Coder Corner

Some of my oldest graphics on the ST were copies of Peter Elson & Chris Moore’s art in the “Parallel Lines” artbook (”Navires de l’infini” in French).

This one was called “Hot Sleep” from Chris Moore:

My copy was one of the first drawing I did on the ST, so it was a bit poor:

I used it in my very first demo (here).

This one was from the same artbook (I got that picture from the internet, sorry for the poor quality):

I already showed the right side in a previous blog post, it looked like this:

This is again one of my oldest attempts at drawing anything on the ST, so my technique wasn’t great there. In fact the left side was so lame I never showed it to anybody anywhere, but here it is:

I did a lot of Dragonball Z copies but good luck trying to find the source material in 2019. How many million hits do you get if you Google “Dragonball Z” these days eh?

Well.

My Google-fu seems to work because I did manage to find the source of this picture, by Googling “dragonball z yellow orange red group picture” (!). The image quality isn’t great though, if you know where to find a better version for this image, tell me:

UPDATE: here’s a higher-quality version:

In any case here is my (fullscreen) conversion on the ST, used in Japtro:

As a bonus, I also found some work-in-progress versions that show a few intermediary steps:

Madoka was a character from Kimagure Orange Road. I drew her a lot.

This original was from an artbook by Akemi Takada:

The copy I made was found in Choice of Gods, and I made her blink from time to time:

This other original was from the same artbook I think:

And the copy was included in our Rising Force demo:

Finally this one was the cover of Animeland issue 7 (a magazine dedicated to japanimation):

My copy was included in an obscure (and rather lame) intro/demo called Dreamways:

IIRC there was another ST graphist who copied the same image and then claimed I “ripped” his picture… Which was very strange considering none of us were the original authors. We both liked the same stuff and copied the same source.

This second example is called Witch World, from Rodney Matthews. I had a couple of Rodney Matthews artbooks and I copied a lot from them (fonts, logos, etc).

Here’s the original:

And here’s the copy, found in the Choice of Gods intro:

Like many of my Atari ST pictures this was unfinished. I wanted to do more for the sky but never did…

Speaking of unfinished pictures, here is another Matthews-copy that I also didn’t finish:

Since it was never finished, it has never been used in a demo.

A lot of the ST graphics I did were just copies of existing art (because I’m a coder, not an artist). It could be interesting to show the source and the copies side-by-side so I’m going to start a serie of posts about this.

The first example is from Cat’s Eye. The original was a poster in a City Hunter artbook:

The copies are displayed one by one in the Japtro intro. I am not sure why I separated them all, it could have been more interesting to put them all in one picture, but maybe I ran out of colors (the ST has a 16-colors palette by default). One can change the palette each line but maybe that’s not enough here. In any case here’s Ai (Alex in the French version):

Here’s Hitomi / Tam (actually I think I did have multiple palettes just for this one already):

And here’s Rui / Cylia (you can tell I got tired of this project because the mouth and the legs are not finished, but it was only displayed for a few seconds in Japtro so you barely notice):

These are some of the largest pictures I drew on the ST.

A long time ago I was drawing pictures on Amstrad CPC and Atari ST. I vaguely wanted to create adventure games. I recently found a bunch of these old pictures on backup CDs. Here’s a selection (click on the picture to enlarge it).