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intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Sun Mar 14, 2021 10:37 am

Back in 1987-ish, someone took the cover of a swimsuit magazine featuring a model by the name of Donna Stokes and scanned it into their Amiga.
F09148EF-365F-4A61-992C-BAECAACB3F04.JPG
DDBE72E7-0DF6-42C8-9A94-8B244AB196F8.JPG

I first discovered this file on a disk back in 2019. It has the innocuous name of "girl.pic" amidst a few other images including crude (but sophisticated for the time) 3D raytraced renders.

After a fair amount of Googling, someone uncovered (cough) the original photo and posted it to imgur.

I believe this is the actual issue the image was featured in 1987.
51Sus2UP2BL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

More to the point, can you imagine - back in 1987 - seeing an image of this quality, depth and resolution on a home computer? It's easy to forget, but this wouldn't have even made sense to the few folks who were lucky enough to see it. Most people would have thought it to be a "Hollywood trick" of some sort, no doubt.

Take yourself back to 1987, if you were on this planet back then, and remind yourself where you were or what you were doing. The HAM images the earliest Amiga could support still impress me to this very day. The PC's 16 color EGA vs Amiga's 4096 on the screen at one time? It was like a caveman looking at a modern glossy swimsuit magazine, and thinking those women must be trapped in the paper.

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JoeUser
Dallas, TX

Posted Sun Mar 14, 2021 11:13 am

She's got very pretty eyes 8-)

But, yeah, I agree regarding the HAM format. But, big penalty in memory though, IIRC. I think I tried to use a HAM image as a background for a game I was developing years ago, and it took a huge chunk of available memory, so had to take a different path...

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primitivefunction

Posted Sun Mar 14, 2021 9:22 pm

Seeing this just reminded me of an experience I had that for some reason has stuck with me all these years.

It was 1993 and I'd just replaced my A500 with a 1200 - 030 accelerator, 6MB RAM - I thought it was the ultimate setup. One day my aunt and cousin came over and I was eager to show off my new computer. So with an audience gathered around the 1942 monitor, I fired up DPaint and started flicking through folders on the HDD. I guess I had a folder full of scanned hi-res fantasy art images - probably a lot of Frazetta, Keith Parkinson etc. In my head I thought, 'right, this is going to blow their socks off'. I loaded up the first image which was a scantily clad warrior-woman straddling a giant worm that she had just dispatched. My aunt, who I'd forgotten was a strident feminist, was NOT impressed. I forget exactly what she said but it made me feel like a complete pervert and I just sort of shrunk back in my chair with embarrassment. To be honest I hadn't even thought about the subject matter of the imagery - I just thought they would marvel at the millions of colours and the pin sharp resolution!

So I just googled it and I think this must have been the painting - https://clydecaldwell.com/wp-content/up ... Turned.jpg - which doesn't seem quite as risqué as I remember - but there you go, nearly 30 years later and these things still stay with you.

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intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Mon Mar 15, 2021 10:49 am

That is a fantastic story primitivefunction - made me literally LOL.

I know Caldwell isn't considered a "fine artist" by the museums and art houses, but his work hits all the right buttons for me when I want to take a trip to my past and feel like a teenager again. I have to say, your description of the woman straddling the worm sounded quite a bit tastier than what I saw after clicking the link!

Curious - and I know this is a long shot - but do you have those art files on disk anymore? I'd love to see them.

Back in the day I think a lot of folks were using DCTV types of devices to bring the images in. My A1K wouldn't let me create any hires HAM images, only lores.

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primitivefunction

Posted Mon Mar 15, 2021 10:21 pm

intric8 wrote:
Mon Mar 15, 2021 10:49 am
I know Caldwell isn't considered a "fine artist" by the museums and art houses, but his work hits all the right buttons for me when I want to take a trip to my past and feel like a teenager again. I have to say, your description of the woman straddling the worm sounded quite a bit tastier than what I saw after clicking the link!
Yeah, I have to admit I didn't know Caldwell's work by name back then, but looking at his website now, I remember so many of those paintings from BITD. He certainly liked to paint attractive women but I don't think he veered too far into T&A territory. At the time I was probably more of a Chris Achilleos fan. His work had started appearing on a few Amiga game boxes in the early 90s and I eventually picked up a couple of his art books.
intric8 wrote:
Mon Mar 15, 2021 10:49 am
Curious - and I know this is a long shot - but do you have those art files on disk anymore? I'd love to see them.
No, unfortunately not. They were all on a hard disk that bit the dust long ago. I was trying to remember what format those would have been in. They might have been HAM8 but more likely they were 640x480 256 colour GIFs that I converted to IFF ILBM. Around that time I was downloading everything from BBSs, so that's probably where they originated. Nobody I knew had an AGA Amiga so pretty much everything came in via 2400BPS modem.





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