Never seen wire wrapped boards besides photos of this and maybe some other early micro. So of course I had to do a little search and one of the first results has Bil Herd from Commodore (Plus/4, C128...) explaining it.
Thanks for sharing that! Never got to see any pro wrapping.
By the time this stuff started, I'd started forgetting all the hobbyist hardware electronics I'd learned (thinking it would last) and had moved to software ... at right about the time that manu's stopped documenting their internals ... but while disassemblers still existed.
Q3test came out in 1999 - on the classic Mac OS he despised, even a bit before its final OS 9 incarnation. This was to get the biggest bugs ironed out on the most restricted hardware scope available as they were going HW accelerated only during a bit of a wild west period when it comes to that.
We were all only reading about OSX in the press at the time - and when Q3 first made it to OSX proper, it was through a third-party (Omni Group).
JC did however switch to OSX as his primary development environment for some time when Apple was the first to ship the Geforce 3 in 2001, which was really the generation of hardware needed to do Doom 3 justice.
A year later, it was all about ATI's new flagship card which pushed things further for his needs - back to windows, and I can't rembember from his .plan files whether he moved back before getting access to that hardware.
Oh, that reminds me of a similar experience with Facebook video. Did a live DJ stream a few years ago but only recorded the audio locally at max quality.
Back then, I think I already had to use the browser debugger to inspect the url for the 720p version of the video.
When they recently insisted by email I download any videos before they sunset the feature, their option only gave me the SD version (and it took a while to perform the data export).
I only recently read Philip K.Dick's Ubik and this headline alone sounded oddly familiar. At least, your smart locks aren't requesting payment ... yet?
DPIV user (A500/512+512k) as a kid/teen in the 90s, been testing things out in pixels again recently.
For a more modern substitute with layer support, GrafX2 is often mentioned. It's a pretty damn good indexed color pixel tool, sort of a child of DP and Brilliance.
Still has the brush and foreground/background color essentials and other things.
- By default, it shares a lot of keyboard shortcuts with DP, with a few key ones being replaced by more modern conventions (you can change them all, apparently).
- It'll open HAM and half-brite images, but will just essentially consider all of the colors as independent (ie instead of automatically deriving the last 32 from the first in H-B), so beware when doing some back and forth.
- It has layers / can handle animations as a result. If you save an image as a gif, all layers become independent frames when the gif is opened somewhere else. Conversely, give it an LBM animation, and it'll load it in the layers, and you can play it back.
- You can start it with a commandline argument to limit its bit depth, so `/rgb 16` will get you to the Amiga's 4096 colors. Apparently dpaint.js can reduce to Amiga colors, but I haven't found where it is and have had colors display wrong in Amigaland in my tests (one doesn't simply reduce to a few colors!). I might have to ask the author about that.
Back then I filled most of my floppies with Star Wars spaceship animations made by combining the perspective and animation tools (as explained in the very thorough manual) - until I ran out of memory and couldn't finish a lot of shapes. People have posted legacy VHS video tutorials, basic and advanced, for both DP3 and DP4, up on YouTube. A lot of what's in there is in the OG manuals, but it's quite a different perspective seeing it in motion, explained by a real person.
Anyway - In DP4 at least, an animation would be saved into a single file, which I found out in some recent exploration gets tricky if you never stuck to a naming convention as a kid :)
DP4 doesn't care about the extensions and will happily load an animation as a still image (and just show you the first frame), although it might complain in some other directions (image as anim, brush as image...).
Thankfully, GrafX2 can tell the difference! You open the file regardless of it being a picture, brush or animation and it does the rest.
As for doing stuff in emulation, for sure turn up the emulated hardware specs, good call from the author there. Don't even really have to step away from cycle-exact, just going up to a 030+FPU or 040 is already a big relief. Mounting part of the real filesystem is great too ; and since you're emulating a faster machine, I'd just upgrade from 1.3 to 3.1 too for a bit more creature comforts (3.1 is rough enough as it is, but it at least allows you to list files without icons in the GUI...). On that front, I would also suggest maybe using noicons in DP - spamming the host filesystem with .info files (icons - also IFF/ILBM and viewable in Grafx2!) gets old fast IMHO.
Used my Wacom tablet a bit as a dumb pencil mouse through the emulator, and even without pressure sensitivity, it was already so much better ; although the "right click to paint in background color" thing is really awkward there. I had to make sure windows pen input was disabled, and that was it. It's possible to get pen pressure in the amiga with DP5 but... that's quite the can of worms, and I wouldn't even try this on emulation.
As for alternatives on Amiga, I also tried PersonalPaint (got the actual licence in my AmigaForever package some years ago), but besides color reduction, error-diffusion dithering and other effects, I couldn't jive with it.
Newtek Digipaint was interesting to play with ; you always work in HAM there and have interesting brush expression parameters. It really makes it obvious that you have to plan your piece and pick your base 16 "real" colors before you start doing anything.
Haven't found a copy of (True)Brilliance to play with.
Go for it, you might be surprised!
In the last 6 years or so, I decided to poke at my childhood Amiga 500 again when visiting family (which is where it still lives) and I wasn't sure how many of the errors I saw came from a dead disk drive or fading floppies.
Last week, enraged with disk/drive issues, I rushed a poor man's drive cleaning with 90 proof alcohol on the heads (99.9 IPA much preferred), and WD40/90 proof in the disk presence switch (again, proper contact cleaner and IPA much preferred).
Most disks behaved well after that - original software or user written, a few of my own disks had errors, and a couple sound like they need gluing back to the center spindle.
These are all disks from 90-98 and I was able to move data back and forth through the serial cables I'd finally acquired for that purpose.
This machine now has more problems with flaky IC connections and wonky caps than disks. Given the visual glitches in some of my old DeluxePaint files viewed on the actual machine, I'm surprised the circuits didn't mess up any of the transfers, because I didn't get the glitches in the emulator afterwards..
For tech3 based stuff, maybe try Netradiant (forked from GtkRadiant), or more specifically its fork (!) NetRadiant Custom (https://github.com/Garux/netradiant-custom).
That one introduces some, er, Trenchbroomisms to its workflow, mostly to do with editing straight from the 3d viewport and the texturing tools.
As far as I can tell from using it with tech4, it also appears to have developed quirks with some basic functionality that I don't remember from other GtkRadiant derivatives (although in tech3).
This might be from the incomplete tech4 support inherited from both its parents, or just from NetRadiant, or just new altogether, I have no idea or urge to find out... but still, friendly warning : maybe keep GtkRadiant around and go back and forth just in case.
1. the ui is basically the same as Radiant which is poor.
2. Documentation not as as good as Radiant
3. (Gtk)Radiant is still getting updates, and it's not clear whether NetRadiant is getting those fixes and unclear whether it could very easily, considering the different language.
QeRadiant was id's original public release derived from their internal QuakeEd. Q3's version of that became the open-source GtkRadiant (so there was a gui framework in the name somewhere at some point ; ), maintained by former id *nix build saviour TTimo (now contracting with Valve).
A number of community forks have come out of GtkRadiant.
If you intend on watching Alien 3, maybe go for the assembly cut - it's like an unofficial director's cut made for the DVD release and fixes a number of issues with the theatrical cut.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXvEDM-m9CE
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