New Member Benefit from Real 40 Year Old Computers: Randomly Generated 8-Bit Cars!

By now you probably know all about the benefits of an Autopian membership: it helps support good, independent media in these difficult times, I’ll draw you a car for your birthday, you get great gifts and merchandise, and you’ll be included in special content, Events and bespoke, personalized, handwritten erotica privy to the Autopian authors of your choice, pending the lawsuit’s outcome and whether I can get everyone to agree to try it, which, so far, no one has. Prudish.

For those Autopian Velor and RCL members who have renewed, I want to tell you about an updated benefit! This replaces the hand drawn car drawing on your birthday. Last year you received a unique, custom-created robot image created by me using hand-drawn graphics and rendered on a real 1982 Apple )(+ computer. This year we’re finally going to do what David wanted me to do First of all : Create randomly generated data Cars.

When we last announced the randomly generated robots, I said this about David’s reaction:

In the interest of full disclosure, I must tell you that David did this problems with this part of the project. David quite reasonably states that this is a car website, and we should deliver Car pictures to our members, not to robots! David was somewhat outraged by this and even spit some of the PB Blaster cocktail he drank in anger when he found out about the robots.

So, at least according to David, it’s time we did the same with cars.

Creating the graphic elements is by far the most time-consuming part of it; I created a proof of concept using five discrete parts that can be combined: an upper section/windshield section, a left side/headlight, a right side/headlight, a grille and a lower bumper/tire. You can see the elements here at the top left, the assembled cars (in various color combinations) below:

The goal is to have between five and ten different bits for each element there. So let’s be hopeful and say I do ten of each, and if we count the left and right lights together as one element, I think that makes over 10,000 combinations? Is that correct? And then we also have four color options for each element, so it’s even bigger, and I don’t feel like doing the math like that. But it might be a lot.

The colors may look strangely blurry and strange, all due to the strange way the old 1977 Apple II design handles colors. I’ll go through this again painful Details on this can be found in the previous robot post, but the short explanation is that all of the Apple II’s colors are actually a byproduct of the strange way NTSC TVs produce colors. They’re actually all patterns made of monochrome dots!

Here, look:

In any case, I find it fascinating. And as before, the cars are generated with a randomly generated make and model name via the BASIC program and are all photographed with a camera connected to the Apple II’s game port! See!

See? We don’t do anything stupid here! I have a lot to do here, and the program I’m using to create the graphic assets gave me disk errors, so I had to quit it and just save to disk the portion of memory where I think the shapes are stored – for Luck I guessed right, but it’s not ideal. Well, yes.

Anyway, all third year members, we’re so glad you stuck around and I look forward to getting you your unique 8-bit car as soon as possible!

Another reason to be an Autopian member: I’ll draw you a damn car

We’re the only car site that offers members perks on real 40-year-old computers, and here’s why that’s cool

I draw custom cars for Autopian members, but my god, why are no two requests the same?!