Comment by v64
1 day ago
I had one of these as a kid; the slow way it drew the graphics onto the screen [1] for a new activity was an aesthetic in itself, like a coloring book being drawn and colored in before your eyes, a perfect loading screen for kids.
Wikipedia notes: The system will "draw" images by filling in areas of the screen with color one line at a time; it is not known whether this is an effect employed for the student's enjoyment or if it is due to the slow processing time of the system.
That does look cool, I'm assuming they stored a lot of the graphics as a series of drawing and flood fill commands as a way to save ROM space, similar to how the old Sierra DOS adventure games did their graphics.
That’s cool.
Similar to how Pixar made their first movie about toys because CG made everything look plasticky back then and they realized they couldn’t get away with making a movie with humans or animals on screen for the whole movie.
The best creative people lean into the limitations of technology.
Probably due to the slow processing speed. That thing had like a rinky-dink Z80 and the most basic of graphics chips[0]. It probably couldn't do much besides a simple frame buffer, so you saw the CPU draw the entire screen, laying down the outline vectors and then flood-filling enclosed areas with color. There is something comfortingly "80s graphics" about watching this unfold in front of your eyes, similar to watching an old CAD drawing regen, or the effect in videos like Advanced Video Group's "Bearobics": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWMNsuIeY0Y
That said, I find it grating when I watch programs like Microsoft Teams draw themselves visibly, like old Windows 1.0 programs.
[0] The graphics logic is entirely custom, implemented in a Toshiba gate array, and it isn't something well-known like a TMS9918A or something else based on that design.