Amiga Graphics ArchiveAbout TFT About Links

About

This site is dedicated to great pixel graphics made with the Commodore Amiga from 1985 to 1995. An uncountable number of graphics were made during this time period, but there are quite a number of noteworthy images that, I believe, shouldn't gather dust on some harddrive, hidden in some extra level inside a game that never gets played or on a PD collection disk that is almost unknown. I want to make these graphics accessible again from the comfort of your own internet browser by showcasing them on this site.

Why am I doing this?

This site is done just for fun in my spare time and I will try to update it as often as possible. I am not going to make any money from it and I will never have any kind of paid banners or ads distracting you from the images. I only extract and assemble the images on this site - the real work was done by the original artists who created these works and I wouldn't feel right taking money for their work.

Please remember that all works on this sites are copyrighted. I am trying to attribute all artists and copyright holders accordingly, but since these artworks have been created such a long time ago it is not easy to find the right artists for every artwork. I may even get the occasional information wrong, so if you know better please let me know, and if you made something that you don't want to see here then just email me.

What file formats are used?

None of the old Amiga formats are in use or supported in browsers these days and not all formats where standardised. Therefore I have to convert the images to another format without losing any quality at all. I have seen graphics collections on the internet that had JPEGs or badly dithered GIFs which was also a reason for me to take care that the images remain unchanged when converted for this site.

Images with less or equal than 256 colors are stored in GIF format, images with more (notably HAM images and images with lots of copper effects) are stored in PNG format. Animations (normal and color cycling animations) are stored in animated GIF format, despite this format being inaccurate with timing.

I am still looking into a proper format for animations but MNG will not work because of insufficient browser support. MP4, Quicktime, WMV, etc. won't do because they have compression artifacts, just like JPEG does. I will probably add Flash as an animation format because this will also allow me to add sound, but I will implement some kind of compression that doesn't introduce artifacts. FLC would be nice but this format has long been depricated and has also never been supported by internet browsers.

What's the software that runs this site?

The new version of the site runs with 11ty, which creates a static html site for a very responsive site. I decided to switch to JavaScript, after seeing the decline of PHP and many of its frameworks. At the same time a lot of the reactive JavaScript frameworks felt like they were trying to be too clever for what I needed. Previously I ran the site with my custom made gallery tool called "mediaBase" which was created with the php framework fuelPHP. The first version of this site was done with the free gallery tool called ZenPhoto which was a good basis to find out how the archive was going to be sorted.

The basic concept is that "ShowCase" stores a large collection of images from any filesystem and then creates structures and hierarchies based upon metadata that I add to the pictures. This way I can change the structure of the site without having to rearrange the file structure, just by changing the filter algorithm.

Who am I?

I'm Daniel Kürsten (alias LyCheSis). I was an active Amiga user from 1989 until ~1999. I was very interested in computer graphics even before I got my first computer and as soon as I got my first Amiga I started to make images with it and collect images that other people had made. The collection that grew out of this was so large that I decided to share it in the form of this archive.

I programmed on the Amiga with Amiga Basic, GFA Basic, AMOS Basic, Blitz Basic and a couple of things in DevPac Assembler.

I pixeled graphics on the Amiga with Deluxe Paint, Personal Paint, TV-Paint (later called Aura).

I created 3D graphics on the Amiga with Sculpt 3-D and Imagine.

I discovered composing music on the Amiga with Deluxe Music Construction Set and later extensively used MED (OctaMED).

The Amiga was the perfect tool for creating all kinds of media, in a time when PCs were simply typewriters and other computers were specialised in one area or only meant for playing games.

I did move on since then, of course, because the Amiga was superseeded many times by other computers, but my roots are with this brilliant machine and I will always remember it with fond memories.