About a month ago, I updated you about a new member perk we were working on, one that continued the Autopian’s exclusive in the industry tradition of generating unique member perks on 40+ year-old deeply obsolete 8-bit computers. Well, I’m happy to say that after about a month of exciting, tedious, and sometimes terrifying work, the hardest part of this has been completed, and we are well on our way to producing our all-new member perk: unique, randomly-generated 8-bit cars!
You remember why we do this, right? By now, you must know all about the benefits of becoming an Autopian member: it helps to support good, independent media in these trying times, I’ll draw you a car for your birthday, you’ll get some great swag and merch. But for renewing members, I can’t hand-draw you another car every year – I need to find some sort of way to at least partially automate the process, while still keeping some degree of personal, even intimate connection. That’s where these 8-bit cars come in!
Last year I did this but made these funny little robot guys, something David was never really down with. That’s because David couldn’t get past the idea that we are a car website, and should be producing car images. I ignored him last year, because I’d already made all the robot graphics and it’s just fun, but this year – well, this year I gave in and made cars.
I hand-made all of the graphical elements for these cars, pixel-by-pixel. And, on an old Apple II, the vintage computer I’m doing all of this on, that’s not easy, because Apple II graphics are deeply weird. I love them and I think they have so much charm, but there’s all kinds of weird color restrictions and other bizarre limitations to deal with – I go over it all in this post.
Last time, I made robots with three sections, and five options for each part, not counting color changes. This time, for the cars, there are four sections, with ten options for each part:
There’s a roof bit, a grille, a pair of lights/fenders, and then the bumper/wheels. So, 40 pieces in all, which you can see here, arranged into ten separate cars:
They’re kind of bonkers looking, I know, but that’s what you get when you combine me and archaic machines like these, I suppose. The Apple II basic high resolution screen (high resolution in the context of a machine developed in 1977 means 280 pixels by 192 pixels. You have file icons on your desk with more pixels.) can display six colors: black, white, purple, green, orange and blue, so that should explain the garish color choices.
Oh, and saving the graphics turned out to be a challenge as well, because of an error in the software I was using. This was terrifying, because I could have lost all of the work I’d done, which, if that happened, would have ended in me attempting to swallow a bunch of billiard balls. I took a gamble and saved to disk the area of memory I thought the shapes were stored in, and made some educated guesses about the size of this 40-element shape table – thankfully, it worked. That’s about 12.5 kilobytes of graphical data, by the way.
I’ll be making cars from randomized elements for each of the four sections, with ten choices for each, and if my mathematical education serves me well – which it never has before – then I think that comes to, let’s see… screw it, let me Google this?
So the formula seems to be
nCr = n!/ (r! * (n-r)!)
So, we have 40 total options for four separate elements, which if we plug those values into the formula, we get 40C4 = 40! / (4! * (40-4)!) = 91,390 possible cars!
Wait, is that right? Because there’s 40 separate parts, but they’re divided into four categories of 10 options each. So would that affect how many cars can get made? Screw it, I don’t know. But I’m pretty sure there’ll be plenty. I hope?
I’ll also be randomizing car names, with year, make and model, so every car will have that, too.
The program that generates these cars will be run on a real, honest-to-Woz 1980-era Apple II Plus, and the images will be transferred to the modern world by having the Apple II trigger the shutter of a camera via its game controller port!
Yes, that’s right, exciting stuff!
So if you want your own custom, only-one-in-the-world 8-bit car, you need to become a member, or renew your membership! I’ll be finishing the car randomizer/car name generator BASIC program hopefully this week, and we should be delivering these soon!
It feels good to be an Autopian, right?
[Ed Note: As a reminder, this is for Velour or RCL members for now… MH]
We had an AppleIIC+ when I was growing up. I remember wondering why the game graphics were so heavy on green and purple, even though our later model could use more colors. I put in many hours on the original Test Drive from Accolade.
We had it from about 1986 right up until it was replaced by an IBM Aptiva around around 1995. The Aptiva had a 1.6 GIGABYTE hard drive, causing young me to exclaim, “What’s a GIG? A thousand Megs? How are we ever going to use that?”
So… Does your use of “another” mean that someone who upgraded to, say, Velour while renewing, who therefore hasn’t yet received a hand-drawn car at all, is still eligible? You know, hypothetically?
I love the graphics! My first computer was an Apple IIGS, and my elementary school had a lab full of Apple II clones.
Jason, do you have one of these?
https://www.bigmessowires.com/floppy-emu/
I don’t! I just transfer stuff from my modern Mac to real disks via a serial cable link. But I do want one of those, as it would be a lot easier and the old recycled floppies I use are going to run out someday!
The last time I tried to use floppies, the rust just kind of crumbled off of the plastic disk and took all 144k of data with it.
You have got to clean up the case and keyboard on that IIc!
That’s not obsolete, it’s a collector’s item. And it would be right at home in r/retrobattlestations
As for “saving” your work, you could always just take a picture worst-case. The upside of doing 8-bit work is that nothing much you do will degrade the quality/resolution.
I think he meant saving the individual parts for use in the program later.
Agreed, but he was also worried about losing it before he got the designs out. With pictures, you at least have something that can be used for merchandise or whatever the end-goal is. Even if you can’t fire it up and edit it in whatever program you’re using.
You can never have too many backups.
Forget about obsolete. This shit is obsolneat! While I only date back to the Apple IICX days I greatly appreciate your work in this important field of computing.
Weird is Good. At least according to my brand spanking new peach colored Autopian T-shirt that arrived today.
Sometime soon this will be made into an NFT
10x10x10x10
You Sir, are a googly-eyed missile man.
You sir, are a really fried missive man.
Half baked perhaps, never fried.
“They’re kind of bonkers looking, I know, but that’s what you get when you combine me and archaic machines like these, I suppose.”
If you locate the intersection of silly and complicated, then the user name of Jason Torchinsky checks out.
That’s just the cutest Mad Max motoring mélange ever!
So awesome! This reminds me of a feature I owned as a producer for a video game.
We were creating a futuristic expansion for the game and we need a wide variety of cars, but only enough modeling time for two cars. I told my art team to explore a modular system to build cars, and voila! By creating interchangeable front/middle/ends, we ended up with 12 cars for the price of two!
These make me feel like I’m about to die of dysentery on the Oregon Road maybe.
Whoo woo, beep, bleep, click, warble, garble.