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Chris Young

chris@wyrms.de

Joined 1 year, 12 months ago

Bookwyrm account I love fantasy fiction. Mastodon: @confusedbunny@oldbytes.space Avatar is from Little Monster's Word Book (Mercer Mayer)

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Chris Young's books

quoted Commodore by Brian Bagnall

Brian Bagnall: Commodore (2010, Variant Press) 3 stars

Filled with first-hand accounts of ambition, greed, and inspired engineering, this history of the personal …

The engineers wanted to improve the colour on the chip. "It was the same thing with the Apple and Atari computers," explains [Bob] Yannes. "You would get interaction between the luminance signal, which is the black and white information, and the colour signal. So you would end up with these various colours on the screen which weren't really what you wanted, but it was just the nature of the NTSC video standard that the luminance and chrominance signals interact with each other." To purify the colours, [Al] Charpentier made a risky last minute change. "Al had the idea that if the two clocks were independent from each other, then that interaction wouldn't happen," says Yannes. "We separated the clock generators on the VIC chip so that the colour crystal was a separate clock from the video shift rate." The engineers noticed the default white on dark blue screen no longer looked appealing. "Even though it has good contrast, the transition from blue to white produced kind of an ugly edge," explains Yannes. "We ended up having to make it light blue on dark blue."

Commodore by  (Page 412)

Bob Yannes (designer of the SID chip) explains why the Commodore 64 had default colours of blue on blue.

Edward Brooke-Hitching: The Phantom Atlas (2016, Simon & Schuster) 4 stars

The Phantom Atlas is an atlas of the world not as it ever existed, but …

Maps

4 stars

I love maps. I spent my childhood pouring over atlases and Ordnance Survey maps, looking for interesting features, roman roads, blue symbols. That atlas in particular had countries that probably had ceased to exist before it was bought - but these are not the phantom lands depicted in this book, but creations mostly related to the fall of the Soviet Union.

This book has maps from further back, ones beautifully illustrated and based on vague descriptions brought back by explorers, where the land masses bear little relation to reality, and blank spaces were filled with sea creatures, monopods, and hypothesised continents.

The phantoms are a mixture of sighted islands that could not be located since, mythical lands which may or may not ever have existed, lands from entirely fictitious journeys which somehow ended up on maps, and depictions of creatures and people either invented or based on real sightings that …