| ▲ | TacticalCoder 3 hours ago | |
Color cycling in the picture file format was so epic! Fun memory: I was with my best friend at another friend's place and his father called him to do some chore. He had to quickly mow the small lawn or something like that. So we decided to prank him: I don't remember all the details but basically we launched Deluxe Paint and simulated an Amiga "guru meditation" using a font that wasn't even correct (I think because we were in 320x256 while the real guru meditation was using a mode with smaller pixels). Then in broken english we wrote something like this: "Hardware failure. If you reboot or turn off your computer it is going to broke forever" We then did a color cycling between red and black for one of the color and put the drawing software in "full screen". When our friend came back, we played dumb and said we had no idea what happened but that apparently we really shouldn't turn the computer off. We managed to hold it for something like ten minutes while he though his computer was done for good but we were dying inside. All three of us remember that prank to this day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru_Meditation P.S: as a side note with the help of Claude Code CLI / Sonnet 4.6 I managed to recompile a 30+ years old game I wrote in DOS in the early 90s (and for which I still have the source files and assets but not the tooling) and I was using converter (which I wrote back then) to convert files between the .LBM format and a "tweaked" (320x200 / 4 planes) DOS mode I was using for the game (which allowed double-buffering without tearing). I don't remember the details but I take it that if we had .LBM picture files, me and the artist where using Deluxe Paint on the Amiga. | ||
| ▲ | binaryturtle 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | |
Once I played a similar prank to a computer science teacher. Back in the Windows 3.x for Workgroups era this was. I made a screenshot of the desktop (showing a window), and put it on as wallpaper. Took the man a little while to figure out why that window couldn't be closed (after a hard reboot later when the window popped back up :) ) | ||
| ▲ | sph 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | |
You might enjoy this GDC talk by Mark Ferrari of LucasArts fame, where he goes over his pixel art technique, as well as how he did color cycling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcJ1Jvtef0 | ||