On July 23rd 1985, the Commodore Amiga was introduced to the world at the Lincoln Center in New York. If you’ve never seen it, now is a good time to watch the launch event with Andy Warhol and Debbie Harry. Also, what have you done with your life up to this point? :)
Side note: Ze Germans had Frank Elstner at their Deutschlandpremiere in Frankfurt one year later, and showcased more of the Amiga’s musical side instead of visual artistry, with the help of Swiss singer and composer Betty Legler. Money quote: “Da können Sie Ihren Hund in ein Mikro bellen lassen!”
I am posting this now because last weekend the great Amiga birthday event took place in Mönchengladbach, Germany: Amiga40! Although I only had a ticket for Sunday, I still had a blast: All the Amiga legends were there together with hundreds of Amiga enthusiasts from around the world, be it engineers, hardware wizards, game developers, Commodore veterans, demosceners, musicians, publishers, bloggers and vloggers, you name it. Tell me you don’t get goosebumps when you watch the thank-you video messages from the honorary guests!
Return magazine, one of many great retro publications we have today, chose this picture for the Amiga anniversary issue:
This is funny because I also chose this legendary picture by pixel pioneer Avril Harrison to celebrate 40 years of Amiga, with a Teletext entry for Flashparty 2025 in Buenos Aires:
I’ve made a pixel-fiddling timelapse of the process: King Tut XL. No, wait – half of it is sixel-fiddling! :)
What sounds like a tongue twister is more of an irritating detail I noticed just now. In the grand scheme of things, it is absolutely meaningless. Unfortunately, the meaninglessness makes it even more irritating… Ugh!
So, to get it out of my system, let me show you the depth gadgets of Kickstart 1.x on the Amiga, used to send screens and windows to the back and to the front, respectively:
Did you see it? The right gadget is wider that the left gadget!
Irritating, right? I guess with the separating background-colored vertical bars being part of the gadgets, the middle bar had to be included in either of the gadgets. Kind of like an airplane armrest situation!
This specific solution is sensible, though: The right, wider gadget is the foreground gadget, and bringing things to front surely is more important than stuffing things away! Speaking of which, I kind of feel better already and can happily stuff this little nuisance away. Thanks for reading! :)
PS: Must… resist… urge… to compile a complete screenshot and width table for all OS versions in Topaz 8 and Topaz 9 mode
A little Teletext piece for the latest #WeeklyTeletextArt prompt. The prompt being “Chunky Fringe”, also as an advertisement for the Teletext event of the same name.
It’s just a cat, but after ZXGuesser’s superliminal engagement post I had to submit something! And “chunky” is about the same as “chonker” – right? Beats me, I’m not a native speaker! :)
Stomp, stomp… Do you like Teletext stuff and want to keep it comin’? Head over to Chunkytext, then!
Deadline was awesome again. After being tortured with “Die Tasse Kaffee… und auch das Glas Wein!” at Revision already, the demoscene audience finally broke and I fully expect to see Tasse-Kaffee wild entries or maybe a full-blown competition at a future party. He, heh :)
Last year I brought a “big” production with me (new art), but there wasn’t enough time to do something like that again. Instead, I made a Mate wall animation: Famous first words
I also took part in the trophy compo and the fast compo, with an unrecognizable rotozoomer and a hastily scribbled animation, respectively. But I did win a sharp little trophy with that! (It’s actually razor-sharp around the edges…)
A party full of highlights, one of which was another guest appearance of the little pixel fella I did for 1k is no limit eleven years ago: XAYAX had an entry for SvOlli’s custom hardware and deservedly won the wild competition with 1k LEDs Is No Limit. No, no, noooo-no, no, no… there’s no limit! What a nice surprise.
Sometimes there’s beauty in little errors, or even a genius idea waiting to be unearthed. Take this little typo:
“Emcoding”, heh heh…
But wait! We do have en-dashes and em-dashes in typography, why not introduce en-coding and em-coding? The world of charsets and encodings is daunting and confusing already, adding more technical terms to the mix surely can’t hurt!
- En-coding
- Typographic counterpart: – (en-dash)
- Narrow: denotes a single-byte encoding
- ASCII, EBCDIC, PETSCII
- Em-coding
- Typographic counterpart: — (em-dash)
- Wide: each codepoint encodes to n bytes
- UCS-2, UTF-32
- Swung-coding
- Typographic counterpart: ⁓ (swung-dash)
- Byte lengths are swinging back and forth
- UTF-8, Big5
To be honest, I didn’t know about the swung-dash before. Maybe that’s stretching the pun too far…? The emd. :)
