Amazing Pixel Art from Old School Games

Amazing Pixel Art
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The amount of digital art being lost to history is a shame. The quality of many old software titles artwork could be astounding. Much of the art was embedded in the program executable so no available to the average user. These artworks should be preserved to museum archives, efforts to preserve digital art have yet to become a greater reality. Here are some screen-shots from old video games that are favorites of mine.

Here is a great archive of these artworks. http://www.shmups.com/

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Yes I am on Tumblr

If you are one of the cool kids yes you can find me on Tumblr also.

Check me here http://designworxs.tumblr.com/

Unfinished Sketch

Solar Eclipse Photo - Monday May 20 2012

Monday May 20 2012 Today my wife and I managed to take some stunning photos of the solar eclipse but not in the way you would imagine. Take a look at these picture's of our home's side wall. The light filtering through the tree's distinctly shows a repeating pattern of the eclipse.  The shots show the phenomenon of crescent Sun shadows being cast under trees as the light polarized and the leaves focus the image on the wall.

 

They say there is nothing new under the sun, just different interpretations.

It was like the light had suddenly decided to paint a modern master piece all on its own.

NodeBox.

What the heck is a NodeBox. Well its a modular programing environment for procedural graphics. Basically you program a group of functions to carry out a visual drawing. Your thinking that doesn't sound creative and actually sounds like work. Let me assure you it is fun and easy. You can create things that you would never want to draw by hand.

A Friendly Face

You want to explore generative design without learning the ins and outs of programming?
Using its node-based interface, NodeBox makes generative design easy and fast.

An Animated Partner

Every parameter in NodeBox can be animated. Animations can be exported as common movie formats or as a sequence of images.

Visualize Your Data

Because of its unique approach, NodeBox is ideal for rapid data visualization. NodeBox takes in data from Excel. Because it's open, you can write your own data importers and exporters.

Peek Under The Hood

Using nodes doesn't have to mean giving up power. NodeBox makes it trivial to customize the functionality of existing nodes or to build your own from scratch.

 Windows Version

Go get your free copy here.

SonicBirth This One is for Mac Users. Free

SonicBirth is an AudioUnit designing application. The first in its category, it allows users to build their own AudioUnit plugins, either by working with existing circuits or by creating circuits completely from scratch. SonicBirth is also a free AudioUnits package, as it comes bundled with a set of plugins designed for standalone use as plugins as well as pre-constructed circuits to modify or build upon for creating new plugins. Whether you're looking for traditional eqs, compressors, and reverbs, or softsynths, distortion, and filters, etc. Every plugin can be used in 32 bits or 64 bits for added precision. Since all plugins share this engine, any improvement in speed will benefit all of them. While Windows users have much choice in modular plugin design environments, sadly Mac user's have relatively few. When I say relatively few, I mean this is the only one that I know off that you can publish a plugin from ... short of moving into C.

Grab it here.

Blender a Free 3D Design Program

Need a free 3d design program that doesn't miss on professional features. Blender is for you.

This program covers most 3d file formats. With a great variety of tools available, Sculpting can be used to create very detailed organic looking characters. Coupled with modifiers like multi-res, the models can be very complex while the interface remains responsive.

Thanks to flawless integration, tasks as simple as walk cycles or as complex as lip syncing can be undertaken with more emphasis on the results and the fine tunning.
With the Non Linear Animation (NLA) independent movements, poses, and gestures can be combined into complex actions, and reordered or altered individually, without having to remake the whole animation.

True and tested, the robust default render engine is an industrial strength image generator.
With powerful optimization for material nodes and procedural textures, along with fully compliant support for farm rendering, the Blender internal render engine is reliable, fast and efficient.

With its complete integration to code base and its totally graphical interface, the Game Engine is both fully independent from, while at the same time perfectly adapted to, your programing skills.
Use the visual data blocks to create your game logic, or code your own, either way once finished your product can be ported to the run time environment of your choice.

 The Game Engine as far as I know is completely unique to Blender and not found in any other 3d editors. Another great thing is almost any platform your on there is indeed a version available.

Mac OS X - Linux x86-64 - Linux x86-32 - Windows 64 bits - Windows 32 bits - FreeBSD

Get your free copy here.

Qdir - File and Folder Management Free

Sometimes software does not accommodate the creative flow especially when dealing with file and folder organization. When needing to deal with folder structure and file duties I have found Qdir helpful in getting the monotonous out of the way so I can get back to the creative faster. 

Q-Dir (the Quad Explorer) makes your files and folders easy to manage, as an installed or portable Windows program. Fast and easy access to your hard disks, network folders, USB-Stiks, floppy disks and other storage devices. Q-Dir is a good file manager with an amazing Quadro-View technique.
You don't have to renounce the usual, Drag and Drop, all Views, and other functions of your system work. Q-Dir does not have to be installed and can be executed easily from the desktop, and can be carried on a small usb-stick or other memory device.

Get it here free. 

Book Cutout Art by Alexander Korzer Robinson

I am blown away and in awe of this unique art. What does this have to do with computers, well nothing but it is very creative. Alexander Korzer-Robinson creates his book art pieces by cutting around some illustrations in the book and removing others. This art focuses on the "inner landscape". Visit his site here for more of his work.

 

Sentences and paragraphs are of little interest to the 37-year-old who instead cuts around different images from 150-year-old Victorian books and carefully pieces them together to create a brand new 3D art form.

The Bristol-based artist, originally from Leipzig in Germany, has created vivid, detailed collages that feature everything from old soldiers standing to attention to giant pink flamingos.

Works are created using only the pictures that are already in the volumes and the end result is a hollowed out book with a layered composition similar to the Victorian paper theatres that were hugely popular at that time.

The books are sealed around the cut so they can no longer be opened, but are designed to be either hung on the wall or can stand by themselves as an art object.

http://www.alexanderkorzerrobinson.co.uk/ 

Room EQ Wizard - Free

Acoustic Measurement and Analysis Software

REW is a Java application for measuring room acoustics and analysing room and loudspeaker responses. It includes tools for generating test signals; measuring SPL and impedance; measuring frequency and impulse responses; generating phase, group delay and spectral decay plots, waterfalls, spectrograms and energy-time curves; generating real time analyser (RTA) plots; calculating reverberation times; calculating Thiele-Small parameters; determining the frequencies and decay times of modal resonances; displaying equaliser responses and automatically adjusting the settings of parametric equalisers to counter the effects of room modes and adjust responses to match a target curve. If you are currently doing any audio mixing or recording it is very important to know and adjust for natural room acoustics. You will be hard pressed to make a descent mix in a room without dealing with the natural sound characteristic's of that environment.

Grab your free copy here.

Inkscape & Sozi - Free Open Source

 Inkscape is an open source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.
Inkscape supports many advanced SVG features (markers, clones, alpha blending, etc.) and great care is taken in designing a streamlined interface. It is very easy to edit nodes, perform complex path operations, trace bitmaps and much more.

Get Inkscape here

Sozi is a small helper program for Inkscape that can play animated presentations. Unlike in most presentation applications, a Sozi document is not organized as a slideshow, but rather as a poster where the content of your presentation can be freely laid out. Playing such a presentation consists in a series of translations, zooms and rotations that allow to focus on the elements you want to show. Sozi is based on open standards. It is free software distributed according to the terms of the GPL 3.0.

A Sozi presentation is an SVG document in which a sequence of “frames” is defined. A frame is a rectangular region of the document associated with presentation and animation information (e.g. title, ordering, transition duration).
The presentation editor is an extension for the Inkscape vector graphics editor. It means that you can create an entire presentation, graphics and animation, within a single environment.

 Get Sozi Here

LineTracer - Free

LineTracer is a tool for converting scanned hand-drawn sketches to vector format. It exports to EPS, which means the output can be used by about any program. It is primarily meant for helping illustrators and animators.

You can grab your free copy here.

Children are not learning computer basic's

It is sad what is happening these days. Children the very foundation of our economy are not learning the fundamentals of computer design and programming. Sure they can text at light-speed and know everything about winning on  the Xbox but the basic's have fallen by the wayside. Its time this changed. You wont like it when China owns the market.

Raspberry Pi
An ARM GNU/Linux box for $25. Take a byte!

http://www.raspberrypi.org/

PWGL Free Open-Source

PWGL is a free cross-platform visual language specialized in computer aided composition and sound synthesis. PWGL integrates several programming paradigms (functional, object-oriented, constraint-based) with high-level visual representation of data and it can be used to solve a wide range of musical problems.  It has some interesting features such as ENP. ENP is used as the notational front-end in PWGL. ENP is a music notation program that has been developed in order to meet the requirements of computer aided composition, music analysis and virtual instrument control. It is intended to represent Western musical notation from 17th century onward including 20th century notation. ENP is not a full featured music typesetting program. It is, however, designed to produce automatic, reasonable musical typesetting according to the common practices.

PWGL patch-window containing a 2D-editor and some basic boxes.

ENP is used as the notational front-end in PWGL.

Currently, PWGL runs under Mac OS X and Windows XP operating systems. PWGL is distributed in two different configurations: as a standalone application, called PWGL Application, that is targeted mainly to end users, and as a developers version, PWGL Binaries, that is made available as a pre-compiled module that can be loaded on top of LispWorks.

You can take a look at what is possible here. 

Synfig Studio 2D Animation Software - Free and Open-Oource

Synfig Studio is a free and open-source 2D animation software, designed as powerful industrial-strength solution for creating film-quality animation using a vector and bitmap artwork. It eliminates the need to create animation frame-by frame, allowing you to produce 2D animation of a higher quality with fewer people and resources. Synfig Studio is available for Windows, Linux and MacOS X.

Get your copy here.