdam housing projects and subjected to the daily brutalities of growing up a black man in... Continue reading at Engadget
[ Engadget | 2023-02-19 15:30:33 UTC ]
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There’s no denying that Colleen Hoover has had an incredible year. Still, despite the relentless appetite for her novels, it seems that the people do not, in fact, want a coloring book based on her number-one bestselling book It Ends With Us, which centers on an abusive relationship faced by... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2023-01-12 17:27:54 UTC ]
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