I just started working on these last week and they were very well received on Twitter. Then, to my astonishment, Edward Tufte retweeted it!
https://twitter.com/EdwardTufte/status/954537749234765825
I have one of his books but didn't realize he was on Twitter until that moment. I was blown away.
A lot of folks asked to buy one, so I made the page that this HN post links to on Sunday night. Within hours Tufte reached out to buy 3 of them! :-o I have 6 other buyers so far as well. So I've been busy fulfilling these requests and trying to figure out shipping and stuff.
Interestingly, about half of the buyers so far are in neuroscience.
http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jou...
They reminded me immediately of electroencephalography (EEG) recordings of brain activity.
https://www.cs.colostate.edu/eeg/data/json/doc/tutorial/_bui...
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Johannes_Knaus/publicat...
So...thanks for writing up and collating so much information about the NES in one place!
[0] - http://infocenter.arm.com/help/index.jsp?topic=/com.arm.doc....
If you want to try running this in a big robotic whiteboard, let me know.
If anyone is interested in exploring something similar, here's the simple fceux script I used to sample the memory of a running NES game: https://github.com/mattbierner/NES-Memory-Visualization/blob...
So I'd wonder if a pattern like that is characteristic of the game switching transmitting graphic tiles to the PPU.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97jic_WRrwY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eafaFr9Q_rU
This one I think is especially cool. Instructions to build a cartridge to run on an unmodified NES: https://web.archive.org/web/20170319202533/www.nullsleep.com...
And these two both use an NES (or Famiclone) CPU, along with some other hardware:
http://kevtris.org/Projects/hardnes/
http://forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php?t=5957&view=next
NSF is a cool format, itself. It's basically a specialized ROM format for encoding game music and sound effects for playback, usually in an emulator. And since it relies on actual CPU code rather than recorded register writes, it can include loops and such programmatically.
Plotting each cell individually over time had never occurred to me, and I'll definitely try this!
I mean, a photo only costs like $10 to print an 8x10, why would the artist dare charge $200 or more?
I'm sorry but unless each print is hand-drawn or something, then $200 is a bit much. Especially if there's masters sitting on a hard drive somewhere.
Can we get platinum editions with famous computer scientists (besides yourself, of course) playing Donkey Kong? I want the Don Knuth edition!
If this is the bazaar, maybe cathedrals ain't so bad...
Art is subjective, of course, and an artist is free to ask whatever they want for their work. I am unimpressed and probably not the target audience (as other comments allude).
So there is a very small market for these prints, and the artist can charge what they want because they won't really be making this a business anyway.
They'd probably buy several, frame them nicely and put them in an obvious place in their house. Then when they're entertaining a large VC or banking crowd someone will notice them and ask WTF they are and he'll have a nice story to explain them and how unique they are. Golf claps all around and my buddies will enjoy having something their other rich friends don't; and of course the short lived adoration of his dinner guests, which is almost better than money.
Intrinsic meaning the investment of individualized effort, which include what we might call "set up costs," and extrinsic meaning: can this artist command some multiplier based on their name?
$200 suggests a modest return on modest sales by an "unknown" whose work will be primarily valued by people with a personal interest in it.
$400 framed would be reasonable as well.
For art world definitions of "reasonable" of course :)
Also, you should probably expect to pay more for the five seconds where Jumpman actually rescues Pauline.
Cool, he has an instrumented emulator, but really, does playing a retro game for five seconds have ANY intrinsic value beyond worthless nostalgia?
In art all that matters is creation and output. A piece of art should not have to come with an explanation or hidden information in order to justify its worth. While it is important to fuel inspiration and artistic experiences, it's a fucking joke that I am expected to pay extra for the "experience" that lead to producing the work when it has no value to me, and especially when said experience isn't as unique as it is being made out to be.
Out in the real world people will judge art way more harshly than I. Real artists don't mind that.
Aesthetically they are nice posters and art-pieces. It's just that some of us are unmoved by the accompanying story.
If you are really buggered, compete.
Well, you are paying for the uniqueness. Doesn't sound too bad.
