The talk of bitsy's limitations reminds me of the tools where I learned super-small scall (and sometimes monochrome) pixel art... the Etch-a-Sketch animator.

Brilliant piece of tech for the day: a Gameboy-ish screen (but with FAT pixels, 40x30) and a digitized, screechy version of the traditional etch-a-sketch dials (heh, shake to erase was still a decade or two out for digital stuff), and 12 screens that could be played back in sequences of over 100 frames

I reproduced the examples in the booklet here: https://kirk.is/features/etcha/ and this is another art-minded thing I did: https://kirk.is/2002/04/15/ (I'm kind of intrigued with "photorealistic" stuff on super primitive display systems)

It also reminds of Pixeltime, word.com (before it was just a dictionary site) had an odd little 45x45 paint program with a digital judge/emcee and a bunch of competitions: https://kirk.is/pixeltime/

The biggest connection was me making tiny tiny fonts, 3x4 and what not.

Anyway, anyone here use either of those?

Best podcast yet, IMO! I'm really sorry I missed out on Allegro. I remember playing w/ a toy Ranjit Bhatnagar made up with it, with bubbling Xs and Os, but it wasn't quite enough for me to realize what I was missing out on...

One minor suggestion to Jeremy: in the mid-early part, I was left wondering about the specific timeline. I could get some idea based on the tech (hm, when was the Atari ST? When was VGA becoming SVGA? When was this Usenet stuff happening? etc?) but grounding things w/ year estimates as the history was gone over mighta helped.

The talk of bitsy's limitations reminds me of the tools where I learned super-small scall (and sometimes monochrome) pixel art... the Etch-a-Sketch animator.

Brilliant piece of tech for the day: a Gameboy-ish screen (but with FAT pixels, 40x30) and a digitized, screechy version of the traditional etch-a-sketch dials (heh, shake to erase was still a decade or two out for digital stuff), and 12 screens that could be played back in sequences of over 100 frames

I reproduced the examples in the booklet here: https://kirk.is/features/etcha/ and this is another art-minded thing I did: https://kirk.is/2002/04/15/ (I'm kind of intrigued with "photorealistic" stuff on super primitive display systems)

It also reminds of Pixeltime, word.com (before it was just a dictionary site) had an odd little 45x45 paint program with a digital judge/emcee and a bunch of competitions: https://kirk.is/pixeltime/

The biggest connection was me making tiny tiny fonts, 3x4 and what not.

Anyway, anyone here use either of those?

I'm glad the podcast is past the "one guy I know from before" stage :-D makes it less unseemly for me to link to like crazy

It reminds me a bit of http://auntiepixelante.com/emotica/ too ... (piggy backing on this because I haven't used emotica enough to have a whole lot of opinions about it, though I love its retro look)