What is fundamental is this: every artist starts out by copying the works of others. It's how you learn.

And in that framing, once you publish your derived work, there is only one question that arises - if you don't credit the original author but sign your own name, you're fundamentally misleading your audience. Your audience implicitly assumes you made the thing. Maybe you made 95% of it, but if you don't give due credit, it looks bad once your audience discovers that.

On more than one occasion my perception of an artist has shifted once I discovered the "brilliant work" they created was actually a remake of somebody else's brilliant work. It's a feeling of being misled. It's never a feeling of "wow, this guy is a total hack and has no ability of their own".

The Revision demo party is soon. From the competition rules for "Oldskool Graphics" [0]:

> Include exactly 10 (ten) working stages of your entry. All entries without plausible working stages will be disqualified.

Yikes...

The rules for "Modern Graphics" [1] and "Paintover" similarly also require work stages, but fewer.

[0]: https://2026.revision-party.net/competitions/oldskool/#oldsk...

[1]: https://2026.revision-party.net/competitions/graphics/#moder...

One should not forget where the demoscene is coming from: crackers. The whole point of "intros" was to show off the skills of whoever cracked a piece of software. So obviously, the views demoscene held on intellectual property are not mainstream, if we can say it like that.

The shift to a more creative and law abiding art scene, led by adults and not rebellious teenagers is more recent development.

My top pick for pixel art would be anything by Made of demogroup Bomb, don't have a good link to hand sorry and need to change trains etc. Also check this amazing pixel art book: https://www.themastersofpixelart.com/

[0] https://2026.revision-party.net/

People wanting to explore the use of generative AI for vintage computers is happening not just for graphics but for code too.

I think in the case of code though, it's still interesting because I don't believe there's been any success yet. I hear of people having success with Claude in contemporary settings but it seems to fare less well when working for older computing platforms. There's a reason for that of course and it's worth exploring.

However, it will cease to be interesting as soon as the first person manages to create something substantial. At the point, the scene should probably shun it for the reasons stated in the quote.

"Danny leaves the scene" (because it's just a bunch of kids with scanners and he's got a job at Eidos now) never forget!

The creative part in a demo wasn't the the art itself, the subject, the composition, etc., no, it was representing something thought impossible. Eventually, kinda like how photography changed painters' relationship with realistic representation, more powerful tech did the same with these types of demos, so the medium moved on.

Successfully integrating many disparate parts has always been the big ticket item. Dealing with the rough edges and making different ideas play together nicely is where all the value lives in most businesses.

Well - the edited image looks clearer in the rendition, but also more fake. So unless that was the goal, I prefer the more blurred image, simply because it is more authentic than that digital edit. Many AI images have a similar problem; they look very out of place. I noticed this in some games where AI generated images are used. The images look great but they simply don't fit into the game at hand or they have a style that looks alien. Case in point was mods for the game Baldur's Gate 2 EE, where these images are great but they look very outside-ish. And that's a problem that seems to be hard to get rid of from such generated images, at the least for most of those I saw so far.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4EFkspO5p4

Thus, some demos, like the one where Lazur's image came from [0] were just slideshows of very colorful images that were more than likely traced from something.

[0] https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=3715 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmhffwhGiK0

I think things can look much better for pixel art that is either very low resolution (e.g. the small characters and objects in a SNES game, which would usually be just a few pixels wide, so every pixel has to be placed deliberately) or has a very low color depth (a pallette between two to ~16 colors, like the backgrounds in a PC-88 game), or both (like the sprites in a Game Boy game).

An example where higher color depth can ruin the visuals is "Snatcher" by Kojima. The backgrounds for the original PC-88 and MSX versions were relatively detailed (200x100 pixels perhaps), while the color depth was very low (8 colors?), which greatly accentuated the pixel-art look. However, the later re-releases added more and more colors and smooth gradients, which only made it look worse, like a mediocre comic book.

https://www.reddit.com/r/OldSchoolCool/comments/ejsb22/micha...

So, no way to tell if the illustrations were illustrative.

e.g. I zoomed in to view the matchbox texture described in the article, and found it a blur. (Clicking loads the uncompressed PNG.)

Personally, I think for this page, loading full res images inline is warranted. The resulting 3MB page size would be more than justified :)

It will change, but craft and "look what I did" won't go away.

Increased efficiency also seems to be part of its appeal. The limitation is you can't increase efficiency by just upgrading computer specs, but instead have to find innovating ways to use the existing resources as efficient as possible to make something great. These kinds of optimization or compression problems seems like something AI would be very helpful for, so I think it is premature to try and ban its usage.

There are those who use AI as part of their process proudly, but secretly, because they know they will receive abuse.

I really wonder how some people think of themselves as artists while simultaneously attacking another persons choice of self expression.