Nice. Might be interesting to try ctx.scale(0.9,1) or whatever ratio approximates the pixel shape on the Amiga in that video mode...would square up the shape of the floppy.
Now imagine your boss coming back a week later.... panic, I showed it to the client and they love it. Can you quickly change it to hold the floppy between the index finger and thumb - at an angle? It's probably easy to do.
Yes, a powerful language paired with an incredibly fast interpreter/compiler even on low end Amigas; not a BASIC fan here, but have to admit it was really great.
It's also Open Source [0], although it's entirely written in M68K assembly language (hence the high speed) which would likely turn any porting effort into a nightmare.
Root cause: The Amiga didn't have curves in its graphic primitives.
Just this week i read an article in a 1986 Byte magazine which included a comparison of the Amiga and Macintosh graphic privatives. The Amiga had color routines, but the Mac had circles, curves, rounded rectangles, and a few other desirable shapes that the Amiga lacked.
Except for the text, the Kickstart image is not a bitmap, it's the output of a vector drawing program using the built-in ROM routines. No curves, and that's what you get.
Tossing my JS implementation onto the pile as well, I guess. Missing the flood fill command; picked the wrong graphics library for this and it was too late by the time I'd realized it. ;) Easy enough to change over to something else, but it's time to move on.
I never would have guessed that the Kickstart 1.x graphic was vector, but it’s so clear in retrospect. It’s not hard to spot the nodes of the pre-Bézier shape paths once you’re looking for them!
ROM space was definitely at a premium, similarly the PS1 booting splash screen was a rendered 3d graphic, with synthesized sound, not a static image with PCM data.
In the mid-late 80s, I didn't think anything about the Amiga was as polished and nice looking as the Mac, but the insert floppy graphic didn't stand out to me as below the standards of the rest of the interface.
> Additionally, I don't like the aspect ratio of the floppy disk.
The Amiga used a standard 320x200 pixel mode [1] for it's boot screen. On a normal 4:3 CRT this mean the pixels are non-square. Since CRTs are analog, it doesn't really matter to the monitor, but if you just look at the digital bits without stretching them it looks a little flat.
I thought it was just the Amiga. Like, Macs had square pixels, to my recollection, both 512x342 and 640x480. I had forgotten that VGA was 320x200 not 320x240, but PCs also had 640x480, so it seems like square or not square depended on the mode.
Strictly speaking, I don't think square pixels were a characteristic of the monitor. If you looked closely there were little dots on a shadow mask monitor considerably smaller than the average pixel, or horizontal gaps between the wires on a trinitron.
