The difference between pixel graphics and modern Photoshop processed graphics are easy to see. Shades and pixels in Photoshop processed graphics are smooth and form a synthetic shape. It is the same phenomenon seen in movies that uses a lot of computer generated graphic effects, things look to clean and to perfect.

The traditional way of working with pixel graphics used to be in a proper 2D art package and in a minimal amount of color, 16-256 colors. To simulate the use of more colors graphic artists used a technique called “dithering” where they mix two pixels of different colors one after another to give the impression of a third or fourth color between two defined colors in the palette. To dither a picture is time consuming but gives the image a much more organic look.

The color restrictions that used to apply for graphics in games is not relevant anymore thanks to true color graphic boards. In the old days there could be only four or five colors free for a sprite in the game, this could lead to a challenge for the graphics artist.

Another task which gives an image a much more natural look was to add shades to the image by hand. Today it is very easy and fast to shade an image in Photoshop but in the old day’s graphics artist had to add the shade by hand.

In modern time not many are working with pixel graphics anymore because it is very time consuming and the market is relatively small. Games for cell phones are a popular place where pixel graphics shows up. Pixel graphics have also shown up on various web sites and there are small firms working with the ancient graphics technique.

Traditionally pixel graphics where done on an Amiga in a program called Deluxe Paint. Deluxe Paint came in five versions on the Amiga and where also released on the Atari and the IBM-PC but never reached more than the second version on those systems. During the nineties many video game companies used Deluxe Paint to create textures for their 3D games.

In recent times Photoshop have also become an alternative to making pixel graphics. However once you learn the different functions in a good 2D paint package it is painfully obvious that Photoshop is not a good alternative for pixel based graphics productions.

In a dedicated 2D paint package as Deluxe Paint or Perfect Paint you can select areas, twist and turn them with simple keyboard shortcuts and zoom into an area. These paint packages where dedicated to making these kind of graphics so they are the best solution but may be tough to learn if someone do not have experience working in the Workbench environment.

Modern pixel graphics are symbolized by isometric pixel images. These images can be gigantic and often portraits a huge city with many details that goes unnoticed if one do not look at the finer parts of the image. Isometric pixel art as we know it today where not common before the Internet so it can be called a net phenomenon. But it makes us wonder if older pixel styles will make a comeback in the future?

A noisy computer can have a serious impact on the peaceful environment your home provides, so the server needs to be quiet. Having your server running every day of the year can have a negative impact on your electricity bill, so the server needs to be energy efficient.

Uses:

The most popular use of a server is to have it set up as a file server, a file server store files on your home network. With networked hardware like Video-games, DVD-players and media streamers having your media files on one central location can be a smart and elegant solution. But there are other uses of a server to, you can set it up as a print server enabling anyone in your house to print files on a central printer, you can run a server as a firewall, a router or a web-server sharing your own webpage, the possibilities are endless.

The plan:

The case should have a small footprint so that the server would fit into a living room at home. The computer should be almost silent so not to disturb the peaceful nature of a living room. It shouldn’t consume a lot of electricity. Should run Linux.

Hardware:

We used the Mini-ITX motherboard manufactured by VIA. It is a small motherboard the size of 17 x 17 centimeters with all necessary hardware integrated. It has graphics, sound and network integrated. One PCI slot is available. The processor is running at 800 MHz which in reality feels more like an Intel Celeron 300 MHz in real world applications. That’s fine for our uses since a simple home server does not need a lot of horse power. The motherboard needs a case and we used an old case for two 5.25 units. We added 512 MB memory and an 80 GB harddrive. We also bought a small Micro-ATX power supply that fit our case. The PSU have an 80 mm fan but it is temperature controlled and rarely spins up to a noise level that can be heard.

Software:

We installed Linux as our operating system of choice.

Thoughts:

We are very satisfied with our new home server. It is very silent and consumes about 50-55 watt on average. We can also use it as a desktop computer since we installed KDE. It sits quietly under my desk and shares files on our network, download files and waits for FTP connections.

The Linux server in a small case

It is possible to buy a pre made system today that is as good and as cheap as any home assembled PC. But there are always factors that can not be edited when dealing with completed systems. My current PC is in a way my view of the perfect home computer that suits all my needs. From working with web design to surfing the web as I run an internet conference with five partners it fits my needs.

My PC

My current PC is based on a small Shuttle barebones case. Shuttle revolutionized the hardware industry when they introduced the smaller barebones series around 2001/2002. One of the big issues of the future is the power consumption of computers. When I configured my system I wasn’t aware of exactly how much power a full system uses. I was a bit surprised to see my Shuttle using up to 110 watt in CPU and GPU intensive games. Since I do not play games a lot I was happy that my Shuttle only used 60 to 70 watt when I worked in office applications. Basically the part in my system using most wattage is the processor, a Pentium 4 clocked at 2.4 GHz. My graphics card, an ATI Radeon 9600- does surprisingly not use more than 5 to 15 Watts depending on the application. How much power a computer uses is a frequently misunderstood conception a lot of times. Many thinks a 500 watt power supply means the computer is using 500 watt but that is simply not true since the watt specs on the power supply only indicates how much the power supply is capable of (which often is not the truth, only what the factory making the power supply wants you to believe).

Keyboard, mouse and monitor

Overlooked a lot but important none the less a good keyboard is essential when you write a lot. I had been using the famous IBM model M keyboard for some years mainly because I heard so many good comments about them. I have since then sold all my model M keyboards because they where too noisy, clumsy and weighted too much (they have a thick and very heavy steel sheet inside them). Finding a good keyboard when you don’t want windows keys is hard. I have been looking for one for a long time.

I am running a 23 inch widescreen TFT monitor running in 1920×1200. A large widescreen monitor is a great partner when working with the web.

Operating system

I have run a lot of operating systems during the years, from Windows 3.11, MS-Dos, NetBSD, Linux, FreeBSD, to Windows XP. Currently Windows XP Pro is my system of choice. Mostly because it supports all important applications I need to run and is a relatively care free operating system if some care is taken setting up the system with firewall and a virus package and when opening up unknown files.

This is a chronological list from my first computer to my present.

1986-1993 – ZX-Spectrum 128K

Specs:

• ZX-Spectrum 128K
• Tape player
• Joystick interface
• Joysticks

Story:

This was my first home computer. It was a simple 8 bit machine that I mostly played games on and coded some basic programs on. Around 1989 most Swedish computer stores did not have ZX-Spectrum software anymore and there was not many Spectrum users left in Sweden after 1990. I bought myself a ZX Spectrum +3 in 2003 for playing games I liked to play when I was young. It was perhaps used one or two times in a year so I sold it. After that experience I now firmly believe that the ZX-Spectrum was meant to be used in the eighties and not in the new millennium.

1994 – C64

Specs:

• C64
• Tape player
• Joysticks

Story:

As a ZX-Spectrum user it was natural to hate the C64 and its users. But I think that many Spectrum users knew that the C64 was the better computer games wise. In 1994 when I got my C64 there were still some hardcore users left who made demos and cracked the small amount of games still coming out, but officially the C64 was dead. I bought my C64 from a friend in school, he promised to copy lots of games to me on cassettes and I had some fun with it for an about half a year but the C64 did not make a huge impact on me like it did with a lot of other users.

1994-1994 – Amiga 500

Specs:

• Amiga 500
• External floppy drive
• 0.5 MB extra memory
• Joysticks

Operating system:

• Workbench 1.3

Story:

Amiga 500 was the ideal home computer to have in the eighties. In Europe it was extremely popular. In Sweden almost every one of your friends had one which meant finding games to copy and play was never hard. It is a bit ironic that I always wanted an Amiga, but when I finally got one, Commodore -the company that made the Amiga- died and so the Amiga market and its user base shrunk.

1995-1998 – 486 DX2 66MHz

Specs:

• 486 DX2 66 MHz CPU
• 4 MB memory
• 420 MB harddrive
• AT case
• 3.5 floppy drive
• ISA and PCI slots
• PCI graphics board

Later upgraded with:

• 8 MB memory
• 4x CD-rom
• 5.25 floppy drive
• Soundblaster 16

Operating system:

• MS-Dos 6.22
• Windows 3.11
• Linux (Slackware/Red Hat)

Story:

This was an expensive computer at the time. My 486 was a dream to work with, it was very silent, stable and fast and I felt home in MS-DOS and Norton Commander. When I expanded it with 4 MB memory a CD-ROM and a genuine Soundblaster card it was complete and could do anything I wanted to do with it. I had it for close to four years which is a very long time in the world of computers.

1998-2000 – AMD K6 233 MHz

Specs:

• AMD K6 233 MHz CPU
• 32 MB memory
• 2.1 GB harddrive
• AT case
• 3.5 floppy drive
• 8x CD-rom
• PCI 2MB graphics card
• Soundblaster Live

Later upgraded with:

• 3DFX Voodoo 2 12 MB 3D card
• 4x CD-burner
• 17 GB harddrive

Operating system:

• Windows 95
• Windows 98
• NetBSD
• Linux (Slackware)

Story:

The two reasons I got a new PC in 1998 were that I wanted to play modern games and I needed to run Windows 95 to be able to play them. I slightly regret not getting a 300 MHz CPU instead, it would have lasted me a little longer, 233 MHz felt a bit slow in 1999 but I got a small lease on its life when I bought a Voodoo 2 card for it.

2000-2002 – AMD Athlon K7 800 MHz

Specs:

• AMD Athlon K7 800 MHz ’slot-a’ CPU
• 128 MB
• 20 GB harddrive
• 24x CD-rom
• Soundblaster Live
• Geforce 256 AGP Graphics board
• ATX Case

Later upgraded with:

• 17 GB harddrive

Operating system:

• Windows XP
• NetBSD
• Linux (Slackware)

Story:

No real story here, I was stuck in the upgrading trap. I just wanted more up to date hardware. It was exciting to have an AMD CPU. I thought at the time that AMD made more interesting CPU’s, they where also slightly cheaper than Intel making them more attractive. Intel and AMD battled each other for the chance to make it to 1 GHz first, AMD won that battle (by a week I think). My original goal was to get a dual AMD K7 board and run two 1 GHz AMD CPU’s when they got available but it would take some more years before a dual CPU AMD solution was offered. And when it was offered I wasn’t to keen on running a computer setup that used 4-500 watt when idling.

2003 – AMD Athlon Thunderbird 1200 MHz

Specs:

• AMD Athlon Thunderbird 1200 MHz ’socket a’ CPU
• 512 MB
• 37 GB harddrive
• 24x CD-rom
• 52x CD burner
• Soundblaster Live
• Geforce 256 AGP Graphics board
• Yeong Yang server case ATX

Operating system:

• Windows XP
• NetBSD
• Linux (Slackware)

Story:

I swapped an Amiga 4000 for this PC otherwise I would have kept my 800 MHz Athlon. I think I could have used my 800 MHz Athlon till 2005, it was very usable in XP and for web development and other needs.

2004 – Pentium 4 2.4 GHz

Specs:

• Pentium 4 2.4 GHz
• 512 MB
• 120 GB harddrive
• 8x DVD-rom
• Shuttle cube case
• ATI Radeon 9600 256 MB AGP graphics card

Operating system:

• Windows XP

Story:

I wanted my hardware to be more up to date. Originally I had a large ATX case but six months later I bought a smaller Shuttle case. This was the first computer I tried to make as quiet as possible. But making the Shuttle quiet was a challenge. I had to mount an external PSU with larger fan and a larger cooling fan on the outside of the Shuttle before I was pleased with the noise level. This is a great computer and a much needed break from oversized ATX cases. This computer would probably last me until 2006/2007 or further since I rarely play games anymore and won’t need more horsepower.

There are tools that can go through a game file and look for the segment in the file where the sprite data is stored and then save a graphics file containing a dump of the sprites.

Specific sprite software is fine but I am going to learn the cheap, fast and easy way of grabbing a sprite (or in this case a logo).

This image shows my XP workbench and I have a Game Boy emulator running the game Bomb Jack. I own this game on a real cartridge as you can see on this page that show you how to play black and white Game Boy games on a GBA micro.

1. Preparing the grab: Set up the emulator

Sprites are pixel graphics so it is very important that the emulator is not set up to filter the graphics. Filters make an old game look softer by using a mathematical algorithm to smooth out the corners of each pixel making a game look more modern, but filters will not make a nice looking sprite so start by turning filters off.

2. Preparing the grab: Turn off the filters

Another important thing to remember is to always grab the image in the original resolution of the game. If you compare this image with the previous you will notice that the window is dramatically smaller, that is because the window is now four times smaller than before, and set to the original size.

3. Lets grab the screen

It is now time to grab the screen. It is recommended that you pause the emulation before grabbing the screen. Press the button on your keyboard with the name “Print Screen” one time and then open up Photoshop, select “file/new” and then select “edit/paste” from the drop down menu. Your grabbed screen can now be edited in Photoshop. You can also, with the window of the emulator selected”, hold the “Alt” button and then press “Print Screen” this will grab only the selected window.

4. Time to get our hands dirty

Right, we now have material to work with in Photoshop. I want to cut out the logo of the game, while not a sprite I the same technique can be used for grabbing sprites, like the bomb in front of the menu on the page. In Photoshop crop the image around the sprite or image you want to grab. As you can see here is the Bomb Jack logo, if you look close enough the background color is not transparent but a very discrete shade of white and gray.

5. Deleting the background of the sprite

In order to make the background transparent use the “Magic Wand Tool” in Photoshop to select the background area, then press “Delete” on your keyboard and then deselect the background. You can now save your sprite as a GIF or Ping with transparent background.

6. The final result: A clean and nice sprite (logo)

This is the result. This logo was a very simple image to grab because the background was a single color. The “Magic Wand Tool” could probably not be used if the background was more complex. If there is a more complex background you have to select each pixel by hand and then delete them one by one in tight places around the sprite.

So I hope you learned something from this short tutorial and keep the sprites alive.

When bandwidth was low ASCII was used to form crude images or headers. Some people worked extra hard in trying to make ASCII images as nice as possible and they became ASCII artists. I am going to show how to write a nice text in ASCII, these techniques can be used to make a nice logon screen on a UNIX system or as a cool piece of graphics on a web template if converted to GIF or PNG.

1. The Draw

I am going to use The Draw. It is a classic ANSI/ASCII paint package for MS-DOS. As you can see it works in Windows XP but I suggest running it in a genuine MS-DOS environment. There are different ANSI/ASCII packages around but we think The Draw is the easiest to learn.

2. A clean sheet

All right, we start with a blank sheet, a black background. There are different techniques one can use to draw ASCII. One that I used quite a lot is based on the “#” character (ASCII Dec 35).

3. Sketching out the first letter

As you can see I have drawn a large “e”. Sometimes letters look better in upper case, but most of the time lower case look better. The letter is nice and square. At this step I only concentrate to make a good looking, square, visible letter.

4. The ASCII logo

Aha, it says “erkan”, if you look carefully every letter except “e” has the same character width. I then decided to make the “e” letter the same width. My main objective in this stage is to sketch out nice visible letters that are very clear. Some ASCII text can be near impossible to read thanks to the style of the artist, but in this tutorial I wanted to do a clear piece that was easy to read.

5. Smoothing out the corners in ASCII

In this step I have rounded the corners. Take a good look at the corners, it is those characters that work best in rounding them off. The corners can be made even smother if I would have used a larger text size. As you can see it looks very good.

6. The final ASCII art logo

And here is my small art piece cut out and converted to a gif ready to be used on the net. I hope you learnt something new and come back in the future for more interesting articles on erkan.se

This is a 486 in a very small package. I think a 486 is a great computer. Maybe not so in these days of 1 TB harddrives and 2+ GHz quad-core CPU speeds but back in the day you could do almost anything with a 486 and 8 to 32 MB ram. Linux was no problem to run, it was more important to have lots of memory because otherwise virtual memory would trash your harddrive whenever you ran X. Windows 3.11 ran great on a 486, sadly not Windows 95 which was a huge disappointment on anything else than a Pentium 1 for me at least.

So I should perhaps write something about the computer in the picture, it is currently running MS-DOS and Windows 3.11. I do not think Windows 3.11 was that horrible as I wanted to believe it was, actually it was a pleasant and uncluttered experience. But as most old school MS-DOS users know you mostly do not use Windows 3.11 a lot, instead you spend most of your time in DOS. DOS in combination with Norton Commander is a powerful environment. You are flexible and can shuffle files around the system in no time and you have the power to edit text files easily together with lots of other tasks. So why run Windows 3.11 at all? As you can see this computer is so tiny there is no space for a CD-rom so I run a very old version of CuteFTP in Windows 3.11 and transfer ZIP/RAR archive from my main workstation acting as a local FTP-server. Works great and Windows 3.11 even detected my 3Com network card during installation of the OS. Anyway Windows 3.11 and MS-DOS 6.22 totally rocks, everything went downhill for MS after that (maybe not).

So let’s open the second part of this article with some hardware specifications of the computer in the above picture:

• CPU: Cyrix 486 clone clocked at 80 MHz
• Graphics board: Integrated, I think 256 or 512 KB memory
• Memory: 16 MB in two 72 pin modules
• Soundcard: Soundblaster AWE 32 (or 64)
• Network card: 3Com ISA
• Harddrive: Seagate 420 MB

It is actually very impressive to see how tight everything sits inside of the shell. They even managed to offer two 16-bit ISA slots, however due to the small size of the case only half size ISA cards can fit into the system making it more difficult to find old school soundcards that will fit. There is space for one full size 3.5 inch IDE harddrive and one 3.5 inch floppy drive. The outer shell is made of aluminum and mounts with two thumbscrews, and just like new modern mini computers have these tiny 40 mm annoying fans this little 486 system have one for the PSU. You would think the CPU gets really hot being sandwiched deep under the floppy drive but I kid you now it does not get hot at all, I actually opened it up after a heavy gaming session with Doom and it was cool to touch.

So it is kind of neat to have a 486 system in the closet ready to be used anytime I would want to since it takes so little space. Speed wise, especially in games you can tell there are faster 486 based computers, I remember my 486 DX2 66 MHz which had PCI slots, back then PCI slots in a 486 system was hi-end and not that usual but that definitely speed up Doom a lot. There are a lot of other cool old school applications you definitely should check out. Of course Cubic Player is very nice, also Inertia Player is a nice old school module player and Electronic Arts classic Deluxe Paint 2 paint program is a nice paint package used even in the 90′ies by game companies.

Occasionally I find older Compaqs (nowadays part of HP) and Goldstars (nowadays known as LG) systems but in my opinion those are ugly systems to maintain and run from a hardware point of view. Also older IBM hardware is very easy to find in Sweden since they were common in offices and sold for quite a lot of money so many employees keep their workstation thinking it is worth “something”. Though in my opinion old IBM workstation are the least worth PC systems out there just because of their horrible looking cases and nonstandard hardware. I much prefer ISA over anything else.

This is a tiny 386 motherboard I recently had the opportunity to buy, it has a AMD 386-SX CPU and is running at 33 MHz It has also got four 30-pin memory slots and is equipped with 16 MB of memory so each stick is 4 MB. There are five 16-bit ISA slots at the bottom part of the motherboard and as you can see the board lacks any connections for floppy drive or hard drive since those ports where provided on a ISA-card (which I also have somewhere in the closet).

So I have to confess I did originally buy the motherboard just for the memory, finding 30-pin memory is by no means hard. There are quite a lot of stores on the net who keep all kind of obscure old memory. But paying a premium price for 20 year old hardware does not feel right when you know you could probably find a sack full of 30-pin sticks somewhere in some offices retired parts bin.

Anyway, this is quite a nice little 386 which I am going to put together in the future when I find a suitable case for it. Until then, enjoy the pictures of the bare board!

In comparison with other 8-bit computers the ZX-Spectrum did not have a common standard for a floppy disc interface. There where third party floppy disk solutions but they where expensive. When the Sinclair ZX-Spectrum +3 was released it was designed to incorporate an obscure three inch format floppy drive. Three inch floppy disks where most common amongst Amstrad computers, Amstrad now owned Sinclair so the later Spectrums looked a lot like Amstrads own home computers of that time.

Compact Flash cards are a great alternative for storage especially for vintage computers that do not use disk swapping. Files are small and load instantly, often it is possible to just attach the compact flash card to a PC and transfer files over without serial ports and transfer programs.

There are many ZX-Spectrum enthusiasts around that still develop hardware and software for the classic computers, hard drive interfaces and floppy solutions are not as rare as they where during the heydays of the ZX-Spectrum in the early 80′ies.

The Sinclair ZX-Spectrum +3 is an interesting Spectrum model. It has an internal floppy drive and a proper keyboard instead of the sorry excuse for a keyboard on the very earliest Spectrum models. It is possible to mount an Amiga 720 KB floppy drive to the +3, and it is possible to copy snapshot images of ZX-Spectrum games to the floppy from a PC. The +3 have some compatibility problems with older software but during my testing those games where rare to run into.

Every operating system has a file manager. Microsoft Windows XP has Explorer which can be replaced with the excellent Total Commander, Commodore Amiga had Directory Opus and MS-DOS had Norton Commander. NC (short for Norton Commander) makes MS-DOS more flexible and easier to use for day to day tasks offering a basic graphical user interface for MS-DOS. NC was very popular once but the popularity decreased when Windows 95 was released. Even though the popularity of Norton Commander has shrunk there are still many popular clones of NC on a variety of operating systems. Midnight Commander is a popular clone of NC for Unix-like systems and Total Commander is a modern version of Norton Commander for Windows. Volkov Commander is a modern up to date MS-DOS compatible NC clone.

Cubic Player

Most operating system has a music player capable of playing classic music formats like MOD, S3M and XM. Cubic Player for MS-DOS is the music player to use for listening to classic sound formats in DOS.

Deluxe Paint 2

Graphic packages have changed a lot during the years. Graphic artists of today work in layers but when MS-DOS was popular graphic packages like Deluxe Paint 2 where the defacto standard when making pixel graphics. Deluxe Paint by Electronic Arts was a popular art package also available on Commodore Amiga and Atari ST , but only the Commodore Amiga got version 3, 4 and 5 because it had superior graphics than the competition. Even though the MS-DOS world only got the second version it is quite good for what it is and much better than Paint.

The Draw

The Draw was another art package for MS-DOS. But unlike Deluxe Paint it was used to draw ASCII and ANSI images. We agree that the demand for ASCII and ANSI art has shrunk a lot since the days of MS-DOS but if you want to make a nice login screen for you Linux server and do not want to use an automatic JPG to ASCII converter then The Draw is the paint package to use.

PKZIP/PKUNZIP

Since Windows XP the ZIP file compression system is integrated in the operating system. In MS-DOS PKZIP and PKUNZIP are used for these tasks. RAR is also available but most people remember PKZIP, ACE and ARJ. But do they remember the command line switches?

SEA

SEA was an excellent image viewer so that you could watch multicolor JPEG images in MS-DOS. SEA viewer had basic image conversion tools built in and was a really fast image viewer.

Terminate

Before the internet computer enthusiasts used to dial bulletin board systems, also called BBS. A BBS carried files which users could download and also had forums where users could post topics and discuss matters. To dial a BBS you needed a telephone modem and software to use for calling bulletin board systems. Terminate was regarded as the best terminal program amongst everyone I knew who dialed BBS systems.