[HN Gopher] Four-Byte Burger [video]
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       Four-Byte Burger [video]
        
       Author : DamnInteresting
       Score  : 160 points
       Date   : 2023-04-21 14:50 UTC (8 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
        
       | andrepd wrote:
       | Ahoy is an incredible channel. This video about tracker music is
       | amazing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roBkg-iPrbw
        
       | who-shot-jr wrote:
       | This is computing heritage.
       | 
       |  _wipes tear from eye_
        
       | stewx wrote:
       | This is delightful. The attention to detail is astounding.
        
       | senkora wrote:
       | I would love to have a print of the reproduction as wall art.
        
         | p1mrx wrote:
         | http://xboxahoy.com/images/four-byte-burger.png
        
           | blakespot wrote:
           | I don't suppose there's a version that is not scaled to 1.2x
           | height, for conversion and display on an Amiga CRT, avoiding
           | the need to scale the PNG and lose quality. (Ahoy, if you're
           | reading this.) I'd love to have such a version.
        
             | zokier wrote:
             | Just opening it in GIMP and scaling back down to 200x320
             | seems to work fine, I don't notice any weird artifacts or
             | anything.
        
             | drewtato wrote:
             | https://i.imgur.com/sXiDtCg.png
        
               | moron4hire wrote:
               | How are there JPG artifacts on a PNG?
        
               | scrollaway wrote:
               | imgur is terrible and compresses png to jpg in some cases
        
           | xmonkee wrote:
           | Damn, just looking at this image for a minute can trigger an
           | intense wave of nostalgia for my childhood.
        
       | joezydeco wrote:
       | Jack Haeger is still around, working for a pinball company
       | outside Chicago:
       | 
       | https://www.pinballnews.com/site/2021/02/15/jack-haeger-join...
       | 
       | Maybe someone can ask him about the art?
        
       | msie wrote:
       | Shocked that there was no "save" functionality at the time.
       | Inspiring actually: Just do it.
        
         | rzzzt wrote:
         | Just freeze and save the entire contents of memory, paint
         | program included, using an equivalent of an Action Replay
         | (provided one existed for the Amiga at that time).
        
           | pham803 wrote:
           | Datel didn't come out with an Action Replay cartridge for the
           | Amiga until the A500 (ie, a few years after this). I still
           | have my ARII- a truly amazing piece of hardware. In addition
           | to letting you freeze a program and dump memory to disk, the
           | cartridge had a ripper option that let you graphically pan
           | through memory to look for images to save (another option
           | searched for music trackers).
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | tomcam wrote:
       | Captivating. I mostly had to listen to it as a podcast,
       | occasionally sneaking a glimpse at the screen while waiting at a
       | red light, and his descriptions were so precise and vivid I had
       | no trouble following along. Love the documentarian voice and dry
       | humor.
        
       | marcodiego wrote:
       | Once he got the color palette, resolution and aspect ratio, why
       | didn't simply automated the conversion, eg. using nearest
       | neighbor in color space to determine the color of each pixel? Why
       | did he do it "by hand" instead?
        
         | lovasoa wrote:
         | Because he's an artist, not a programmer.
         | 
         | But I have to admit that, after finding the video on hacker
         | news, I was quite surprised when he opened Photoshop too
        
           | Arnavion wrote:
           | Also that wouldn't have let him do the animation at the end
           | of the video.
        
       | VikingCoder wrote:
       | I absolutely love this.
       | 
       | However... I was wishing the recreation had been done in software
       | rather than in Photoshop.
       | 
       | I was hoping that some clever image processing would result in a
       | Github Repository of a program that could take any photograph of
       | a pixel image, and reproduce the original pixels. Handling all of
       | the distortions along the way...
        
         | UltimateEdge wrote:
         | After using the scanlines to determine the grid size, I bet you
         | could apply a pass of some filter in the frequency domain to
         | remove the artefacts created by the CRT screen! Like here [1],
         | where the author removes a moire pattern created by the process
         | of printing a photo.
         | 
         | [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28663719
        
         | jonny_eh wrote:
         | "Wow, amazing accomplishment, I just wish you did it a
         | different way"
         | 
         | HN is wild.
        
           | VikingCoder wrote:
           | I'm not going to spend a day and a half reproducing old pixel
           | art in Photoshop. I celebrate an artist who will take the
           | time to do that, and I think their final result is fantastic.
           | 
           | If there were a tool that would help me do this, there are
           | situations where I would use it.
           | 
           | I actually wrote a tool that took a PNG and helped me break
           | out the original sprites, backgrounds, and fonts from an old
           | video game. But I recognize that doing this from a photograph
           | is a couple orders of magnitude more difficult.
           | 
           | If anyone is looking for a technical challenge, and has the
           | relevant skills, here I am highlighting how amazing I think
           | it would be.
        
             | codetrotter wrote:
             | "I'm not going to spend a day and a half reproducing old
             | pixel art in Photoshop"
             | 
             | ..instead, I will spend a month and a half writing a piece
             | of software to reproduce the pixel art for me.
             | 
             | :^)
        
         | kmoser wrote:
         | That was my first thought: write software to find each pixel
         | and put it in an array based on its color value. Then find the
         | 32 densest clusters in the array (i.e. the 32 most frequently
         | used colors), determine the average color value of each of
         | those clusters, and that's your palette.
         | 
         | Then run through each pixel again, and set it to the closest
         | matching value from your palette. Done!
        
           | VikingCoder wrote:
           | I think "find each pixel" is a lot harder than you and I are
           | describing it. (I've done some of this work before.) Without
           | knowing the intrinsic parameters of the camera, and how the
           | photo from the camera was cropped, it's pretty rough...
           | 
           | ...but on the other hand, with a high enough quality
           | photograph, and a low enough resolution original image... it
           | sure seems possible.
        
             | chaorace wrote:
             | Just spitballing a high-level implementation:
             | 
             | 1. Color correct for the CMYK printing process
             | 
             | 2. Load image as a pixel matrix
             | 
             | 3. Unwrap pixel matrix into a pixel vector
             | 
             | 4. Convert the pixel vector to HSV representation
             | 
             | 5. Group each pixel into a palette slot by plugging the H/S
             | dimensions into K-means with 32 as the target (ignoring L
             | for clustering to account for scanlines/flicker)
             | 
             | 6. For each palette slot, calculate the "true" HSV value by
             | taking the group's median H/S values and the mean V value
             | 
             | 7. Convert HSV representation to 12-bit RGB colorspace
        
             | zokier wrote:
             | Having visible scan-lines should help a lot?
        
             | wdfx wrote:
             | I was at least hoping he had an example image both in
             | digital and print form from which to derive a mapping which
             | could restore the pallette of four byte burger more
             | accurately.
        
             | russellbeattie wrote:
             | I disagree - we know the grid used. So the scan will just
             | go through and pull out the average color found within each
             | pixel area in the grid array, then those colors are
             | adjusted to the nearest 32bit version (as explained in
             | parent). I've done this sort of thing to convert photos
             | into "pointillist" style images.
             | 
             | The first pass might be off - I can imagine adjusting the
             | grid size to skip the scan lines for more accuracy. But the
             | final result will be very close with 5% of the work
             | involved. The guy has spent a day and a half for a task
             | that should take less than an hour at most.
        
               | VikingCoder wrote:
               | In the arbitrary case, the grid can look really skewed.
               | 
               | Even non-fisheye lenses have some distortion, but look at
               | how wacky the grid can appear here:
               | 
               | https://docs.nvidia.com/vpi/image-003.jpg
               | 
               | And it gets worse if you only see the grid, and don't
               | know how it was cropped out of the photo it was taken
               | from (if it was off-center).
               | 
               | But yeah, I think we're all on the same page that some
               | entrepreneurial image processing expert could make fairly
               | quick work of the problem.
        
               | kmoser wrote:
               | I happen to have the premiere issue of Amiga World
               | magazine and looking at the original printed image, I can
               | tell you that the vertical scan lines are straight as an
               | arrow, and line up perfectly with the (cropped) sides of
               | the image.
               | 
               | Even if they were distorted by a fisheye lens, it should
               | be easy to use something like Photoshop's "pinch" filter
               | to create an undistorted image to work from.
        
               | zokier wrote:
               | do you happen to have scanner to get nice scan of the
               | picture? I can't seem to find one on the internet; IA
               | only has a very low-res version:
               | https://archive.org/details/amiga-world-
               | premiere-1985/page/n...
        
               | VikingCoder wrote:
               | In case you didn't see - someone found a great
               | resolution:
               | 
               | https://www.flickr.com/photos/blakespot/50926604693/sizes
               | /o
        
               | VikingCoder wrote:
               | This is the highest resolution image I could fine - do
               | you know a higher resolution one?
               | 
               | https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/50926604693_1e6b65f13
               | b_b...
        
               | RileyPatcher wrote:
               | Here's the larger 2000x2585 version from the link you've
               | given.
               | 
               | https://www.flickr.com/photos/blakespot/50926604693/sizes
               | /o
        
       | donatj wrote:
       | I feel like it'd be easier to write some software to do this
       | rather than by hand in Photoshop.
       | 
       | I somewhat wonder if there were actually at least 2 shades of
       | blue in the background of the original given how much visible
       | noise it contains.
        
       | atum47 wrote:
       | A long time ago I was fiddling with code to "reconstruct" pixel
       | art [1]. After watching this video I am tempted to try to restore
       | this image using code. by the way, I first discovered ahoy back
       | in 2016 and I've been a subscriber since. great videos of the
       | highest quality.
       | 
       | 1 - https://github.com/victorqribeiro/pixelRestorer
        
       | icelancer wrote:
       | Ahoy's channel is amazing. If you haven't delved into Iconic Arms
       | and all the Retro videos, man, you're in for a treat.
        
       | lvl102 wrote:
       | What are some other iconic digital images from this era? Feel NFT
       | crowd really missed the boat on the Four-Byte Burger.
        
       | zokier wrote:
       | Does anyone have good scan of the original? Would be nice for
       | playing along
        
       | throw7 wrote:
       | Leaving the monitor on its side overnight gets rid of the
       | discoloration??? Ok, somewhere here must know why... or we're
       | being bamboozled.
        
         | kmoser wrote:
         | I can confirm that turning a monitor on its side does result in
         | distorted colors, especially on the edges. When I experienced
         | this with a Commodore 1701 monitor (we're talking early to
         | mid-1980s) the only other electronic device nearby was the
         | Commodore 64 it was attached to, so it's unlikely caused by
         | _other_ devices.
         | 
         | This thread explains that you need to degauss the monitor after
         | turning it on its side:
         | http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=84041.0
         | 
         | I suspect leaving the monitor off overnight effectively
         | degausses it.
        
           | throw7 wrote:
           | Hmmm, in my vague memory I do remember some monitors having a
           | "degausse" button...
        
         | qbasic_forever wrote:
         | Monitors use electromagnets to steer an electron beam. The
         | earth has a more or less constant magnetic field in a certain
         | orientation. Rotating the monitor changes the magnetic flux the
         | electron beam experiences and might distort which subpixels the
         | electron beam is hitting.
        
           | Arrath wrote:
           | Interesting! I would have thought the field was too slight to
           | have an effect in a case like this.
        
         | JohnFen wrote:
         | Maybe for the same reason that you shouldn't mount chips
         | upside-down lest all of the electrons fall out?
        
       | retrocryptid wrote:
       | This is crazy. And I mean that as a complement. It mixes geeky
       | obsession with high production values to produce a tour-d-force
       | of 80s nostalgia and personal accomplishment.
       | 
       | Well worth watching, even if you're unfamiliar with the 1980s,
       | the Amiga or the original artwork.
        
         | Lev1a wrote:
         | AFAIK Ahoy has been pretty famous for his high production
         | values using well-done research, slick graphics and nice
         | animations for a number of years.
        
         | FireInsight wrote:
         | Ahoy is a very high quality channel! Highly recommend watching
         | the video about Polybius, and the one about the first video
         | game.
        
         | nickt wrote:
         | Stu makes great videos - truly the David Attenborough of video
         | game history.
         | 
         | In case you've missed it, he has some other channels, including
         | the brilliant DrinksAhoy [1], Krush Dev Diary [2] and music on
         | Bandcamp [3]
         | 
         | [1] https://www.youtube.com/@DrinksAhoy [2]
         | https://www.youtube.com/@krush8272/featured [3]
         | https://xahoy.bandcamp.com/album/four-byte-burger
        
       | causality0 wrote:
       | An underrated aspect of digital image preservation in general is
       | that you are not looking at it the way it was designed and
       | intended to be viewed. These images were designed by someone
       | working on a CRT to be viewed on a CRT. In some cases such as
       | retro game emulation, the translation to LCD or OLED displays
       | badly mangles the intended look.
       | 
       | https://twitter.com/CRTpixels/status/1357132408634630144/pho...
        
         | zokier wrote:
         | I don't know if I'd call it underrated anymore nowdays that crt
         | filters/shaders are mainstay in emulator community. Especially
         | with 4k displays you can do quite a lot of tricks to get that
         | CRT look. You have also products like Analogue Pocket that do
         | incredibly detailed display emulation (although lcd instad of
         | crt..).
         | 
         | https://docs.libretro.com/shader/crt
         | 
         | https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/12/analogue-pocket-revie...
         | 
         | Some closeup shots of Analogue Pocket display
         | https://www.reddit.com/r/AnalogueInc/comments/rikszr/analogu...
         | 
         | edit: found also this lengthy article on setting up Amiga
         | emulation with CRT shaders, which includes comparison shot with
         | real CRT: https://blog.johnnovak.net/2022/04/15/achieving-
         | period-corre...
        
           | VikingCoder wrote:
           | Also: https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term
        
         | wholinator2 wrote:
         | Hmm, Twitter seems to be fully down currently. Even just
         | twitter.com won't load
        
         | mbork_pl wrote:
         | Yes! I remember reading a long blog post or something about
         | this very thing a few years ago, with photographs. The
         | difference between a CRT and an LCD was amazing. Sadly, I
         | couldn't find that post (and I did search...)
        
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       (page generated 2023-04-21 23:00 UTC)