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 ]
Simon Savidge has left his role at Liverpool Libraries to take charge of logistics for the BBC’s Novels That Shaped Our World libraries events programme. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2020-03-09 06:33:08 UTC ]
More news stories like this
How J. Edgar Hoover used the power of libraries for (gasp!) evil. | Lit Hub History “Mechanical travel blunts our sense of the world.” On the reverie and detachment of the American road trip. | Lit Hub Travel On the magic sentences of Lauren Groff, creating action without verbs. | Lit... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2020-03-07 12:30:11 UTC ]
More news stories like this
Adobe has released a new Gmail add-on to make it easier for Creative Cloud users to share their work over email. The plugin allows you to attach synced files, libraries or mobile creations you have stored on your Creative Cloud account as links. Continue reading at Engadget
[ Engadget | 2020-03-05 18:10:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this
Once a revered political figure the public looked to for advice on everything from crime to child rearing, J. Edgar Hoover—the former director of the FBI from its inception in 1935 to his death in 1972—is now known as a bigot who abused his power to squash progressive causes and spy on political... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2020-03-04 09:48:43 UTC ]
More news stories like this
This week, the ongoing protests in India in response to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s controversial new citizenship law, which discriminates against Indian Muslims, have intensified and turned violent. But one bright spot is the fact that, as Maroosha Muzaffar reports at Ozy, some volunteers... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2020-02-26 16:11:24 UTC ]
More news stories like this
Taking a look at some of the world's most innovative libraries and library projects as a way of looking toward the future of these important institutions. Continue reading at Book Riot
[ Book Riot | 2020-02-26 11:38:35 UTC ]
More news stories like this
How a career in libraries is paying dividends for PW columnist Sari Feldman in her new role—grandmother. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2020-02-21 05:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this
As a girl, the author of “Wild” and “Tiny Beautiful Things” spent hours studying Scholastic book club catalogs. But “my family was too poor to pay for the books,” she says. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2020-02-18 15:29:22 UTC ]
More news stories like this
Libraries across Southern California are aiming to serve the immigrant readers of rapidly changing cities by purchasing books in a variety of languages. Continue reading at Los Angeles Times
[ Los Angeles Times | 2020-02-17 13:00:04 UTC ]
More news stories like this
Bradford Council has reversed planned £1.05m cuts to its libraries but says some services could still be moved to other buildings in a bid to make them financially viable. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2020-02-16 18:54:07 UTC ]
More news stories like this
As we all know, there is only one Valentine and it is every book. Luckily, Harrison Ford talking about how great libraries are is an acceptable human Valentine proxy for all books. Why—besides the fact that you can’t spell”Harrison Ford, you irascible Jedi” without “Library”—is Ford making PSAs... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2020-02-14 14:17:02 UTC ]
More news stories like this
Do some good and help these classrooms build inclusive libraries by donating or spreading the word about their projects. Continue reading at Book Riot
[ Book Riot | 2020-02-14 11:41:33 UTC ]
More news stories like this
As a girl, the author of “Wild” and “Tiny Beautiful Things” spent hours studying Scholastic book club catalogs. But “my family was too poor to pay for the books,” she says. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2020-02-13 10:00:03 UTC ]
More news stories like this
OPINION: Does seeing ad spend and number of advertisements really tell us that much? Continue reading at Stuff
[ Stuff | 2020-02-07 16:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this
From about 1890 to 1940, a half century of ultra-cheap editions of Jane Austen’s novels aimed explicitly at educating the working poor. Because these ill-printed and shabby versions of her stories never made it into the scholarly libraries that safeguard “important” editions, the hardscrabble... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2020-02-04 09:49:29 UTC ]
More news stories like this
First published in 1977, Usborne’s The World of the Unknown: Ghosts was among the most treasured books (and anecdotally, the most stolen) in school libraries of the late 70s and 80s. Many of my friends—a disproportionate number of whom are writers and artists—remember poring over the pages of... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2020-01-29 09:48:13 UTC ]
More news stories like this
ON HALLOWEEN 2016, former Fox News anchor Greta Van Susteren tweeted, “Colleges should stop building vanity projects like huge libraries and billing students–full libraries are on our smartphones!” At the time, this statement sounded like garden-variety know-nothingism, ideological in the sense... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books
[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2020-01-28 13:30:27 UTC ]
More news stories like this
Ten libraries could be closed across Hampshire with others having their opening hours reduced after the local authority announced plans to slash £1.76m from the service’s budget. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2020-01-10 01:00:51 UTC ]
More news stories like this
Rakuten OverDrive, a platform for digital books (used by more than 43,000 libraries and schools worldwide), has released a list of its most-borrowed ebooks and audiobooks in 2019. There are no real surprises on the list, besides maybe the fact that so many people want to listen to a woman tell... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2020-01-08 19:19:19 UTC ]
More news stories like this
When libraries help people in cold weather, they become a critical service for teens, the elderly, and unsheltered people. Continue reading at Book Riot
[ Book Riot | 2020-01-07 11:35:59 UTC ]
More news stories like this