A Moogle  🏳️‍🌈 💻 🎮 🎶 🇸🇪

So: Why did CD-i games have flat-shaded cartoons? To stream off of a 1x-speed disc, they had to. Why was the artwork so terrible? Blame the developers on that one. The CD-i itself was remarkably capable. That same RLE mode could have been used to do Starfox before Starfox.

Beyond that, the art style was a grotesque caricature of humanity, more resembling strips of flesh welded to a metal frame, more resembling Animal Soccer World or Aladin from Dingo Pictures than any sort of memorable cartoon. But that's not the console's fault.

Now, none of this is meant to defend or approve of the atrocious art found in the CD-i Zelda games, or Hotel Mario. As RLE fills were limited to a single line (I believe), I can't think of a reason why some amount of shading couldn't have been done, as long as it was vertical.

This was the key to compressing cutscenes to be small enough that they could be streamed at a reasonable frame rate. You'd load up a static background on one video plane, then stream RLE cartoons onto the second plane, layered on top. Easy.

Well, the Apple IIgs had a prescient aspect of its own video hardware: It supported run-length encoding (RLE) for graphics. The CD-i spec called for video hardware that could do RLE, too. In English: RLE is a value and a repeat count. "Blue, 25 times" instead of "blue blue bl...

Given that a full frame of 320x240 pixels at 16-bit color resolution is exactly 150 kilobytes, that would seem to mean that the best you could hope for is a "video" running at one frame per second. That's not a video, that's a slide-show. So, how do we solve it?

Beyond that, it's important to keep in mind that the baseline CD-i spec was sporting a 1x-speed CD: The best you could get, assuming continuous transfer with no seeking, was 150 kilobytes a second coming off of the disc.

This was what a handful of games used to play FMVs within a small, limited on-screen window, since it provided enough color fidelity to be worthwhile.

The standard video hardware of the CD-i was an odd thing: One of the video modes (and the only way to break out of palettized color) was "delta YUV", where you'd specify the starting values in YUV color space, then each following sample was a delta against the current value.

MPEG decompression was simply not supported unless you had a Digital Video Cartridge, or had a model from pretty far into the console's life cycle, when manufacturers would sometimes integrate DVC compatibility into the console itself.

TL;DR in advance: Large areas of flat shading can be streamed off the disk faster. The baseline CD-i player spec, ironically, did not support the sort of full-motion video that comes to mind when we think of the "multimedia" heyday of the early 90's.

Apparently, I'm being unfollowed since I no longer work for Mojang and am just a Twitter idiot. Congrats on taking 6 years to clock that I no longer work somewhere, which I've stated openly, and even longer to realize that I've always been a Twitter idiot. Please wear a helmet.

15mins later, guy comes downstairs, gets his stuff, wishes us all a good night, and hits the road. I ask K, "Dude, HOW?" He just laughs, "It's no problem man, I just told him straight that nazis aren't welcome here, and if he insists on staying, nobody's going to find his body."

Anyway, K is in the room the whole time, listening, and he also clocks what this drifter guy is actually about. K invites him upstairs to smoke a bowl and have a quick, but private, chat.

He settles in a bit more, we start talking about music. He asks me, "Hey, have you ever listened to Skrewdriver?" For those not in the know, Skrewdriver is an English neo-nazi band. Any interest in them beyond an analytical context is instant, and massive, red flag.

He's run out of minutes on his phone. Alright, he's bouncing from town to town, I get it. He asks if I'd be okay with putting my card info into his phone so he can top up. Uh, no. But I'll happily wander into town with you tomorrow so we can get a prepaid card - not interested.

With the guy needing a place to stay, K being K suggested, hey, we have multiple couches, feel free to crash over at ours. Guy sets down his pack, and almost immediately I feel like something "off" about him. Allow me to explain.

At any rate, I was spending a long weekend visiting him and the rest of the circle of friends I had in WV. I'd just arrived a few hours prior, and he walks in with a dude I'd never seen before close behind. Turns out, other dude was a drifter, popped into town earlier that day.

Dude is an absolutely legendary party animal, and absolutely lives up to the redneck reputation in that regard. Can kill beers as if they're filled with water. But he's also the kind of guy to give you the shirt off his back - then head on into work shirtless.