Re: lisa demo

Sure. The YouTube part is 'real' in the sense that the Lisa is actually playing video, but no, the Lisa isn't really connected to the internet and it definitely isn't running Flash Player to decode a YouTube video. One of the people who worked on the demo wrote some video player code and dealt with converting the Rick Astley video to 1-bit monochrome. The YouTube comment that says something about us going to Finland just to rickroll assembly

As for the rest of the Office System stuff, it's 100% fake: The POST, Office System boot, e-mail client, and Safari are all carefully timed static images. I got the starting point from LisaEm screenshots and watching the club's real Lisa 2/10 booting. I was quite OCD about making the boot process look authentic (other than being far faster than a real Lisa would take to boot for time reasons), for instance notice that the I/O ROM revision 88 appears after the I/O board test passes, just like it does on an actual machine.

I'm probably going to go into entirely too much detail about the part I did since it's what I know the most about. I'm more of a hardware guy than a software guy, so I didn't write any of the code in this demo (if you look at our page on Pouet, I did write some of the code in "Where Have All The Pixels Gone," a production we did for an 80s vector graphics game console called the Vectrex - specifically I coded the Nyan cat at the end of the demo and wrote a little bit of unexciting assembly code for internal stuff since I actually know 6809 assembler), my main contribution to this demo was the graphics in the fake Lisa OS stuff. All the icons that aren't real Lisa icons were designed by me, although the "Voice of Lisa" icon that shows a Lisa 2 with a musical keyboard instead of a computer keyboard was just a mod of an original Lisa icon. The Mail and Safari apps were designed to look like the current OS X Mail/Safari, but how I'd imagine they would have looked on a Lisa. I created the icons in GIMP on a modern machine, edited 1 pixel at a time at about 800% magnification. For authenticity, I tried to make everything look right on the Lisa CRT with rectangular pixels. My favorite icon to do was the iTunes one that briefly appears, originally we were going to have an iTunes screen, it got cut out, but I left the icon there since I liked the cassette tape and it seemed appropriate. The Mail application e-mail list is actually a cutout from a LisaCalc spreadsheet, the message bodies were typed in later in GIMP - someone did a really nice pixel for pixel copy of all of the Lisa fonts that can be loaded on modern PCs, that was a huge help to me with this. Same deal with the Safari window, it was originally a blank LisaTerminal screenshot since that gives me a big blank window with scrollbars, I added my own icons, address bar, etc. as well as doing the graphics for the YouTube player.

Some kind of "fun facts" about the demo (I.E. stuff nobody would notice): * Look at the name of the very anachronistic default search engine in Safari.
* The first YouTube comment is a tribute to the guy who wrote the code that displays the Rickroll video since he couldn't go to Finland to enter this at Assembly.
* Yes, we actually shipped a Lisa 2 from the USA to Helsinki, Finland and then back. It went in a giant Pelican case with copious amounts of antistatic foam, bubble wrap, and kapton tape to hold down any loose parts like socketed chips, or the little circuit boards that plug into the sockets to steal the video signals.
* Yes, we actually shipped ourselves to Helsinki to show this thing off. The name of the event is Assembly (www.assembly.org) and it is the world's largest demo party/LAN party. A demo is real-time computer artwork, and a whole community revolves around writing and showing off these things. It's cool stuff, split up mainly into modern (how awesome are your graphics/coding skills to show off crazy stuff on a fully loaded modern PC) and oldschool (what kind of cool stuff can you make old computers do that they were never intended to do).
* The names of the people in the e-mail window are actual club members (except for Amazon and Hormel, obviously) * The fractals during the credits were based on code that the guy who designed the sound card logic originally wrote for a DOS PC in high school. * Notice the dedication at the end of the demo. We got this idea when Dennis Ritchie (creator of C and UNIX) died shortly after Steve Jobs (guy who could sell sand to Saudi Arabia but probably couldn't write a hello world program in BASIC) did and nobody seemed to care.

On Tuesday, October 15, 2013 4:08:08 PM UTC-4, Peter wrote:
>
> Very cool! Can you tell us more about the Safari browser and YouTube
> part? Is that just hard coded in the demo and not really running on the
> Lisa?
>
> On Tuesday, October 15, 2013 10:57:24 AM UTC-7, lincol..._at_email.domain.hidden wrote:
>>
>> Sorry to revive an old thread, but I was one of the people involved with
>> this project, and can answer a few of the questions people had.
>> ...
>>
>

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