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.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deluxe_Paint

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:

https://amiga.lychesis.net/applications/DeluxePaint.html

Then we should probably mention

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?

That first one looks like a parody of 'View of the World from 9th Avenue' but I don't know what Acius was!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View_of_the_World_from_9th_Ave...

I think the .png images on this website are larger than the uncompressed originals (1-bit depth, 1 bit per pixel).

  $ 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

Thanks for finding this! A relic from a more civilized age.

rembrandt paintings from the 17th century still look great today

The loading time for this artwork has a quality all of its own.

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.

The UXN people did similart art too: https://xxiivv.com

https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/noodle.html

so does roman mosaics :-)

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!

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.

The review at the time was if you weren't a particularly good artist, MacPaint wouldn't change that.

Crazy to see 4D in there, is it actually a 4D poster with the big 4 in there?

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.

Similarly, some cave paintings still look awesome.

https://www.bradshawfoundation.com/lascaux/

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?

This dithering is somehow so pleasing. It’s like “sand dithering”.

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.

https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/macgrid

Incidentially /r/VintagePixelArt often has discussions about this sort of thing.

The Amiga is quite another beast, especially showing photos in HAM mode, giving 4096 colors.

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.

So maybe for some values of "great." Maybe.

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.

"Design is about constraints" - Charles Eames

The constraints of the original Mac and MacPaint have resulted in an art form specific to the time and place.

These really need to be viewed with a CRT renderer IMO, as well as the Amiga art mentioned in this thread. The hard square pixels on the website aren’t quite representative of what these looked like on a contemporary monitor.

Reminds me of the youtube video where Ahoy recreates one of the classic 4 Byte images from the 80's 4-Byte Burger https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4EFkspO5p4