PC Graphics Programs of the 1980's 

Thanks!

too bad there aren't any awards given out for vintage PC repair or rescue - Digital Basement would be a shoo-in

I actually was there in person and it was an awesome party. I voted for area5150 naturally. ;) Even though there were lots of good entries!

Nice. I think I saw mention of that when I went looking for this on the web.

Indeed. That is still to come in a later video! Great program.

​@@PCRetroTechI was already wondering where it was 😄

That was one I definitely used but it was far more than a drawing program.

Certainly. Of course on the professional end of the scale there were much more sophisticated options, but they usually required specialised hardware or unbelievably expensive software.

Nice suggestion. I'm not sure that feature of my editing software is free, but I can take a look.

That's also one of my first memories on the Amstrad PC 1512. That and Basic.

Thanks

Yeah neopaint was awesome!

I didn't think of that one, but I remember using it actually. Thanks for the suggestion.

Interesting. I hadn't thought of checking the Windows Paintbrush to see what happened there!

I've definitely seen that program and thought it was ZSoft PC Paintbrush, but when I went looking for the option I couldn't find it. Somehow I must have gotten it mixed up with another one.

That's possible. There's not a lot on this machine. One of the programs wouldn't load some images due to there not being sufficient memory.

Same here. It must have been 30 years or more until I saw that tiger again fairly recently.

That is actually possible, though I'm not sure if I'd have anything to enter. Thanks for doing Jury duty. That must have been quite the effort!

A very interesting question indeed. I wonder if I can figure that out. I did notice the same thing. So far Gem Paint is my best guess, but I'm not sure.

I remember Dr Halo! We had a Genius mouse and I remember using it with Dr Halo. Perhaps it came with it, I'm not sure.

@@bananaboy41 I also had a Genius mouse, so your guess may be correct!

Great suggestions!

Of course there was DeluxePaint on the PC too. I'll have to show that in a later video on the PC I think.

I've tried to do this, but IPhones have really noisy cameras. I didn't like the appearance at all, though it does get rid of the flicker. I also found it difficult to record audio at the same time and make it sound ok for RU-vid.

@@PCRetroTech Sure, whatever works for you. The noise is usually tweakable in apps like Mavis, where you manually can select an ISO setting. And the more recent the phone and higher tier, the better the camera. My old 4S had bad low light recording, compared to my current XR, which is already almost 5 years old! I am just too cheap to spend a lot of money on extra equipment for recording... :)

@@root42 I have a 2020 SE. Not sure if that qualifies as good. But yeah I'd much prefer to spend 1000 on a real camera.

Interesting. I'll have to check that out. It just qualifies, being 1990.

@@PCRetroTech i used that program a lot as a little kid. it was a big part of what eventually led me towards becoming a graphic designer. funny thing is that i didn't have a mouse back then while using it on an ibm at. it was all cursor keys and hotkeys. i remember making christmas cards for my family where i took the head off of a clipart santa claus and stuck it in his toy bag lol! those computers were something special. programming graphics in gwbasic was a lot of fun too. oh and fractint! big fan of your videos btw.

Yes, the formula is not difficult. The issue is just getting it efficient and making sure that the right pixels get drawn. If you use floating point arithmetic it is trivial, but this will be very slow.

I think businesses could often afford more advanced software which was probably tailored to their trade. These were very generic programs that the home user and small businesses would have had I think.

Some old devs of 8bit computers created sprites at pixel level, sometimes just by using a sheet of squared paper

Definitely one of the cool ones.

That's a bizarre problem. I don't recall an issue like that on real hardware, but maybe I just got lucky.

Let us know if you remember to check it. Would be interesting to check it out!

@@PCRetroTech I found the disks! They came with a Genius mouse, and the program is called Dr. Genius. I found it featured here: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-jBvbRLGHPAQ.html&ab_channel=DYKOdesigns

That's not a bad idea. I'll give it some thought, though earlier on I started series and didn't finish them and others had multiple topics in the same video. I might be able to put series in playlists in future though. I agree it is becoming more difficult to organise things like this.

I've been loving your Let's Code series, so please do. They aren't super hard to implement and I should be more precise what I mean. I really like code that doesn't spill registers in the inner loops, doesn't use variables, only short jumps, is really optimised and so on. This is all irrelevant on 386 but is really important for performance on 8086. I have managed to implement horizontal ellipses on the 8086 in CGA fulfilling all these usual criteria. I don't think there is any hope of doing diagonal ellipses this way on 8086, but it can more or less be done on 386 (modulo an exceedingly long code preamble and a bunch of self-modifying code). I also like to output the pixels directly, rather than write out a list of pixels and plot them in a second pass or call a function for plotting pixels. And if possible the code should make use of symmetry (there won't be any for splines of course). When I get more familiar with the 386 I'll likely drop some requirements which should make coding easier. I'm told that a 386 DX around 20-25 MHz can do a push or pop in 2 cycles (with a cache making little difference at this clock speed). I need to write some code to verify this and then get a handle on the actual cost for retrieving values from variables. Once I have a better idea of what this actually costs in practice I might allow push/pop and variables in my inner loops. There's also still some issues related to default 16/32 bit operands that likely have some effect on performance which I haven't pinned down yet. So I still have quite a lot to learn about the 386 before I am able to confidently say I'm really pushing the limits. I may also switch from MCGA mode to Mode X or Y. That's another set of optimisations. Anyway, I guess a lot of this is stuff I'll cover in my video on diagonal ellipses when I finally get the code working. So when I say "difficult to do" I mean difficult for a given set of restrictions.

@@PCRetroTech Oh boy, yeah, I wouldn't do those hardcore optimizations. I keep the code in my videos really unoptimized, so people can better follow the ideas behind it. I would do the optimizations later, but my skills in this area are much weaker than yours. I just submitted a tiny 256 byte intro to Outline 2023, my first in decades! But I am pretty happy about how it turned out. I hope it gets accepted! If it does, I will make a video about it explaining how I crunched the size down to the limitation of 256 bytes. I also used only 8086 opcodes -- even though the intro runs acceptably only using a 486 or higher... the effect I chose is just too expensive. Probably you could make it run fast enough so it will have a chance on a 286! 😀 I still have to learn a lot about x86 assembly to make more efficient programs. I do know a lot of graphics algorithms from university, so in theory I could do it... Mode X and Y aren't necessarily an advantage. They are great if you need soft scrolling or page flipping. But otherwise they mostly are a hindrance. I used them sometimes to get chunkier versions of an effect (by being able to duplicate pixels) for slow machines, but otherwise it's often better to use mode 0x13.

@@root42 Yes, I definitely wouldn't make a video about all the optimisations if the aim was for education. I'm just mentioning it to you to put my comments in the video in context. I may already know the main algorithms for splines, but I'd still be very interested in seeing your take on it. That kind of stuff isn't so easy to search nowadays and it is very possible I've overlooked important things.

@@PCRetroTech 100% agreed. And understanding Splines and Beziers is fundamentally important even in today's game development or engineering applications. It is the basis of a lot of algorithms and more complex topics, such as surfaces and other interpolation methods.