There's a lot of smooth shadows and highlights on this Enterprise model. In addition, it is the TOS design!
I thought Video Toaster existed prior to 1990 despite what Wiki says. I'm sure I first heard of it when I was still living in the midwest and saw a system set up in a computer store.
There will be jaggies on any sort of diagonal line on a raster computer display, especially back in the 80s. The C-64 screen res was 320x200 in "hi-res" mode. Sprites were low resolution objects, typically 8x8 pixels, with the pixel size matching those of of the pixels in the hi-res mode. The C-64 color palette spanned a paltry 16 colors, and was too limited to do proper anti-aliasing to hide such jaggies/aliases. Even the Amiga couldn't have rendered that smooth triangle I pointed out.
Who's name dropping? Jim Kent or me? If me, if I were really name dropping I would've gone for some bigger names I've met.
One of the lines in the vector graphic thingy on the left is suspiciously free of jaggies as well (lower center). Or it looks like the vertical resolution is much higher than the horizontal.
There's something going on with the aspect ratio for sure. That's probably why the scan of the TOS Enterprise is squished. According to this http://www.richardlagendijk.nl/cip/article/item/spot_the_commodore_2/en at least the font is an Amiga font. They might not have had a 3D modeling program in '86 but they where doing 3D demo animations from pretty much day one on the Amiga, weren't they? Those huge displays in Starfleet look hand drawn (for 1986). Another reason why I think the animated stuff like on Spock's teleprompter is computer. If you're going to do 23rd century cell animation you'd make it jaggie free like the Starfleet displays, right? Also, wouldn't hand animating jaggies that looked just like cutting edge 16 bit animation be somewhat difficult? But yes, that jaggie-free arrow is weird. This thread is turning out to be a lot more fun than I expected. Did I mention at the beginning that I think The Voyage Home is possibly the most attractive Star Trek movie ever made?
Then you must love ACTION JACKSON, it is the only other movie where the smoke levels are so obnoxious (like Chekov running through a CLOUD BANK inside an aircraft carrier) that you have to start laughing while watching it, yet simultaneously feeling bad for what everybody had to breathe on set.
In 1987 I had a choice between getting an Atari 1040ST or an Amiga 2000 and I chose the Atari. Lets just say, "I choose poorly."
Hi Tom, If you were creating graphics and animation then yes, the Amiga had the advantage. I owned a three over the product line's lifespan and loved what they allowed me to do. However, if you were creating music then the Atari's with their built-in MIDI ports certainly had the advantage over the Amiga. Why MIDI ports weren't standard on all home computers, even to this day is a mystery to me!
That's just the pollution levels in the latter part of the 20th century...and Klingon gas. Speaking of Atari ST's, for them's who ain't seen it before, here's the mockup I made of a Star Trek game for a software company pitching to Simon & Schuster (who had the computer game rights then) back in late '86 using early 3D and animation packages for the ST. S&S turned it down because they didn't want a game requiring hand-eye coordination.
That was kinda fun. Didn't want hand-eye coordination, huh? That's about on par with not wanting to make a movie that requires the audience to keep its eyes open.
That would have been amazing for the era, I would have played the heck out of that! I love in spacedock that you have shuttles, workbees, guys in space suits going by and there's a Miranda class ship being worked on.