There's a term I read about a long time ago, I think it was "aesthetic completeness" or something like that. It was used in the context of video games whose art direction was fully realized in the game, i.e. increases in graphics hardware or capabilities wouldn't add anything to the game in an artistic sense. The original Homeworld games were held up as examples.
Anyway, this reminded me of that. Making these pictures in anything but the tools of the time wouldn't just change them, they'd be totally different artworks. The medium is part of the artwork itself.
timoth3y · 31m ago
The same holds true for everything from cave paintings to Roman frescos. It's part of human expression. The tools of that expression shape it.
For example, Bach's music was shaped by the fact that the harpsichord had no sustain. The piano changed that, but "upscaling" Bach's work to take advantage of this new technology would destroy them. You use the new technology to play them as they were written for the old. The beauty comes through despite the change.
al_borland · 36m ago
I have to imagine that fully realizing a vision can only truly take place when the artists are not working at the limits of the present day tools. I’m thinking of something like games today that choose an art style and run with it, rather than trying to push the hardware as hard as possible.
Was this the artist’s vision, or were they simply making the best of the tools they had?
zozbot234 · 29m ago
Pixel art is very much still around today, even though it's far from "pushing" the limits of current hardware. It's pursuing a rather consistent "vision" of maximizing quality while staying within the bounds of a predefined level of detail (i.e. resolution) and color depth.
al_borland · 22m ago
Right. This is kind of what I’m talking about. Someone choosing pixel art today is making a choice; they have a vision. 40 years ago, they were limited by the system. The choice was largely made for them.
Old video games come to mind. The box art would be drastically different than the look of the game. The box art was the vision, the game was what they ended up with after compromises due to the hardware of the day. I think it’s only been in the last decade or so that some game makers have truly been able to realize the visions they had 40 years ago.
lukan · 2h ago
Hm, are you sure that there is not some nostalgia at play here?
To me they look horribly pixelated and at least some would improve aesthetically a lot for me with a higher resolution.
fwipsy · 6m ago
Of course there's a subjective element, but I was born about a decade after these were created and I find them to be beautiful. I love the mural with the tree, it's amazing how it creates a sense of openness that wants me to go outside, even with such a limited palette.
zozbot234 · 2h ago
Even today these pictures have an almost perfect resolution for showing on a compact e-paper display. The viewing area on the original Mac models was not that much bigger, either. They only look "horribly pixelated" when artificially upscaled for a modern big screen.
(A pixel-art specific upscaling filter would mitigate that issue, of course.)
lukan · 1h ago
I was viewing them via a small mobile screen, not high DPI, not fullscreen. And to me, they simply don't look good the way they are.
But if you folks enjoy them, go for it. Otherwise taste is subjective I think.
reconnecting · 51m ago
It's amazing what people achieved with the resources of the '80s, creating fairly enjoyable visuals using extremely limited technology.
Another example from the early '90s is MARS.COM (1) by Tim Clarke (1993). Just 6 kilobytes and 30+ fps on a 12MHZ 286 (2).
I was born in ‘83 and a good chunk of my formative years were spent imagining the world through dithered pixels — playing games, creating art, writing, and exploring. Seeing these images evokes a rush of nostalgia, simply because they’re dithered.
gxd · 4h ago
Awesome! You can also find great art made with Deluxe Paint for the Amiga. The limitations from early computers in resolution and, most importantly, palette, create unique art styles:
These seem worse IMO. Not sure if it’s the medium (eg more saturated colours, the particular website) or if I just like the compositions less.
zozbot234 · 2h ago
They have more color but way less resolution, thus less detail. Pretty much what you would expect to see, given that the original Mac and Amiga came out around the same time.
jameshart · 7m ago
Both Motorola 68000 machines, typically 512K-1024K of RAM. So similar underlying constraints, under which they made very different choices for how to prioritize graphics.
The constraints of the original Mac and MacPaint have resulted in an art form specific to the time and place.
poisonborz · 3h ago
I envy that small world, where people could be this genuinely enthusiastic about their computer products and companies, where most actors seeked the best interest of other parties.
taylorius · 2h ago
The lack of photorealistic fidelity gives your brain a bit of room to use imagination to fill in the blanks in your internal model. This fosters a certain type of engagement with the content that you don't get with photorealistic images.
kjellsbells · 1h ago
The street scene is by Gerald Vaughn Clement, the inventor of MacGrid, a drawing program that used a sort of plastic grid to perform high detail drawing and digitization.
Incidentially /r/VintagePixelArt often has discussions about this sort of thing.
Dante690 · 1h ago
Really interesting. I’m wondering if there’s any LLM or image model on Hugging Face that has been trained specifically on low-res black-and-white images like MacPaint. Has anyone come across something similar or seen a fine-tuned model in this specific retro visual style?
sgt · 1h ago
Not sure why you're being downvoted. I'd like to see this, too. Just for fun.
amelius · 22m ago
I think it is downvoted because it would potentially harm the creative value of the original works.
aidos · 4h ago
Love it.
At the end of the article they mention digging in to the Amiga scene. If you want to feel old, Deluxe Paint turns 40 this year. My mates had Amigas (I had an Amstrad) and the computing world just felt full of wonder and promise. It was a magical time of creation.
(From page HTML source)
<!-- ******** HELLO OLD COMPUTER USERS ******** -->
<!-- This site is designed to be viewable at 640x480 resolution or higher in any color mode in Netscape/IE 3 or any
better browser, so if you're using an LC III or something, you're welcome. In fact, I really hope you are using such a machine,
because limiting the site to this level of simplicity wouldn't be worth it unless someone is. Please let me know if you are
using an old computer to visit the site so I know it is worth it to someone to maintain this compatibility. I do
apologize for the one javascript error that you may get on each page load, but I don't expect it to cause any crashes.
The major exception to all of this is Netscape 4. That thing sucks. -->
Does anyone even remember why Netscape 4 was bad?
spydum · 1h ago
Browsers were changing quickly back then, but if anybody remembers, it became Netscape Communicator and tried to expand to do everything..
If I'm not mistaken Netscape Communicator was just a pack of different applications, including NN. The real issue seems to be was specific CSS and some style rendering.
numtel · 2h ago
I think it was a total rewrite, similar to why Winamp 2 was great, fast, not bloated but Winamp 3 was slow, adding extraneous features nobody wanted.
reconnecting · 1h ago
True, Winamp 2 was much solid. Unless I'm mistaken Winamp 3 introduce skins and after absolute madness starts.
jfim · 1h ago
NN4 tended to crash more than NN3, it may have been due to the rushed development during the browser wars.
Software outfit founded by a French guy, as hinted by the drawing with Paris visible ...
(Those "view from ..." were plentiful at the time)
JSR_FDED · 1h ago
This dithering is somehow so pleasing. It’s like “sand dithering”.
zozbot234 · 3h ago
Thanks for finding this! A relic from a more civilized age.
promiseofbeans · 2h ago
The 2nd artwork ('A Door Somewhere " - Bert Monrov) had me really confused for a moment.
When I scrolled down to it, there was a sort of flickering effect, like as if it were a gif, with a flickering light adding ambience to the scene.
But no, it's just how that sort of black & white shading looks when you scroll past it - amazing effect!
SSLy · 1h ago
As the neighbour mentions, it's only a case of your display having ghosting. This effect is not present on eg. OLED screens.
donkeybeer · 2h ago
What monitor do you have?
Hilift · 2h ago
The review at the time was if you weren't a particularly good artist, MacPaint wouldn't change that.
lowwave · 2h ago
Crazy to see 4D in there, is it actually a 4D poster with the big 4 in there?
perihelions · 3h ago
I think the .png images on this website are larger than the uncompressed originals (1-bit depth, 1 bit per pixel).
decryption · 3h ago
Yep, I upscaled them by 400% so they’re easier to view on modern displays.
perihelions · 3h ago
I know; I mean to say they're larger file sizes—the PNG compression ratio is effectively less than one.
Take the first one, "acius.png", at 84,326 bytes. If you losslessly scale back to the original size (1/4th) and convert to 1-bit NetPBM, it's 51,851 bytes, without compression. I thought that was remarkable.
encom · 2h ago
The PNG files seem to be very poorly compressed.
$ oxipng -o max --strip all -avZ --fast acius.png
Processing: acius.png
2304x2880 pixels, PNG format
8-bit Indexed (2 colors), non-interlaced
IDAT size = 84251 bytes
File size = 84326 bytes
Transformed image to 1-bit Indexed (2 colors), non-interlaced
Trying filter None with zopfli, zi = 15
Found better result:
zopfli, zi = 15, f = None
IDAT size = 24466 bytes (59785 bytes decrease)
file size = 24541 bytes (59785 bytes = 70.90% decrease)
24541 bytes (70.90% smaller): acius.png
Max-q · 33m ago
The Amiga is quite another beast, especially showing photos in HAM mode, giving 4096 colors.
nntwozz · 3h ago
The loading time for this artwork has a quality all of its own.
rembrandt paintings from the 17th century still look great today
spankibalt · 1h ago
Yeah. Seems that art might be... timeless.
drewcoo · 29m ago
Meh. It was nothing compared with PLATO systems at the university. And the CAD setups dad and his engineering team used for work then (Silicon Graphics?) also looked much better.
Anyway, this reminded me of that. Making these pictures in anything but the tools of the time wouldn't just change them, they'd be totally different artworks. The medium is part of the artwork itself.
For example, Bach's music was shaped by the fact that the harpsichord had no sustain. The piano changed that, but "upscaling" Bach's work to take advantage of this new technology would destroy them. You use the new technology to play them as they were written for the old. The beauty comes through despite the change.
Was this the artist’s vision, or were they simply making the best of the tools they had?
Old video games come to mind. The box art would be drastically different than the look of the game. The box art was the vision, the game was what they ended up with after compromises due to the hardware of the day. I think it’s only been in the last decade or so that some game makers have truly been able to realize the visions they had 40 years ago.
To me they look horribly pixelated and at least some would improve aesthetically a lot for me with a higher resolution.
(A pixel-art specific upscaling filter would mitigate that issue, of course.)
But if you folks enjoy them, go for it. Otherwise taste is subjective I think.
Another example from the early '90s is MARS.COM (1) by Tim Clarke (1993). Just 6 kilobytes and 30+ fps on a 12MHZ 286 (2).
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zSjpIyMt0k
2. https://github.com/matrix-toolbox/MARS.COM/blob/main/MARS.AS...
https://amiga.lychesis.net/applications/DeluxePaint.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44076501
[1]:https://civitai.com/models/875790/amiga-deluxepaint-or-fluxd
https://amiga.lychesis.net/applications/AmigaDealer.html
https://www.bradshawfoundation.com/lascaux/
The constraints of the original Mac and MacPaint have resulted in an art form specific to the time and place.
https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/macgrid
Incidentially /r/VintagePixelArt often has discussions about this sort of thing.
At the end of the article they mention digging in to the Amiga scene. If you want to feel old, Deluxe Paint turns 40 this year. My mates had Amigas (I had an Amstrad) and the computing world just felt full of wonder and promise. It was a magical time of creation.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deluxe_Paint
http://macpaint.org
(From page HTML source) <!-- ******** HELLO OLD COMPUTER USERS ******** --> <!-- This site is designed to be viewable at 640x480 resolution or higher in any color mode in Netscape/IE 3 or any better browser, so if you're using an LC III or something, you're welcome. In fact, I really hope you are using such a machine, because limiting the site to this level of simplicity wouldn't be worth it unless someone is. Please let me know if you are using an old computer to visit the site so I know it is worth it to someone to maintain this compatibility. I do apologize for the one javascript error that you may get on each page load, but I don't expect it to cause any crashes. The major exception to all of this is Netscape 4. That thing sucks. -->
Does anyone even remember why Netscape 4 was bad?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Navigator#:~:text=Thi...
https://sbpoley.home.xs4all.nl/webmatters/netscape4.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View_of_the_World_from_9th_Ave...
Software outfit founded by a French guy, as hinted by the drawing with Paris visible ...
(Those "view from ..." were plentiful at the time)
But no, it's just how that sort of black & white shading looks when you scroll past it - amazing effect!
Take the first one, "acius.png", at 84,326 bytes. If you losslessly scale back to the original size (1/4th) and convert to 1-bit NetPBM, it's 51,851 bytes, without compression. I thought that was remarkable.
https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/noodle.html
So maybe for some values of "great." Maybe.