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MacPaint Art from the Mid-80s Still Looks Great Today

(blog.decryption.net.au)
1034 points decryption | 2 comments | 12 Jul 25 08:45 UTC | HN request time: 0.557s | source
1. JSR_FDED ◴[12 Jul 25 12:25 UTC] No.44541573[source]▶
This dithering is somehow so pleasing. It’s like “sand dithering”.
replies(1): >>44543068 #
2. wenc ◴[12 Jul 25 16:17 UTC] No.44543068[source]▶
“Dithering” is the key — except this seems to have been done by hand.

When I was a kid, I owned a monochrome display that could only display at CGA resolutions “640x400” 1-bit (and 320x200). Many games and art and didn’t support that showed up garbled.

Then I got hold of Deluxe Paint that would load pictures in color and dither them with an algo called Floyd Steinberg. And the pictures that I saw on my friends VGA monitors suddenly looked beautiful on my monochrome screen.

See examples https://surma.dev/things/ditherpunk/

Games like Monkey Island were also ditherered for monochrome displays and they looked great.