Lolly Sticks

Another day, another video of a rather lame mock uploaded to YouTube. We're back to 4:3 again, and a short video a did to teach myself how to use Adobe Premiere Elements:

Before I bought Premiere Elements in early 2008 I'd never done any video editing before, so it was all very new to me. I did huge a number of videos to experiment and work out a good workflow to transfer my material from Flash or Fireworks to video. I recorded my work over and over again onto the same DVD-RW and then scuttled downstairs to the television to see how the results looked on a CRT television rather than an LCD monitor. As you can see from this video, I hadn't yet worked out things like interlacing or how to age transparencies properly.

Although the first BBC 1 globe symbol I remember from my childhood was the black and cyan version with the italic "COLOUR" lettering, the first BBC 2 symbol I remember was the striped cylindrical 2. I saw this countless times waiting for Play School on weekday mornings or Play Away - the strange oasis that appeared between boring black and white films - on Saturdays. BBC 1 and ITV were showing wall to wall sport at the time due to their regulatory obligation to provide programming for the hard of thinking. Channel Four didn't even exist. Play School mornings were usually accompanied by a cup of Mellow Birds made with milk. Despite being Julie Steven's favourite beverage, it never seemed to dissolve properly back then, so you'd get little brown bits on the top...

When the computer generated ==2== symbol replaced the cylinder on BBC 2, I never really took to it. The cylinder's animation was far more interesting, so I often wondered what would have happened if the stripey cylindrical 2 had been kept but updated. The end result, my "lolly sticks" symbol was created in Swift 3D. The animation does a very similar thing to the cylinder - the coloured stripes rotate in opposite directions - but to make it more interesting the camera does a 270 degree trip around the stripes as they do so.

Swift 3D - click to enlarge

One interesting thing about the lolly sticks symbol is that I created it at 400 x 300 in Swift 3D. As I was exporting it in vector format as a .swf it didn't matter what size it was so long as the aspect ratio was 4:3. Vector 3D is something that Swift 3D really excels at, although it's very good at raster 3D as well. After more experimentation I'd later scrub this approach in favour of working at 720 x 576 and correcting in advance in Swift 3D itself for non-square PAL pixels.

Thin hairline 2 in Flash

To get the striped 2 into Swift 3D in the first place, I drew it in Macromedia Flash 8. I drew it as a series of hairlines, and then turned the hairlines into thick rounded strokes.

 Exactly the same graphic, stroked in Inkscape

After doing this, I turned the strokes into fills, and exported the resulting graphic as an Adobe Illustrator file for importing into Swift 3D.

GNAT Flash - Click to Enlarge

The clock is my Macromedia Flash 8 version of BBC Engineer Richard Russell's computer originated GNAT (Generator, Network Analogue Time) clocks. The GNATs were used by BBC 1 and BBC 2 throughout the 1980s. There was even a rather nice yellow and blue Open University version for a few years. You can download a screensaver created using the final version of the GNAT software from Richard's site. Richard has also written an article that discusses the history of the GNAT.

Teacher's discipline problem #5435 - POW!!!!!!!!

The schools dots is again another one of my Flash 8 concoctions. This is the second version, where I finally got the font right! This, along with the clock, is the sort of animation that's very easy to do in Actionscript, but a real pain to produce a version you can export to use in video projects.

Henry Woolf was even better with Charlie than with Pinter

The slide was based on a BBC1 version I did around ten years ago now for the sadly soon to be defunct BBC Cult website. I simply traced a screen capture in Flash that the BBC supplied to me from the opening titles of the programme "Words and Pictures".

My treatment of the slide was very unsatisfactory - both in terms of the fading and blurring I used and the very bad banding that appears on the image. It looks very fake indeed, and one day I must get round to writing a post about how I would have gone about doing that job properly.

Just a note about the font - when I'm doing 70s stuff that requires Helvetica I tend to use URW++ Nimbus Sans these days. I'll explain why in a post about Thames Television some other time.

The music is from one of my favourite programmes - 4Square - and was composed by Ian McKim. The music was designed as a tension bed underneath a computer generated (Acorn Archimedes) maze game and made for a very exciting minute of television.

Anyway, technically a rather unaccomplished little video of another lame mock. But it brings back lot of memories and I enjoy watching it from time to time.

From Claptrap to Claptraps

Normally I use this blog to drone on about my own claptrap. However, today I'd like to use it to have a look at a friend's.

Level 1 - It's all uphill from here...

To be more precise, a computer puzzle game called Claptraps, written by "testpilotmonkey". It's one of the most joyfully bonkers and imaginative games I've ever played - the sort of thing Oliver Postgate would have come up with if he'd have been given a book about scripting languages.

The game itself was written in the language Python with the help of the wonderful PyGame SDL library.  If you've ever want to write a computer game for GNU/Linux, Windows, or Mac OS this combination is the place to start and indeed Claptraps will work beautifully on all three of these platforms and doubtless several more besides.

I think this game is really rather special for lots of reasons:

• it is released under the Free Software Foundation's General Public Licence or GPL. That in itself is a marvellous and selfless thing to do, particularly when you consider how much hard work has gone into the game.
• the quality of the music testpilotmonkey has composed to include in the game - I really enjoy listening to it.
• the graphics, which have a wonderful cut-out animation feel
• and, most of all, the standard of the puzzles. The game design is incredibly clever and the puzzles are fiendish but solvable with thought. That makes it one of the most rewarding games I've ever played.

I could talk about the game at length here, but why not download it yourself from testpilotmonkey's blog?

The game has come on in leaps and bounds since this video was made of an early demo version, but it's worth a look:

The gameplay is loosely inspired by the games in the Repton Infinity suite with dashes of Bonecruncher and XOR. However it has a personality all of its own, something which you don't get in modern games written by huge teams.

I'm hoping to do some work of my own on Claptraps if I get the chance over the coming weeks - in true GPL spirit I've been studying and modifying bits and bobs already which I hope to start sharing soon. The code is very, very clearly written and I'm looking forward to having a proper dabble with it enormously.

NB: As the game is still a work in progress, GNU/Linux users may find they need to append two lines to ClapTraps.py:

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

Also, don't forget to right click on the Claptraps.py in the file browser, and go to Properties ➔ Permissions and check the Execute check box to Allow Executing File as Program. You'll also need to make sure you have the pygame package installed on your computer - but if you've installed GNU/Linux in the first place I'm sure you can manage this.

Windows users can just click on the .exe. I know nothing at all about Apples apart from the fact that Granny Smiths are my favourite and my mother's bramley crumble with custard is delicious.

Happy St George's Day

As I'm English, I thought I'd celebrate today with a video of my choice - my daughter speaking very good English even though she hasn't been there since she was eighteen months old:

But I suspect people reading this blog will be more interested in the first part of the video.

I've been playing with doing more work in widescreen in the past couple of years. The reason is simply that watching pillar boxed stuff annoys me. I always used to hate those letterboxed films they showed on BBC2 for film buffs with magnifying glasses when I was a kid. So as 4:3 televisions are becoming harder and harder to find and I have a 16:9 monitor I've been animating everything in 16:9 for the past couple of years - perversely I've got DVD's full of 16:9 presentation I've done in Flash from the 50s, 60s and 70s.

Flashy house building - Click to Enlarge

I animated the Playschool house animation from scratch in Macromedia Flash 8 and the BBC 1 South West globe in Swift 3D v5.0 - both at 720 x 576 for use as anamorphic 16:9 in Adobe Premiere Elements. The video was filmised in VirtualDub using the MSU Old Cinema plug in. I hope to have an example Flash animation of some kind filmised using OpenShot on GNU/Linux (I'll probably be on Fedora 13 by then) to compare this against soon - the options for filmising your work on this look very promising indeed.

The Whole Wide World in Swift 3D version 5

The BBC1 South West globe was animated at 50 frames per second, and I used that to create an interlaced 50 fields per second file in VirtualDub. The colour was keyed on in Adobe Premiere Elements. The announcement is actually Peter Macann (former Tomorrow's World presenter) and was from BBC1 South in Southampton.

The BBC1 caption was traced in Macromedia Flash 8 from a scan of the original BBC1 globe caption from BBC Graphic Designer Bob Richardson.

The Playschool music (the definitive Paul Reade version) has a voice over from the magical Brian Cant and the day is given to us by Australia's finest singer, Don Spencer.

ATV on the BBC

I have a YouTube channel called "stupidrubbish" where I put bits and pieces of video I've created as and when I get the chance.

The channel's name "stupidrubbish" comes from the rather unaffectionate term my wife uses to refer to television presentation. Her usual question would be "Are you working or are you doing stupid rubbish?". The answer would often be "Both." In Hungarian, the term translates to "hülye szemét" and sounds even ruder than it does in English.

Absolute bobbins, and I freely admit it

Amazingly, although it contains all sorts of bits and pieces I've poured my heart and soul into getting as accurate as possible, the most popular video on the channel is something I very nearly didn't upload at all, and did nearly 25 years ago. It was my first attempt to recreate some presentation on a computer and it was not done in Flash, or even on a PC. It was done on a BBC Master 128 computer in 1986, written in BBC BASIC and was the ATV colour zoom logo.

I hadn't seen an ATV logo in years in 1986, and wondered whether I would ever see one again. You can see from the animation that I couldn't really remember what the logo looked like, or even what happened in the animation, but I suppose it all adds to the charm. I planned the lightspots and the logo out on graph paper using a pencil and pair of compasses.

To draw the logo I used the Acorn Graphics Extension ROM (GXR) arcs (the GXR extensions were included in the Master by default), a GXR custom fill pattern and screen memory bank switching in order to animate the thing. I also used GCOL1 for mixing the colours using a bitwise AND in the lightspots and palette switching to allow me to animate on bits of the logo without having to wait to draw them.

A number of commenters expressed interest in the code, so here it is:

1REM The "ATV" logo

2REM by

3REM Dave Jeffery

10MODE2

20VDU23;8202;0||

30HIMEM=&3000

40*FX112,2

50*FX113,2

60PROCnext_setup

70HIMEM=&3000

80*FX112,1

90*FX113,1

100PROCcircles

110HIMEM=&3000

120*FX112,2

125*FX19

130*FX113,2

140PROCnext

150PROCletters

160END

170DEFPROCnext_setup

180CLS

190VDU23,2,&2A2A;&2A2A;&2A2A;&2A2A;

200MOVE600,500

210MOVE950,700

220PLOT173,250,700

230MOVE600,900

240MOVE250,700

250PLOT173,950,700

260GCOL0,0:MOVE600,700:PLOT157,600,892

270GCOL1,1

280MOVE600,300

290MOVE950,500

300PLOT173,250,500

310MOVE600,700

320MOVE250,500

330PLOT173,950,500

340GCOL3,1

350MOVE600,500

360PLOT157,788,500

370GCOL0,134:GCOL0,7

380PLOT133,600,500

390GCOL16,0

400GCOL0,129

410PLOT133,900,50

420PLOT133,600,688

430:

440c=1

450GCOL0,128

460FORbox=250 TO 958 STEP 8

470GCOL2,c

480MOVEbox,288:DRAWbox,900

490c=c+1:IFc=7 c=1

500NEXT

510GCOL3,15:MOVE600,700:PLOT157,600,888

520:

530ENDPROC

540DEFPROCnext

550VDU19,15,7||

551FORF=0TO75:NEXT

560VDU19,0,4||

570FORF=1 TO 6:VDU19,F,4;0;19,F+8,7;0;

580NEXT F

590FORF=1 TO 6:VDU19,F,3;0;19,F+8,3;0;: FORW=0TO100:NEXT

600NEXT

610VDU19,15,4||

620ENDPROC

630:

640DEFPROCcircles

650VDU19,0,7;0;19,8,0||

660COLOUR8

670Key=GET

680GCOL0,1

690FORloop=600 TO 792 STEP 8

700MOVE600,700:PLOT157,loop,700

710NEXT

720GCOL1,2

730FORloop=500 TO 692 STEP 8

740MOVE500,500:PLOT157,loop,500

750NEXT

760GCOL1,4

770FORloop=500 TO 692 STEP 8

780MOVE700,500:PLOT157,700,loop

790NEXT

800PRINTTAB(5,26);"IN COLOUR"

810FORwait=0 TO 1000:NEXT

820ENDPROC

830:

840DEFPROCletters

850GCOL0,128:GCOL0,3

860MOVE500,708:MOVE500+50,708+150

870PLOT85,500+75,708

880PLOT85,500+125,708+150

890MOVE500+100,708+150: MOVE500+150,708: PLOT85,500+150,708+150: PLOT85,700,708

900MOVE550,708+50:PLOT101,675,708+25

910FORwait=0 TO 1500:NEXT

920MOVE500,652:PLOT101,700,628

930MOVE575,628:PLOT101,625,528

940FORwait=0 TO 1500:NEXT

950MOVE500,328+150:MOVE500+50,328

960PLOT85,500+75,328+150

970PLOT85,500+125,328

980MOVE500+100,328: MOVE500+150,328+150: PLOT85,500+150,328: PLOT85,700,328+150

990REPEATUNTILFALSE

1000ENDPROC

If you want to run the code, why not pop along to BBCMicro.com, where you can get hold of a BBC Emulator to try this out for yourself.

If you run the code in an emulator (or on a real BBC Master 128) you'll notice I took a few liberties with the timings when I was editing the video together to upload to YouTube!

Hopefully I've got a bit better at recreating the ATV logo since then. A more recent attempt, in Macromedia Flash 8, is here:

Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Sant

I must admit glass scares me. Oh I see, you just give the impression of glass don't you?

Orbituary

I had finished creating my BSB Squarial font on December 16th. It was now the December 17th, the event was on January 9th, Rory hadn't yet received any BSB material from Kaleidoscope and time was getting short.

So, to make sure I had a fighting chance of getting an ident ready in time for Rory to use, I turned to the ever reliable TV-Ark site. I found some wonderful scans of BSB promotional material that I could use as source material. I started putting as much of this as I thought would useful into Inkscape.

The first thing I did were the channel logos - Movies, Now, Sport, Galaxy and Power Station. Due to the good quality of the source material I ended up being able to produce nice vector versions of these logos in Inkscape.

Five Inkscape BSB channel logos

I also used Google Image Search which sucessfully came up with some other source material I thought may be handy. At the fascinating Vintage Broadcasting site I found a fantastic IBA breakdown caption, which I recreated in Inkscape.

Inkscape IBA/BSB breakdown caption

...and a test card used for engineering tests. Again I recreated it in Inkscape.

Inkscape BSB Engineering Card

Another thing I found was the caption that was broadcast when BSB transmissions on the Marco Polo satellite ceased. Again here's my Inkscape recreation.

Inkscape BSB Closure caption

It was interesting that they used Friz Quadrata rather than the BSB corporate font for this. I suppose they must have been past caring by then!

Once I'd done all this I sent it all off to Rory in Inkscape SVG format so that he could use or edit any of the files I created if he needed to.

The good news was that Rory had received the BSB material from Kaleidoscope. The bad news was that it seemed to be mainly third generation VHS stuff. This is a nightmare source material for recreation because the VHS format chucks away so much picture detail and colour information that recreating anything from grabs of VHS material is slow, frustrating and largely down to guesswork.

However, Rory did send back ident grab of a BSB logo which was very handy, and which I duly recreated in Inkscape. The letters are a bolder weight of the BSB font than the one used in the caption below it, so I drew them from scratch.

Inkscape BSB logo

The coloured ring in the BSB logo is quite interesting. To do this I created a coloured background that was made of a red, yellow, green and blue fills overlayed on top of each other and grouped into a single object.

Inkscape BSB logo with the ring mask unset

Then I created the shape of the ring, and used that as a mask over the coloured background.

My final port of call was Mike Brown's excellent mb21 site. The mb21 site contains an extensive library of scans historical documents related to UK Broadcast transmission. What I was after was the famous BSB testcard complete with the girl who won the newspaper "be a the satellite test card girl" competition.

I created the testcard with a green circle in the centre in place of a photograph and a Kaleidoscope logo in place of a channel logo. The green circle was so that Rory could key in whatever he wanted.

Inkscape BSB/Kaleidoscope test card

Once I had done this, and sent it to Rory I had done about all the still images I usefully could so I couldn't delay doing the animated ident in Flash any longer. I still had no audio too, but I decided I'd start creating an ident anyway and hope for the best.

After Channel 4 burst onto the scene in 1982 with its famous CGI blocks logo there had been a glut of shiny plastic and metallic 3D shapes whizzing about the screen in television presentation. That meant that by the time BSB came along just seven years later that sort of thing was all old hat. What was now in vogue was creating lots of soft fluttery layers of images on top of each other with subtle lighting changes.

This actually suited me, as I don't have my copy of Swift 3D here in Hungary with me, so I couldn't have created something very three dimensional anyway (although if I had had Swift 3D my finished BSB ident would have been much nicer).

The brief from Kaleidoscope was to create an ident with the BSB logo and the legend "The Quest Continues..." underneath it. Obviously thoughts of space and Star Trek and Dr. Who came to mind.

"The Quest Continues..." text would be easy - I'd simply zoom it into view with a trail Tyne Tees 1979 stylee. Clichéd, naff and typical of me...

Tyne-Tees style text zoom

For the background I used a nice picture of Pleiades star cluster that I found on Wikipedia. I'd used this before for a Rediffusion Christmas ident that I'd recreated for Transdiffusion. You can see it below, behind the Rediffusion ad astral logo - you'll probably have to click on the image below to see it.

Flash 8 Rediffusion Xmas recreation

One of the things I wanted was to make a nice form-up of the diamond shape around the BSB logo that represented the BSB "squarial" receiving dish. I also wanted to make this a bit kaleidoscopic, in honour of the fact that the ident was being done for Kaleidoscope.

I decided on the simple device of making the sides of the box zoom in with coloured trails using Flash motion tweens.

I did an early test with solid colours - and this looked all wrong. It looked like a 1970s cel animated ident.

Rather 70s...

However, with some gradient fills and some alpha transparency it suddenly looked all right.

What a difference a fill makes...

Rory sent some audio and a genuine BSB Galaxy ident - this was handy because I hadn't actually seen any real BSB presentation at this point.

I realised that I needed to make the ident longer, and I also needed to add some more elements to layer it a bit more and make it a bit more "Lambie-Nairn" than "Lamey-Dave". I came up with some ribbons accompanied by Galaxy-style five-pointed stars.

Animating the ribbons in Flash

These were simply animated using shape tweens (shape morphs) in Flash. As well as tweening the shape of the ribbons, I anmated the gradient fill inside them to simulate the lighting effects. I used primary and secondary colours rather than the subtler shades that Lambie Nairn used as I wanted to get over the idea of "television".

Completed ribbons layer

Again, drawing the ribbons in Macromedia Flash 8 was a horrible job and every second of doing it made me miss Inkscape terribly. Using Bézier handles in Flash 8 is fiddly and unintuitive and I can't believe how much work I actually did using them!

I could have used Flash 8 Professional filter effects in my ident, which would have allowed Gaussian blurs, compositing effects etc. and made the end result both more pleasant to look at and created an effect more faithful to the genuine BSB idents. However I decided against this as if I had relied upon them and Rory couldn't import them his end we would have been stuck. I didn't have time to post him a DVD of an exported video file from Flash.

Rory, as always, immediately spotted what was wrong with my ident and added some beautiful stars that slowly moved towards the viewer, which made all the difference to the finished product. And here it is:

The finished BSB "Quest" ident

I'm really, really pleased with the way the finished ident turned out. My comfort zone is doing material from the 50s, 60s and 70s so I was really dreading doing a job that was supposed to evoke the late 80s. So to get anything approaching half-decent was a huge relief.

It's hip to be Squarial

Kaleidoscope is a non-profit making organisation that researches vintage British television. Their publications are essential reading for anyone seriously interested in British television history. It also holds regular fund-raising events for the RNLI, where rare archive gems are screened and auctions of memorabilia are held.

I've done various graphic items for Kaleidoscope events in the past thanks to my friendship with the multi-talented Rory Clark. Rory recovers many of the domestic videotape recordings that Kaleidoscope discovers, and also compiles the videos and documentaries that are shown at their fund-raising events.

A bit of my past Kaleidoscope work

The last Kaleidoscope event was held jointly with the British Film Institute at NFT1 at the BFI Southbank, London on January 9th. Part of the event was a showcase of recently recovered programmes from the ill-fated BSB (British Satellite Broadcasting) service. Two of the main programme providers for BSB were Noel Gay TV and John Gau Productions. Sadly, nearly all of their programmes for BSB were junked. However Kaleidoscope has been busy helping track down domestic video recordings of lost BSB programmes to return them to the archives.

BSB corporate identity

Rory asked if I would like to contribute some graphics to help him out with the BSB segment, and I was delighted to be asked. The corporate look for BSB was designed by Martin Lambie-Nairn, and I think it was very nice indeed.

One of the key parts of the BSB corporate identity was a specially designed typeface. My first impression was that it looked similar to Albertus and Friz Quadrata. On looking at printed examples of the face, I decided it was an adaptation of the typeface Friz Quadrata, but I could not find a perfect match for in digital form. Therefore I decided it might be nice to make one.

To do this, I thought I'd go my usual route: I'd create glyphs in SVG format in the free software vector graphics package Inkscape, then I'd import my glyphs into the free software font design program FontForge 2.0 to create a truetype font file.

The first thing I did was think up a name - Squarial, which is a pun on the name of the Arial typeface and also the name of the distinctive square dish that you needed to receive BSB programmes.

The easy part being done, I then set to work. The first letter I looked at was the letter B. There were various differences I could see between this B and the B in Friz Quadrata. It was lighter, it had no flared serif at the base, the top loop was larger and there was an angled cut between the main vertical stem and the halfway line of the B.

Click to enlarge

The next letter I wanted to look at was the R, as this was another key letter to get right. As you can see, it is almost Agfa Rotis Semi Serif in appearance.

The other two letters I wanted to do were the S and the G. Once I'd got these right, I could use them as the basis for the rest of the alphabet.

I had to guess how some of the upper case glyphs would look, as I had no printed example, so I used the shapes found in Friz Quadrata as a base and modified them to match the letters I did have.

Click to enlarge

I've included some of my "guesses" above - hopefully they make some kind of coherent face when used with the other glyphs. Incidentally, I drew all the vector shapes in Squarial from scratch in Inkscape - the vector information in the truetype versions of Friz Quadrata I had was too messy and irregular to be of any use.

Due to the contraints of time, I didn't want to create lower case glyphs for the Squarial face, but I did want to add a small range of punctuation and some numerals so that Rory could use the finished font to caption the various clips that would be shown at the Kaleidoscope event.

One thing I thought would be nice would be to include Squarial-style squares as the points in the punctation. You can see some examples below.

Click to enlarge

Once the punctation was done I had a set of individual glyph .svg files all ready to import into FontForge.

The glyphs imported into FontForge with no problems at all. One of the things that saved me a lot of time when designing this font was keeping all of my Bézier control points on integer co-ordinates in Inkscape. I am now also much better at knowing where to put the control points so that FontForge will not need to add additional ones.

Sterling glyph in FontForge 2.0

And, after spending some hours kerning glyph pairs, I had a finished truetype font.

The finished font

The finished font, Squarial, is licensed under the SIL Open Font Licence (OFL) 1.1 and is available to download from here. Microsoft Windows users may need to use the free software tool 7-Zip to unpack the .tar.gz file.

The music accompanying the Kaleidoscope ident in this post is an excerpt from "The Iceman Cometh" from the album Grim by Maestoso. You can get hold of a copy on the Maestoso compilation "Uneasy Listening" which is available here.

Karmic Tablets...

I've wanted a graphics tablet ever since I watched a pretentious little series on BBC2 (Painting With Light, 1987) where artists such as David Hockney were given the Quantel Paintbox to play with for an afternoon. They all produced a load of bobbins, but it looked such fun.

My interest was rekindled when a former colleague of mine, the multi-talented artist David "Peanut" Paramore used to bring a graphics tablet in to work with him a few years ago. The sort of work he produced with it was (and is) incredible and I really wanted to have a go at using a tablet for myself.

So, for Christmas this year, I was delighted to finally receive a Trust TB 5300 graphics tablet.  Even after I asked my parents for this, I wasn't actually sure I'd be able to use the thing with GNU/Linux. I had visions of having to take a crash course in C and X programming in order to get the thing to work.

I needn't have worried - the nice thing about the GNU/Linux world is that its users tend to blog about getting unusual bits and bobs working on the operating system, and this was no exception.

A blog called "Dick's Open Source Life", which is written by Dick Thomas, came to my rescue and thanks to this blog post I have the Trust TB 5300 working on Ubuntu Karmic Koala very happily indeed.

Both Inkscape and The GIMP work fine; even pressure sensitivity functioning as expected. I didn't even need to callibrate the tablet as it worked fine out of the box.

In fact, the tablet even works properly when I'm running Macromedia Flash 8 via WINE.

Thanks once again for your help Dick!

Bakelite Milk Cheques

One of the blogs I follow is Cheeseford, a blog written by the author Louis Barfe. There's always something on there worth seeing, hearing or reading that I wouldn't have stumbled upon otherwise.

A good case in point was today, when Louis linked to a blog called Gypsy Creams, that is run by a friend of his. The blog presents scans of articles and advertisements from women's magazines from the 50s, 60s and 70s.

Quite apart from being filled with beautiful examples of the typography of the period and being very funny, it also very nostalgic. One image on the blog screamed out at me "do an SVG version in Inkscape, quick".

It was the Co-op "clover leaf" logo - something that evokes all sorts of memories from me. Chard High Street was dominated by the Co-op when I was growing up. There was the Co-op dairy, the Co-op furniture and clothes department store and the Co-op supermarket.

My paternal grandmother, who lived in Chard, was an atheist and staunch socialist (she was a very sensible woman - which is probably why she never liked me much) and because of that she liked to use the Co-op as much as possible. I remember the beautiful Bakelite milk cheques on her mantlepiece, the reams of Co-op dividend stamps, the 99 tea she used to buy and the Co-op milk bottles on her doorstep. Most of the things on her kitchen shelves would have the Co-op clover leaf logo on it somewhere.

Anyway, the first thing I did was cut the logo out of the scan from Gypsy Creams using The GIMP. I loaded the scan into Inkscape and then  drew the letter O at the top right hand corner. To draw the O, I drew two points, at the top middle and middle left of the O. I then copied and reflected the resulting curve to get the entire outline of the outside of the O. I then copied the outside of the O, and shrank it down in place by holding down Ctrl+Shift as I scaled it with the mouse to create the inner curve.

The Co-op has asked you all to do some Inkscape...

For the rest of the letters I simply copied the finished letter O on top of them and tweaked them slightly. I drew a triangle for the cut-outs on the P and C and a rectangle to create the descender on the P. A box for the outside and I was finished apart from colouring it in with some suitably faded colours. It took far longer to blog about than to do!

...especially for me!

And as for my Granny - well, it seems I'll never escape her. My daughter Mary looks almost exactly like her.

Repton Through Wine

A couple of days ago I rather glibly said that the PC versions of the computer game Repton ran fine with WINE on the GNU/Linux operating system. That's not quite true, so I thought I'd take a closer look at running Superior Interactive's PC versions of Repton 1, Repton 2 and Repton 3 on GNU/Linux.

WINE Is Not an Emulator

I have two computers here. They both run the GNU/Linux operating system with the GNOME desktop and have WINE installed. In case you didn't know, WINE is the little bit of free software magic that lets you run programs written for Microsoft Windows on GNU/Linux, Mac OS, FreeBSD and Solaris. My wife's computer runs the Fedora 12 distribution (or distro) of GNU/Linux and the free nouveau graphics driver. I've installed version 1.1.32 of Wine on my wife's computer. My computer currently runs Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) distro of GNU/Linux with the non-free nVidia driver. It has version 1.1.35 of WINE installed.

WINE 1.1.32 is the version currently available for popular distros such as Ubuntu or Fedora, and will therefore be the version most users are running. WINE 1.1.35 is the very latest version, and instructions on how to obtain it are available here.

The PC Repton games can be run "full screen" or in "windowed" mode, in a window on your desktop. You can toggle between these modes by pressing F10.

Repton 1

On WINE 1.1.32 the game will not run properly in "full screen" mode. It will run in "windowed" mode but suffers from a couple of issues. The first is masking - the masking of sprites and the pointer does not work at all.

Repton 1 masking visible on WINE 1.1.32

The second issue is digits missing from the screen selector boxes on the main menu screen.

The boxes at the base should contain digits

On WINE 1.1.35 Repton 1 runs perfectly in "windowed" mode so if you have WINE 1.1.35 or above I can recommend Repton 1 to anyone running GNU/Linux provided you're happy to have the game running in a window.

No masking visible on WINE 1.1.35

And the digits are present on WINE 1.1.35 too

It also runs reasonably well in "full screen" mode. The sprites are stretched, as no compensation is made for the aspect ratio of my widescreen monitor when making the display full screen. The game also suffers from the masking problems that affected Repton in "windowed" mode on WINE 1.1.32. But it does not suffer from the missing digits on the screen selector boxes that affected WINE 1.1.32.

Apart from the masking issue and the stretched sprites the game plays very well "full screen".

The Repton 1 level and sprite editor works with no issues on both versions of WINE.

Repton 2

On WINE 1.1.32 the game will not run properly in "full screen" mode. It will run in "windowed" mode but suffers from the same masking issue as Repton 1.

Repton 1 & 2 have same mask issue on WINE 1.1.32

On WINE 1.1.35 Repton 2 runs perfectly in "windowed" mode so, again, if you have WINE 1.1.35 or above I can recommend Repton 2 to anyone running GNU/Linux provided you're happy to have the game running in a window.

No mask issues on Repton 2 with WINE 1.1.35

It also runs reasonably well in "full screen" mode. The sprites are stretched, as again no compensation is made for the aspect ratio of my widescreen monitor when making the display full screen. The game also suffers from the masking problems that affected Repton 1 in "windowed" mode on WINE 1.1.32.

On exiting Repton 2 from full screen mode

However, unlike Repton 1, it crashes messily on exiting the program having been in full screen mode.

The level and sprite editor works with no issues on both versions of WINE.

Repton 3

The issues with Repton 3 are identical for both versions of WINE.

The game will not at all in "full screen" mode - in fact, selecting it will cause the game to crash messily. It leaves the screen at low resolution as it crashes so you have to either log out and in again.

Repton 3 in "windowed" mode

It will run in "windowed" mode, with issues. The first is that selecting "Run game in high priority mode" will cause the game to crash, and you need to reinstall the game before you can use it again.

The second is selecting the map. If you try and select the map the game will crash. So, Repton 3 will run (and run very well) in Windowed mode provided you don't try and look at the maps.

I told you not to look at the map...

The level and sprite editor works with no issues on both versions of WINE.

Conclusions

So there you have it. Other than no full screen mode Repton 1 and 2 work well on the latest version of WINE. Repton 3 has a serious fault (the lack of maps) and more minor niggles (no full screen mode, and the crasher upon selecting High Priority mode) but other than that is perfectly playable.

If you have tried to run one of these games with WINE I'd be interested to hear how you got on.

From The North

Recently I had another nice surprise - Michael S. Repton has uploaded a play-through of ROVERS, the Coronation Street theme I created for the BBC Micro version Superior's Repton 3 in the late 1980s, to his YouTube channel.

I've already described the "Rovers" Repton set here, but as always it's fascinating to watch a player as good as Michael tackle my levels.

You can download the "Rovers" theme for the PC version of Repton 3 from here.

Repton's Silver Jubilee

I've just turned 38, which means I've been a keen Repton fan for 24 years. It seems incredible, but next year is Repton's Silver Jubilee.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, if you look through the Blog Archive you'll see I've talked about the computer game Repton several times: both the cover art and graphics I've done recently for Retro Software and also some of the screens and graphics I designed on my BBC Micro back in the 80s.

This time of year - Christmas and my birthday - always makes me think of Repton. Waiting for Christmas 1986 was almost unbearable as it was then I was going to get a copy of the latest Repton release, Repton 3. I didn't have a disc drive at the time, so my copy of Repton 3 would be on cassette tape for the BBC Micro.

The excitement was because, for the first time ever, I was going to be able to design my own levels and graphics for the game and I couldn't wait. I only had a couple of C15 cassette tapes to store my levels at first, and I as I designed levels and graphics I'd save over my previous work again and again. And sometimes a quirk of the cassette recorder volume or tone control meant that the file wouldn't save properly. I dread to think of the number of levels and character designs I lost.

However, one of the very first levels I designed that Christmas I was so pleased with it just seemed to hang around and hang around and I still have it to this day. The password for the level is "TIMOTHY" - named after my pet goat at the time and it was always screen G (for Goat).

Screen G - TIMOTHY

I actually could only complete this level with great difficulty for many years - I used to be happy if only I died twice when completing it.

Eventually, using information I'd gleaned in a Hac-Man article in The Micro User I culled all the easy levels I'd created on various tapes and 5.25" floppies into one set - Set1.

Set1 also featured a customised set of graphics. I was very disappointed with the graphics in Repton 3. This was because they didn't look like the abandoned diamond mine on the cover art. They were all clean and clinical and didn't have much character. So I sat in front of Repton 2 with coloured pencils and recorded every sprite faithfully on graph paper.

My original drawings from 1986

Then I entered all the character designs into the Repton 3 editor - a process that took a very long time and was rather difficult on a fuzzy Microvitec CUB CRT monitor.

The graphics entered into Repton 3

Recently I've been thoroughly enjoying the Repton level play throughs posted onto YouTube by SentinelProxima, ReptonGeek and TestPilotMonkey. SentinelProxima is the YouTube channel name of Michael S. Repton, undoubtedly the world's best Repton player.

I was curious to see how Michael would tackle Screen G, as I take an age to complete the level even now. Michael very kindly produced a long playthrough of all the screens.

The first four levels are completed here:

And the second four levels are completed here:

It was incredible to watch Michael complete my levels - all far more elegantly and with greater efficiency than I could ever manage. As I've said before, the effect of watching someone so good play Repton is as compulsive as watching a 147 break in snooker. It really was a pleasure to watch, and it was a truly fantastic birthday present.

Lovingly prepared new versions of Repton 1, Repton 2, Repton 3 and Repton Spectacular are available to buy for the Microsoft Windows operating system from Superior Interactive. And, for those lucky enough to use the GNU/Linux operating system, you'll be pleased to hear all three games work reasonably well with WINE.

You can download my levels for Repton 3 for the PC version of Repton 3 from here.

Merry Christmas

But what's it for?

When I posted about my VHS and PAL plug-ins for The GIMP, I forgot to say why I originally wrote them. As I was using the VHS plug-in last night, I thought it might be interesting to explain what I was using it for.

I often find myself taking captions found on old multi-generation VHS tapes, and trying to recreate them in Inkscape (or, in the old days, in Macromedia Flash).

The trouble is that VHS changes can change the way captions appear. In particular, it changes the way the text on captions appears. This makes it very hard to match the typefaces used on captions with ones I have in TrueType, Postcript or OpenType format.

Take this caption, for example (click on it to make it bigger).

Could you help someone coping with franchise loss?

When I saw it, I knew immediately that the "PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT" text was in Compacta Bold. However, when you create the caption in Inkscape it simply doesn't look right (click on it to make it bigger).

Together we can beat pipe smoking.

As you can see, the text looks so much thicker it's almost as if I've used the wrong font weight. But I know that the text is not Compacta Medium - that would be far too thin. And I also know there were no other weights of Compacta available to Scraggie and his friends in the Mecanorma or Letraset dry transfer lettering catalogues in the 1970s. So what's going on?

If I load the Inkscape caption into The GIMP and put it through my VHS filter, which reproduces the mangling that VHS inflicts on television pictures, you get something that looks like this.

Dinage isn't the problem it was.

The weight of the font in the caption above looks more like the original - and I've clearly used the right typeface all along.

The Southern Television logo is used courtesy of Nic Ayling.

Hey Jemima let's go popping....

Having got heartily fed up of Ubuntu GNU/Linux snap, crackling and popping at me at the slightest provocation, I ended up looking for a solution. After a quick Google I found the answer. It turns out I'm having this audio issue because Ubuntu is utilising a power saving "feature" of Intel integrated sound hardware.

At the command line, if you type:

gksu gedit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf

And then comment out the following line in the gedit window that appears by putting a hash (#) symbol in front of it:

options snd-hda-intel power_save=10 power_save_controller=N

You'll find that, after a reboot, there's no more popping.

I've also finally discovered a music player program for GNU/Linux that does exactly what I want. It's called Quod Libet, and comes with an excellent piece of tagging software called Ex Falso.

What exquisite taste this man has.

I've found it to be utterly fantastic for people like me who like to organise and tag their music to an inch of its life.

Inkscape 0.47 Out Now!

One of the jewels of free software is the vector graphics editing program Inkscape. Inkscape is based on the W3C Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. The SVG format is very exciting and as well as vector graphics includes both fonts and animation - at the rate Inkscape is implementing the features of the SVG specification it won't be long before Adobe's Flash has serious competition.

Inkscape 0.47 has now been released. I've been using betas of the new version for some time now, and one of the attractions of the betas were the new vector effects filters.

For instance, take a copy of my vanilla flavoured TVS .svg file:

Daring, dazzling, death-defyingly dull, divinely decadent...

Now add "Chrome Dark". In one mouse click you've got something very nice indeed. You can click to enlarge the image below:

TVS + Chrome Dark filter

One thing I would recommend when playing with the filters (and which is a bit counter-intuitive seeing as Inkscape is a vector editor), is seeing what effect you get if you make your drawing bigger - much bigger in fact. Some filters seem to work best on larger images.

Inkscape is available for the GNU/Linux, Windows and Mac OS X operating systems and if you haven't already downloaded it I strongly recommend that you do so.

Meanwhile, I'm off to play some more!

The TVS logo was originally designed by John Haiman. The TVS logo and TVS name are registered trademarks of TVS Television Productions, Vinters Park, Maidstone, Kent, ME14 5NZ.

Running Rampant

Yesterday was St. Andrew's Day, so I thought I'd listen to some Al Stewart whilst I did something related to Scottish Television - the company whose license to print money predated Quantitative Easing by quite some margin.

Here it is - traced by hand in Inkscape, from a scan of an original STV pasteboard (courtesy of Gareth Randall).

What's on Channel Ten, hen?

It's interesting, but I've found all the recent work I've been doing on fonts has helped me enormously in hand tracing complex shapes such as this accurately.

Watching DVDs on Ubuntu

Many moons ago I published a post about my problems in playing DVDs in Ubuntu GNU/Linux. The main problem was that I simply couldn't. Which is quite a big problem, particularly for me.

Well, now I can without going through the hoops I posted about last time. Thanks to the updated version of the Linux kernal found in the latest version of Ubuntu, the fix for UDF now actually works. To apply it you need to change a file you find in

/etc/fstab

You need root privileges to write to this file, so to get them I opened it up in the gedit Text Editor using the sudo command.

sudo /usr/bin/gedit /etc/fstab

Then I commented out the line that read:

/dev/scd0       /media/cdrom0   udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec,utf8 0       0

By putting a hash (#) symbol in front of it and then added a line underneath it that read:

/dev/scd0 /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 users,noauto,uid=0,gid=46,mode=0777,dmode=0777,nosuid,noexec 0 0

This should be all one line. Once that is done, video DVDs will actually mount, and you can actually play them.

Now I can watch DVDs just like this one!

I had another problem with video in Ubuntu, and that was Totem never seems to be able to work out the duration of a VOB or MPG video file. It thinks no MPG file is longer than about 24 seconds. Mind you, that's about four times the average attention span these days, which is probably why the bug hasn't been picked up yet.

I fixed this by the simple expedient of installing the excellent free software media player VLC. It particularly excels with video, and allows me to have lovely jittery interlaced fields using the Video -> Deinterlace -> Linear option.

What a waste of time...

This morning, I stumbled upon...

http://new.myfonts.com/fonts/profonts/sportowy/

Head -> Desk -> Head -> Desk -> Head -> Desk.

And it's about fifty times better than the version I did.

Head -> Desk -> Head -> Desk -> Head -> Desk.

If I had known I wouldn't have bothered.

Head -> Desk -> Head -> Desk -> Head -> Desk.

Look how elegant the sportowy @ sign is, and the sportowy circumflex and breve, and how they managed to get the inner stroke proportions correct as they had decent source material to work from...

Head -> Desk -> Head -> Desk -> Head -> Desk.

And overhead a rainbow appeared. In black and white.