[fstark]

Hi. I am the author of macflim.

This is the old video, I am finishing the techdemo that have sound, there is a video on youtube (https://youtu.be/YRe6I5AICJ0). I'll update the macflim.com website later today.

And yes, diskspace is one of the reason why it is impractical, but with a SCSI2SD, one can get 4 2Gb partitions on you mac for around $100.

And yes, it is bizarre and useles, hence absolutely necessary. If you have time, try the app, it is full of inside time-correct jokes.

[sdenton4]

Super cool! How are you handling the dithering? The website examples look a bit 'swimmy,' with dots wandering around a lot, but looks a bit better in the bit of the tech talk I looked at. Did you find a nice improvement to the dithering technique?

In both cases, there's lines of dots in wide dark spaces, as one would expect from an error-diffusion dither. Did you look into other approaches?

[fstark]

I looked at several approaches, but I absolutely wanted to do floyd-steinberg, as this is what were, for me, "realistic" images on my Mac back in the 80s.

The example on the website are identical to the ones in the first video, as the simple looping gif is a by-product of the encoding.

On the second video (the one with sound), you cannot compare, as the video is compressed and not all the parts of the image are updated. But the algo is the same.

The swimmy bits come from the fact that I encode images using the preceeding one, and use the pixels from the preceeding images to "control" where the error gets diffused, to try to get some temporal stability in error diffusion (I have a long blog post that explains that, but I never got around finishing it, it seems people were more interested by having me coding sound).

I am not completely sure why the swim effect seems to always be in the north-west direction (I understand why pixels go in that diagonal, but no why they always seem to crawl on the top-left, and never the bottom-right).

The dithering code can be found in the encoder, on github:

https://github.com/fstark/macflim/blob/main/flimmaker.cpp#L3...

If you have other dithering ideas, let me know. I am happy with the one I have, which matches what I was looking for, but we never know. Also, for the compressed version (the one with sound), the dithering have a huge impact on the ability to play on slow machines.

(Btw, I tried ordered dithering, but I have always found it awful looking. Maybe in motion it would fare better?).

[RodgerTheGreat]

Another period-accurate approach would be Atkinson dithering, which is similar to Floyd-Steinberg but slightly simpler in implementation. I did a writeup about this technique a while back:

https://beyondloom.com/blog/dither.html

[sdenton4]

Cool, yeah Floyd Sternberg is definitely period appropriate!

This article on dithering made the rounds a few months ago, and was a fascinating read; the hilbert curve method at the end (Riemersma) might be a good fit and get rid of some of the line effects (if that's of interest). And the Atkinson error diffusion sounds like it even has some history in old macs.

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

There's a really nice blog post on video stable dithering in Return to the Obra Dinn, but in that case it's a 3d game, and they've got direct access to the scene geometry. I'm curious if there's a nice way to use video encoding pixel tracking vectors to reduce swimminess...

[JKCalhoun]

You made the right call.

I think there should be a clipping of the lower-grayscale coming into your filter. A black-point cut-off.

I think that would get rid of most of the "swimming pixels" in the very dark areas (would become completely black areas).

Some loss of detail of course in the dark areas ... but what details was there anyway?

[fstark]

Interesting. I tried some light posterization (splitting into discrete levels), but it made the image uglier. Your approach would make nice blacks and whites. Grays would still suffer, but it is an interesting take.

[OnlyMortal]

Floyd-Steinberg was usually the better choice for rendering an image.

It might be an option to offer Ordered by a menu option?

[fstark]

The dithering is performed by the C++ linux encoder. I could add it as an encoding stage option...

[samat]

Do you have patreon or something? This is a project I can wholeheartedly support with my hard earned money.

[fstark]

That's kind of you, but no, I don't have a patreon nor need financial support. Having enthousiats users/lurkers if all that I need.

However, if anyone can help me getting my hands on some vintage hardware, that would be awesome (mac or non-mac, I have a few nasty software projects involving weird hardware).

[I'm ready to pay "normal" prices for those items, of course]

In particular, I am looking for a network card (for the next couple of years) for the SE/30, as I see streaming could be useful to a late 80's computer... :-) . I did found one, once, but the seller didn't ship outside of the US, and the time to organize, it went poof :-(

I also try to get my hands on a Performa/LC 575 motherboard to perform a Mystic upgrade of my Color Classic -- the goal being to see what kind of crazyness we could get on a top-of-the line color compact mac. Again, those things seems to be made of unobtainium, and probably hoarded by collectors...

A Turbo NeXT Cube would be awesome, but again, nowhere to be found...

[azinman2]

Congrats. This is a massive technical feat. Are you going to publish the source, and/or give a technical talk on how all of this is achieved?

[fstark]

Source code of the silent version is at https://github.com/fstark/macflim (Mac app source code, C++ encoder source code and instructions). The sound version (the new demo from yesterday's video https://youtu.be/YRe6I5AICJ0 is massively more complicated and I will release the binaries over the week-end and the source code later next week, probably).

I'd love to do a video with the explanations (or a talk), but I am still think about how to present this is a understandable and entertaining way.

[tyingq]

I really liked this writeup where someone found a way to push an old Kaypro into running their game at a much higher framerate than expected: http://www.chrisfenton.com/dd9-kaypro-edition/

[Wowfunhappy]

Wow! The clip on the Mac 128K is kind of rough, but the one on the Mac SE is totally watchable! I could easily see myself watching an entire movie that way, if I didn't have access to any other screen for some bizarro reason.

[hyakosm]

I love it! (And George Abitbol would be proud of you)

[fstark]

As long as I avoid flim about cyclimse, everything should be ok.

[VeejayRampay]

flim sounds like a strange way a French person would pronounce "film" for fun

[fstark]

It is an inside joke about a French movie made from barely legal cuts of hilariously dubbed Warner Bros extracts. I found th3e concept weirdly suitable for a tongue-in-cheek artistic experiment that will probably mostly be used to display extract of other people movies...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Classe_am%C3%A9ricaine

[VeejayRampay]

George Abitbol, etc.

I thought it was!!

very nice job anyway

[ddingus]

Impressive! That is all really. Makes me wish I had an old Mac.

Had a big grin watching your video.

[fstark]

Knowing people appreciate that made the oh-so-many hours worth it. Thx!

[ddingus]

It's actually really fun to see it play so well, and then think back to those times, wonder what would have been possible, what people might say

[erickhill]

The catch being the storage solutions employed here would have been impossible to imagine back then. But, perhaps just a 3-5 second video (like some of the gifs on the site) could have made the rounds. Even then they probably wouldn't have fit on a disk! Storage was so tough back then.

[ddingus]

Yeah, totally. It was. I myself remember my first 10 megabyte hard card. I had stuffed it into some 8086 PC to run a CAD program. Prior to that, anything over a floppy seemed huge!

Funny, I had a flash back to a high school chat. Friend had picked up on digital music. Sampling was a thing we all heard about and the chat was no noise, perfect music one can carry around on chips...

Seemed like sci-fi. We were using Apple 2 computers, some with a half megabyte of RAM. A CD held so much information!

It all just happened. Fairly quick too.

[montroser]

This is simply wonderful!

Full color next? https://www.anfractuosity.com/projects/rainbow/

[nr2x]

Great work, feeling some heavy nostalgia!

[ChrisMarshallNY]

THAT is a labor of love!

Kudos!

[fstark]

Thx!