Oct 4, 2007

Animating Retro Games (in retrospect & freeware e-book format)

Computer Animation Primer by David Fox (of Zack McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders fame) and Mitchell Waite was published back in 1984, which apparently means it's a young and perky book by any standard, provided of course said standard happily originated outside the computer/video-gaming industry. Now, truth is, this book is quite a bit technical and tends to focus either on 25 year old super-computers or the Atari 8-bit home-computers, which sort of places it inside the computer industry. I'll give you that. Still, it has aged remarkably well and manages to remain surprisingly interesting .

Read it and you'll learn a lot on 2D -mostly game- graphics, on the history of animation and finally get to truly understand such commonplace terms as scrolling, sprites, antialiasing and clipping. The excellent Making of TRON chapter might be of interest too. Read the online version of Computer Animation Primer here. It's absolutely free.

Related @ Gnome's Lair: Designing Arcade Computer Game Graphics, Nintendo Wii retro gaming, Space Quest IV, free PDF & e-book archive

4 comments:

  1. The only thing I recognized in this article was tr0n, which is a bit like pr0n... But then again, I'm very pissed... Or as we say in Manchester... "Leathered" I'm feckin' leathered... And smoking...

    Jeez what happened to gym Father?

    MEH...

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  2. Hehe! At last the ominous forces of "gym" got what they deserved... I salute your return to a proper lifestyle Father...

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  3. the juxtaposition of the words technical and free.... stalemate....!

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  4. Oh, thought we were playing checkers...

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