1 Jun
2007
1 Jun
'07
5:33 a.m.
On Thu, 2007-05-31 at 23:51 +0100, Andrew Burton wrote:
Hehe, I did see some issue of Byte for sale on eBay
the other day (not the same auction), but decided against it as I don;t have the space :(
I did get "Graphic On The ARM Machines" by Roger Amos (published by Dabs Press
in January 1993). Not hugely great for me since I don't have an Acorn Archemedes
(though I did use them at Secondary School in the early 90's) I thought, but I decided
to snap it up anyway for ?5 since noone else had bid on it.
The book came today and looks to be an interesting read. One of the first chapters talks
about Vector graphics which is bound to teach me something. In one of the later chapters
it talks about fonts, how they were made/stored and even anti-aliasing!
Now I *know* anti-aliasing didn't make it into games consoles until 1997 (on
Nintendo's N64 console), but I assumed it was something totally new at that time. Now
I realise it must have been new to games consoles.
Does anyone here know when anti-aliasing was first used and who came up with it? (No time
to google it tonight)
Well, Deluxe Paint had anti-aliasing. The principle has been around for
a very, very long time. Games consoles had it well before the N64 was
around, just not on hardware-accelerated 3D.
It's actually particularly critical for graphics that are to be keyed
over video, because the hard edges of digitally-generated text will make
the audio buzz. This is because the upper harmonics extend out past the
sound subcarrier. It's only noticeable on old TVs, really, but I
remember noticing that my sound would buzz when captions came up. Now
since the whole lot is done digitally, it's not such a big problem - and
we can throw more computing power and greater bit-depth at it anyway.
Gordon