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A 3D mesh of the 1701-D from...1988?

I'm big on preservation of work as it looked, so what I've taken to doing is running the old animation files in an emulator, taking a screenshot of each frame, and then assembling those images into an animation in Final Cut Pro. It's slightly tedious, but the results are the best I've found. The only tricky bit is finding a video frame rate that corresponds to the refresh rate on the computer.
 
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Forbin said:
I'm sad that I never came up with a way to convert my animation files from Amiga to a PC-friendly format. I did record them to VHS via a genlock, and recently digitized the VHS tape to a PC file. But there were glitches on the 20 year old VHS tape, of course. :(.
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If you can still read the original files, try Multishow. It uses Java, so it's platform independent, and I just used it to recover a lot of old files ... including that wonderful image of Legion's Phoenix that I'd downloaded and saved a decade-and-a-half ago. It will even display IFF Anims and supports register cycling. Maurice's method of saving animations frame-by-frame is superior, but possibly tedious, especially if you lack access to the original software. So I used Multishow and a screen recorder at several different FPS settings and have pretty good captures of the animations, and could break them down to individual frames from that for later reconstruction.

Here's a hand-drawn picture of the motion picture Enterprise that I made using DeluxePaint in high-res, interlaced mode back in 1986-87. It's the first time I've seen her in in nearly 20 years!

starships.png
 
Psion said:
Forbin said:
I'm sad that I never came up with a way to convert my animation files from Amiga to a PC-friendly format. I did record them to VHS via a genlock, and recently digitized the VHS tape to a PC file. But there were glitches on the 20 year old VHS tape, of course. :(.
Click to expand...

If you can still read the original files, try Multishow. It uses Java, so it's platform independent, and I just used it to recover a lot of old files ... including that wonderful image of Legion's Phoenix that I'd downloaded and saved a decade-and-a-half ago. It will even display IFF Anims and supports register cycling. Maurice's method of saving animations frame-by-frame is superior, but possibly tedious, especially if you lack access to the original software. So I used Multishow and a screen recorder at several different FPS settings and have pretty good captures of the animations, and could break them down to individual frames from that for later reconstruction.

Here's a hand-drawn picture of the motion picture Enterprise that I made using DeluxePaint in high-res, interlaced mode back in 1986-87. It's the first time I've seen her in in nearly 20 years!

starships.png
Click to expand...

Epic art :) :techman:
 
Psion said:
If you can still read the original files, try Multishow. It uses Java, so it's platform independent, and I just used it to recover a lot of old files ... including that wonderful image of Legion's Phoenix that I'd downloaded and saved a decade-and-a-half ago. It will even display IFF Anims and supports register cycling...
Click to expand...
I just tried it and it works like a charm on most of the Atari .SEQ animations I tried it on. Only two didn't play right, so I'm going to try to figure out what's different about them.

Psion said:
Maurice's method of saving animations frame-by-frame is superior, but possibly tedious, especially if you lack access to the original software. So I used Multishow and a screen recorder at several different FPS settings and have pretty good captures of the animations, and could break them down to individual frames from that for later reconstruction.
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I'll probably still use my technique, but I'd use Multishow to get the frames to capture if it has a frame-by-frame advance option, which I've not found yet. It would spare me the step of running the animations the original software in an emulator.

Psion said:
Here's a hand-drawn picture of the motion picture Enterprise that I made using DeluxePaint in high-res, interlaced mode back in 1986-87. It's the first time I've seen her in in nearly 20 years!
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Neat! I have some elevations of the same ship drawn on an Atari 800XL in much lower resolution. lol
 
^Okay, but all my files are on Amiga-formatted 3.5" floppies, and I don't have the Amiga any more. :shrug:
 
Forbin said:
^Okay, but all my files are on Amiga-formatted 3.5" floppies, and I don't have the Amiga any more. :shrug:
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If you need a max conversion for them, or other exported format, send me the file and we can do a test, if you´re interested. ;)
 
^^^Wouldn't he have to have a means to read the disks, as that's what the problem appears to be.
 
Forbin said:
... Never found a PC program to match it. Well, Flash, I suppose, but I hate Flash.
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These days, I love MyPaint, but only for static images. DeluxePaint was amazing and I'd kill to be able to use it again on the more powerful systems available today. Animation was ridiculously easy in DPaint ... just define the length of the animation and start painting. Need something to move? Create an animbrush. Need something to distort? DPaint had an elementary morphing algorithm and could rotate a flat object in three dimensions. Want to just waste time? Define an animation range, start painting with a large, circular brush, and hold down whatever key was used to advance to the next frame (I forget) ... as soon as you get to the last frame, the program loops seamlessly back to the first frame and lets you continue to paint over the earlier frames. Now start chasing the circles you left in the first cycle. Repeat several times and you have a trippy animation full of organic-looking activity.

It's as though software since then has been re-written for classical artists ... which is a good thing, but they've forsaken some of the cool things possible back before they knew what they were doing.
 
Psion said:
...Here's a hand-drawn picture of the motion picture Enterprise that I made using DeluxePaint in high-res, interlaced mode back in 1986-87. It's the first time I've seen her in in nearly 20 years!

starships.png
Click to expand...
Here are some elevations I did of the same ship in 1985 on an Atari 800XL using Atari Artist and the Atari Touch Tablet. Mind you, each screen was 160x192 pixels with only 4 colors at once (out of 128).

6402366117_0cd58d62fc_b.jpg

​
 
Maurice said:
...
Here are some elevations I did of the same ship in 1985 on an Atari 800XL using Atari Artist and the Atari Touch Tablet. Mind you, each screen was 160x192 pixels with only 4 colors at once (out of 128).

6402366117_0cd58d62fc_b.jpg

​
Click to expand...

Alright, you win the resurrection of old files contest! Somewhere with my TRS-80 I have a floppy disk with my effort to recreate the opening credits and Klingon battle with V'Ger in 128x48 monochrome graphics, but I doubt that'll ever see the light of day again. Written in Level II BASIC (or maybe even Microsoft's Level III BASIC), it sensed the start of music playing on the cassette port and then printed text and graphics in synch with the music. The Klingon ships were very crude, but recognizable, and shots of V'Ger's cloud required embedded machine language to update the screen fast enough. There's no way I'd ever be able to get it running again and transcoded to put up on the Internet, though.
 
Psion said:
Alright, you win the resurrection of old files contest! Somewhere with my TRS-80 I have a floppy disk with my effort to recreate the opening credits and Klingon battle with V'Ger in 128x48 monochrome graphics, but I doubt that'll ever see the light of day again. Written in Level II BASIC (or maybe even Microsoft's Level III BASIC), it sensed the start of music playing on the cassette port and then printed text and graphics in synch with the music. The Klingon ships were very crude, but recognizable, and shots of V'Ger's cloud required embedded machine language to update the screen fast enough. There's no way I'd ever be able to get it running again and transcoded to put up on the Internet, though.
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I'd love to see that! There's a site that discusses how to transfer TRS-80 disks to a PC where they can be used via emulation, and one poster offers to convert disks for people who aren't set up to do it.

Here are some more images.
6402366025_e20bedc46d_b.jpg

​

The left two are as-drawn in 1985. The lower right one is a 2009 redo of the 1985 version, using what I later learned about anti-aliasing and better use of the palette. The upper right one is an Atari 8-bit version of a higher resolution/color depth image I drew on my Atari ST the same year.
 
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Awesome Pixel art :) :techman:

Reminds how much id like to see Starfleet Academy for SNES rereleased on the DS or 3DS :)
 
Kaiser said:
Awesome Pixel art :) :techman:

Reminds how much id like to see Starfleet Academy for SNES rereleased on the DS or 3DS :)
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Well, the following images are from the same year, when I moved up to a 16-bit Atari ST!
6402365957_165afb4ed9_z.jpg


The upper-left image was one of the (if not the) first images I drew on the ST. It was a mega-redo of the Klingon ship image on the 800XL (see previous post). What doesn't show here is that I used color cycling to make the rays of the V'ger bolt spin.

The upper-right image was a digitized photo of the Earth I color reduced and then drew atop.

The lower-left image was an attempt to recreate one of the better publicity photos of the TMP Enterprise. In 2009 I redrew this image to work on an Atari 8-bit (see previous post).

Finally, the lower right image was a real pain to do. as it was based on a tiny image on the back cover of The Making of Star Trek (hence the colors being off from what they really were on the show). The hardest part about drawing this was the paint program I was using (NeoChrome v0.5) was a pre-release program that didn't have a circle drawing function! I ended up drawing a circle on paper using a compass, cutting it out to leave a large hole in the paper, stuck it to the screen and placed pixels just inside the edge to draw the circle. Now that's "manual override"!
 
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Maurice said:
^^^Wouldn't he have to have a means to read the disks, as that's what the problem appears to be.
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Correct. I had "cross-DOS" on my Amiga to bring all the still images (I think Corel read .IFF files to convert them to JPGs), and it let me convert the Caligari meshes because there was a version for PC (TrueSpace). But there was no conversion for .ANIM format to anything PC-readable.

The files on disk, and on a removeable drive, are up in the attic. I doubt the media is in very good shape.
 
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