Notices by vga256 (vga256@dialup.cafe), page 2

macOS users who have large photo libraries: do you have a recommendation for a photo deduplication program that will run on Monterey/12.x? i've got a collection of 40k+ photos that needs massive deduplication, and I cannot upgrade this production machine to a newer version of macos (which has dedupe built-in to Photos)

#macos

merry christmas to all of us surviving a night with the inlaws 😅

insanely deep and scientifically rational explanation for the decline in flavour of exported Kenyan coffee beans.

i've never learned so much about coffee production in a single, well-written and researched article

https://christopherferan.com/2021/12/25/kenya-and-the-decline-of-the-worlds-greatest-coffee/

#coffee

@ThreeOhFour 😭 i know what a terrible mistake

when life calls you to drive 3 hours to pick up 50 computing newspapers from the 90s you do not question

when i was a kid, you could build a simple game or application by dragging and dropping a few UI controls, and gluing them together with a few dozen lines of BASIC or Pascal. it might take 15 minutes, at most, to get your little character walking around on the screen. this is how we ended up with a lot of hilariously good and cheap shareware you could share on BBSes in the 90s.

for the past year i've been quietly working on building a software thingie that doesn't exist anymore. i've been building a software toolkit that's kinda like Visual Basic and Borland Delphi, designed for making tile-based 2d games.

i've been using it to build my own little goofy games, and improving on the drag'n'drop IDE as i figuring things out. it's not done yet, and has a long ways to go before it's ready for other people to start making their own little applications and games. think PICO-8 or ZZT if they had grown up on a steady diet of Windows 3.1 and GeoWorks Ensemble instead.

i'm really, really bad about polishing turds to infinity and never releasing them. to break that habit, i've built a mini-website for the IDE/Shareware Creation Kit. it's called Exigy, named like a bad 80s metal hair band or richard garriott game.

https://exigy.org

i'll be posting weekly blog/devlog updates there, so i don't irritate anyone with them on this account. there is an rss feed button at the top right if you hate my demonic php and css.

#shareware #ultima #php #blog #smolweb #zzt #indiedev

@tomjennings i still remember the IMG tag as being one of the most hotly debated HTML spec additions in the early 90s

xmas protip: if you string your lights on the ground, future snowfalls -> procedural volumetric lighting shader for free

#canada #christmas

huge thanks to @talin for uploading his Faery Tale Adventure (amiga) source to github

several users are already hard at work digesting the source tree and getting things working. one of the best is Xarklabs' ongoing SDL2 port, located here:

https://github.com/XarkLabs/faery-tale-amiga/tree/macos

talin's original source here:
https://github.com/viridia/faery-tale-amiga

#gamePreservation #retroGaming #amiga

filmmakers/vfx coders - i came across a *very* subtle dissolve effect in a game that i've very rarely seen used in games, and i can't figure out what it is, and how it's done.

the first 5 seconds show the game's dissolve effect.

the second 5 seconds shows a dissolve to black using a standard cross-dissolve algorithm that any film editing program would use

look at them very closely, frame by frame. they dissolve *very* differently. the game seems to dissolve the thinnest parts of the font first, and dissolves only the thickest parts toward the end.

the standard cross-dissolve dissolves all pixels simultaneously, which doesn't look very interesting.

update: thank you demosceners and film nerds! you nailed it - it's a "film dissolve" - and it is produced by dissolving in linear RGB color space with gamma 1.0

can anyone recognize the algorithm or industry name for the effect used in the first one?

TIL La Abadia Del Crimen got a 256 colour remake several years ago under the name "The Abbey of Crime Extensum", and the animation and pixel art is *gorgeous*

the controls have been modernized a bit, and it's a joy to explore.

free download and/or steam link here:
https://www.abadiadelcrimenextensum.com/en/the-game-2/

#retroGaming

my wife had to go into work today so i got put in charge of pumpkin carving

i'm sure you'll agree that halloween is an important day to scare children by rattling the bones of our dead culture

suspect next year she'll decide to stay home instead.

#halloween #retroComputing

@lunarloony I can think of only one film that pulls it off in a convincing manner and yet is absolutely mysterious about the mechanism. it was a little indie film called Primer by shane carruth

i have no idea
what possessed
the producers of
this documentary
to release a
teaser in 9:16
aspect ratio,
but we're here for
the content right

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDtowjlV0uU

#reboot #cartoons #tv

🧵
hiked the "big lake" prairie pothole biome today, near lois hole provincial park.

one of the best hidden secrets are the wild trails hidden in the forest once you get off the gravel/paved pathways.

first: some adorable young mallards enjoying duckweed on one of the ponds

#yeg #canada #alberta #wildlife

one of the nice surprises along the trail was this tiny muddy creek, making its way down from the prairie far above the forest

hoof prints - likely deer - and coyote tracks were all alongside the mud banks

#yeg #canada #alberta #wildlife

twelve years ago, a painter by the name of anders ramsell painted 12,597 aquarelle paintings of blade runner, shot by shot, of the entire film edited down to ~35 minutes. it took two years of painstaking work, all done in his spare time after work each night.

the video circled around the web for a few years, and quietly disappeared from every single site it was hosted at.

a few months ago i spent a few hours digging for it, and finally found a copy of the original file.

i'm not sure how long it will last over at IA, so enjoy it while you can. it is a true achievement. 🙏

#filmPreservation #art #painting

https://archive.org/details/blade-runner-aquarelle-edition

buried in my 30 year old copy of NSCA Mosaic alpha was a bookmarked hyperlink to a university of cambridge (uk) live webcam of a coffee pot, brewing in the Trojan Room computing lab

while live coffee/lab cams were not uncommon in the mid 90s, this one is fascinating for a few reasons:

- it was up and running in 1991, predating the graphical world wide web by a few years
- it ran over the MSNL protocol using a telecom network standard called ATM, which was a competitor to ethernet
- an entire machine was dedicated to grabbing a frame from the camera, compressing it, and uploading to the web server: an Acorn Archimedes 🔥
- the exact URL stored in Mosaic still resolves today, and the web page hasn't changed in 30 years

https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/coffee/coffee.html

more history of the setup here:
https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/coffee/qsf/coffee.html

more images of the sacred pot by @quentinsf here:
https://statusq.org/archives/2024/07/11/12127/

#retroComputing #worldWideWeb #webPreservation

time for a desert roadtrip

a local drumheller tourist trap: rock shop still here after 40 years

#canada #dinosaurs #alberta

badland gully formed from thunderstorm runoff