8 Bit & '8 Bitish' Graphics-Outside the Box

What Hacker News said

Strong rec corysama · 2018-06 · on “GrafX2 – a bitmap paint program inspired by Amiga programs”

If you are here and you haven’t seen Mark Ferrari’s GDC talk, you really should sit down and watch it. He is perhaps the greatest pallete animator of all time. Even if you aren’t familiar with the games he worked on, HN folks have likely seen his gallery of single-image animations linked below. [this video] [LINK]

Strong rec corysama · 2019-05 · on “Making a Game Boy Game in 2017”

Every Deluxe Paint fan out needs to watch this video of the master of that tool explain his craft Mark Ferrari: 8 Bit & '8 Bitish' Graphics-Outside the Box [this video]

Strong rec Macuyiko · 2021-03 · on “Loom EGA/VGA Comparison”

> The original EGA background art for Loom was made by Mark Ferrari Obligatory recommendation for this talk by Mark Ferrari: [this video] - truly an artist

Strong rec imachine1980_ · 2022-05 · on “Living Worlds: 8 Bit art animated with palette cycling (2012)”

this is incredible talk form the Background Artist of monkey island, about 8 bit and explain in details how palette cycling works, and modern way to doing the same more efficiently for modern games. 8 Bit & '8 Bitish' Graphics-Outside the Box [this video]

Strong rec chongli · 2024-02 · on “How video games use lookup tables”

He gave one of my favourite GDC talks of all time [1]! I recommend this talk to anyone who is interested in the details and history of working on limited colour palette games! [1] [this video]

Strong rec corysama · 2025-01 · on “A Pixel Parable”

Mark was nice enough to invite me to his home studio when I was a new high school grad to talk working in games as an artist. He told me the story of the fight over dithering. I give him strong partial credit for ending up a game engine/art pipeline coder instead and got to thank him after his most excellent GDC presentation on the lost power of palettized textures [this video] You can see that power in action here [LINK] (Hit show options) [LINK] BTW: Deluxe Paint has been remade in Python if you want to give it a try [LINK]

Recommends codetrotter · 2018-11 · on “Dithering Process, Return of the Obra Dinn (2017)”

Came across this in a thread on Reddit. It’s been discussed on HN before as well but I think it’s worthy of being resubmitted. Previous discussion: [LINK] In that discussion multiple people said that they preferred the non-stabilized dithering, and they argued that that is “how it was” on the old 1-bit Macs. “The original effect is how it's supposed to look and how it would have looked on an old computer with 1-bit graphics.” says one commenter. I think these comments are missing the forest for the trees. It’s not about faithful recreation, it’s about artistic inspiration and invoking certain feelings. See also the talk “8 Bit & ‘8 Bitish’ Graphics - Outside the Box” by artist Mark Ferrari.

Recommends kick · 2019-12 · on “A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art (2015)”

I don't agree with that! Early personal computers also had pixel art, and it was mind-blowing what was done with it. Watch this talk from Mark Ferrari, for example: [this video] [LINK] Check out what he did with color cycling in this demo: it's amazing. I recommend looking at "May - Jungle Waterfall - Rain" to see how amazing this is. That's not a gif, it's a single image, just rotating the colors. That was to deal with storage constraints. Can you imagine? The techniques of early PC and applications are worth saving , too. The art shown in that tweet is amazing, too, but it's not the same thing! It's an entirely different thing, with entirely different constraints.