My dad has this very old piece of cross-stitch art in his house. Every time I see it I'm struck by how much it anticipated 1990s pixel art on 16-bit micros like the Amiga, simply because the artist was working under similar constraints: a low-resolution grid of square pixels, and a strong incentive to use as few _different_ colours of yarn as possible, with much less constraint on what those colours should be – just as the Amiga and similar machines let you have a palette of 32 colours on screen at once but they could be chosen from a much larger space.
And the artist has used the same stylistic tricks to compensate for those limitations as Amiga artists did, or at least some of them. I could easily imagine someone having drawn this in Deluxe Paint, and perhaps even used it as an interstitial image in the middle of a period-themed Amiga game, with some important plot dialogue subtitled on the bottom.
I keep thinking it would be kind of cool to digitise it back to pixels + palette. But for proper style the result would have to be stored in an IFF ILBM instead of any more up-to-date image format.
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Mathieu Perona
in reply to Simon Tatham • • •Martin Vermeer FCD
in reply to Simon Tatham • • •Simon Tatham
in reply to Martin Vermeer FCD • • •@martinvermeer yes, I started writing X apps myself when that was still a real possibility. Indeed, the GTK version of PuTTY still has code in it to handle that case – search unix/window.c for function calls starting 'gdk_colormap_'! Surely hasn't been tested in years, though.
The standard Amiga GUI (at least in the original A500 days when I had one) just said "Here are the colours you have, use them or make your own separate Screen". X11's idea of trying to let multiple apps _share_ a limited-palette display and ask for the colours they need is much more ambitious!
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Pooja Saxena
in reply to Simon Tatham • • •Typographic Eye № 12 / Pixel Type & Needlework
us12.campaign-archive.comJean-Truc au terminal trituré
in reply to Simon Tatham • • •instagram.com/gauvainmanhattan…
Gauvain Manhattan (@gauvainmanhattan) • Instagram photos and videos
www.instagram.comook
in reply to Simon Tatham • • •Roel Nieskens
in reply to Simon Tatham • • •AlsoPaisleyCat
in reply to Roel Nieskens • • •@pixelambacht
I think that this is actually tentstitch or another tapestry stitch rather than cross-stitch.
There were many adaptations of European tapestries onto canvas needlework patterns available from a firm in France in the 1990s. For those, one chose tapestry wool oneself rather than having it come in a kit.
Cross-stitch isn’t the only one that’s natively pixelated.
Even some of the rug hooking patterns that are trending again are very pixelated.
#needlework #tapestry
Simon Tatham
in reply to AlsoPaisleyCat • • •@AlsoPaisleyCat @pixelambacht thanks for the correction!
As you've probably already guessed, I'm not remotely an expert on tapestry or any other kind of stitching, and my interest in this kind of design is focused on its relevance to computers, so I just had to make my best guess out of types of stitch I'd heard of. 😀
Matze Schmidt
in reply to Simon Tatham • • •painting by Johannes Vermeer at Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden, Germany
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)Del C
in reply to Simon Tatham • • •etsy.com/ca/listing/1755140565…
Simon Tatham
in reply to Del C • • •@delcj apparently it is, thank you! I found this, with a photo of the box. Penelope Needlework, and the design is called "Dutch Interior".
picclick.co.uk/Unopened-Vintag…
(The eBay page it links to is long gone, but at least this confirms your identification.)
Unopened Vintage Penelope Needlework Tapestry Kit - Dutch Interior (B 5721) • £43.00
PicClick UKmaxy
in reply to Simon Tatham • • •beemoh
in reply to Simon Tatham • • •youtu.be/i4EFkspO5p4
Four-Byte Burger
YouTubeJoost Rekveld
in reply to Simon Tatham • • •PypeBros
in reply to Simon Tatham • • •can't wait to see them embrace the hardware capabilities and setup a copperlist to make a beautiful raster on that blue sky ;)
i.pinimg.com/originals/c6/67/7…
Simon Tatham
in reply to Simon Tatham • • •Digitisation now done! Followup thread (with considerable Amiga emulator war story): hachyderm.io/@simontatham/1140…
Simon Tatham
2025-02-17 20:59:57