Hitting the Books: Amiga and the birth of 256-color gaming

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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[ The Bookseller | 2020-01-05 21:59:32 UTC ]
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Electronic Arts is banning some Linux gamers from Battlefield V

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[ Betanews | 2020-01-04 10:03:20 UTC ]
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Essex libraries campaigners hit out at 'commercialisation' of service

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[ The Bookseller | 2019-12-24 02:02:07 UTC ]
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£3m investment will improve 'clunky' system, says head of Essex libraries

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[ The Bookseller | 2019-12-23 00:45:10 UTC ]
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What Can Heal the Publisher-Library Divide? Data

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[ Publishers Weekly | 2019-12-20 05:00:00 UTC ]
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[ Book Riot | 2019-12-18 11:30:11 UTC ]
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CILIP says libraries need £250m in demand to Johnson government

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[ The Bookseller | 2019-12-18 08:39:06 UTC ]
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How Libraries Are Dealing With Bedbugs

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[ Book Riot | 2019-12-17 11:32:47 UTC ]
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[ The Bookseller | 2019-12-17 04:51:52 UTC ]
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The Little Free Libraries of East Rogers Park

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[ Book Riot | 2019-12-14 11:33:25 UTC ]
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[ Los Angeles Times | 2019-12-13 18:32:41 UTC ]
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[ Betanews | 2019-12-13 14:35:38 UTC ]
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Why It's Time to Quantify the Library's Role in the Reading Marketplace

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[ Publishers Weekly | 2019-12-13 05:00:00 UTC ]
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ALA Midwinter 2020: On E-books, Librarians Must Hold the Line

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[ Publishers Weekly | 2019-12-13 05:00:00 UTC ]
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State Library Victoria proves libraries aren't just about books: they're about community

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[ The Conversation | 2019-12-08 18:49:50 UTC ]
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[ Book Riot | 2019-12-03 11:30:46 UTC ]
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[ Book Riot | 2019-11-29 11:30:56 UTC ]
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Jeremy Corbyn vows to protect libraries from forces of doom.

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[ Literrary Hub | 2019-11-27 16:43:19 UTC ]
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[ Betanews | 2019-11-27 10:04:35 UTC ]
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