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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Want to read more dark and twisty stories with academic settings? Dive into 8 brilliant dark academia books written by authors of color! Continue reading at Book Riot
[ Book Riot | 2023-01-12 11:32:00 UTC ]
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Whether you love spy fiction, romances, sprawling sagas, or even horror, there’s a new historical fiction book for you on this list, like In the Upper Country by Kai Thomas. Continue reading at Book Riot
[ Book Riot | 2022-12-21 11:36:00 UTC ]
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Pantone's Color of the Year for 2023 is Viva Magenta, and we've got a roundup of books fit for celebrating the new color. Continue reading at Book Riot
[ Book Riot | 2022-12-16 11:38:00 UTC ]
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The holiday travel season is once again upon us! It's the magical time of the year that combines standing in airport security lines with incrementally losing your mind as the hands of your watch perpetually tick closer to a boarding time that magically moved up 45 minutes since you left the... Continue reading at Engadget
[ Engadget | 2022-12-04 15:30:19 UTC ]
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The impact of Japanese RPGs on pop and gaming culture cannot be overstated. From Final Fantasy and Phantasy Star to Chrono Trigger, NieR, and Fire Emblem — JRPGs have spanned console generations, bridged the Japanese and North American markets, spawned entire universes of IP and delivered... Continue reading at Engadget
[ Engadget | 2022-11-06 15:30:37 UTC ]
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Women have faced gender-based discrimination in the workforce throughout history, denied employment in all but a handful of subservient roles, regularly ignored for promotions and pay raises — and rarely ever compensated at the same rates as their male peers. This long and storied socioeconomic... Continue reading at Engadget
[ Engadget | 2022-10-30 14:30:31 UTC ]
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General Motors has been in business for more than a century, but in its 112 years, the company has never faced such challenges as it does in today's rapidly electrifying and automating industry. The assembly line jobs from Detroit's heyday have been replaced by legions of automated industrial... Continue reading at Engadget
[ Engadget | 2022-10-23 14:30:06 UTC ]
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After Mary Sears and her team had revolutionized the field of oceanography, but before Katherine G. Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson helped put John Glenn into orbit, a cadre of women programmers working for the US government faced an impossible task: train ENIAC, the world's first ... Continue reading at Engadget
[ Engadget | 2022-10-16 14:30:01 UTC ]
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Apple's Watch Ultra, with its 2000-nit digital display and GPS capabilities, is a far cry from its Revolutionary War-era self-winding forebears. What sorts of wondrous body-mounted technologies might we see another hundred years hence? In his new book, The Skeptic's Guide to the Future, Dr.... Continue reading at Engadget
[ Engadget | 2022-10-01 14:30:47 UTC ]
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We all have those thoughts, the ones that come to us in the small hours of the night. Who am I? Why are we here? What if my cellphone ran on vacuum tubes instead? Randall Munroe has the answer to, well, only one of those questions, but also the answers to a whole bunch of others collected... Continue reading at Engadget
[ Engadget | 2022-09-18 15:00:37 UTC ]
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Lethal Tides tells the story of pioneering oceanic researcher Mary Sears and her leading role in creating one of the most important intelligence gathering operations of World War II. Languishing in academic obscurity and roundly ignored by her male colleagues, Sears is selected for command by... Continue reading at Engadget
[ Engadget | 2022-09-04 15:00:53 UTC ]
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I’m Glad My Mom Died details the abuse the iCarly actor suffered as a child star. Continue reading at Slate
[ Slate | 2022-08-18 20:31:47 UTC ]
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C. J. Hauser’s memoir-in-essays is a frank exploration of intimacy and romance that doesn’t always lead to a happily ever after. Continue reading at The Washington Post
[ The Washington Post | 2022-07-05 13:21:38 UTC ]
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More than a million new titles are published annually in the US, far more than even the most bibliophilic secret agent could get through. Even with a weekly publishing schedule, we can only bring you 52 Hitting the Books each year. To help shine a spotlight on all the fantastic stories that... Continue reading at Engadget
[ Engadget | 2022-06-22 17:30:23 UTC ]
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Forefront Books and the Frederick Douglass Family Initiatives are teaming up to form Frederick Douglass Books, a publishing imprint meant to “establish a pathway for Black and Brown authors” into the publishing industry, the two organizations announced in a press release last week. The imprint... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2022-06-16 13:04:40 UTC ]
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In a May 20 panel, four young publishing professionals discussed workloads for lower-level staffers in publishing, a growing dissatisfaction among a new generation of book business workers, and more. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2022-05-23 04:00:00 UTC ]
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A tough year for the stock market got worse in April, leading the Publishers Weekly Stock Index, now down to only six companies, to drop 8.8%. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2022-05-06 04:00:00 UTC ]
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After decades on the decline intro, America's labor movement is undergoing a massive renaissance with Starbucks, Amazon and Apple Store employees leading the way. Though the tech sector has only just begun basking in the newfound glow of collective bargaining rights, the automotive industry has... Continue reading at Engadget
[ Engadget | 2022-05-01 14:00:34 UTC ]
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He crafted tales of everyday life for early readers. His “Mr. Pine’s Purple House,” first published in 1965, later inspired a new publishing company — and Jeff Bezos. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2022-02-24 23:32:36 UTC ]
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From domestication and selective breeding to synthetic insulin and CRISPR, humanity has long sought understand, master and exploit the genetic coding of the natural world. In The Genesis Machine: Our Quest to Rewrite Life in the Age of Synthetic Biology authors Amy Webb, professor of strategic... Continue reading at Engadget
[ Engadget | 2022-02-19 16:30:24 UTC ]
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