Camelot

The castle at Camelot was presented as a series of highly ornate menus. I used a huge Old English font; it was quite striking in those days. Unlike modern menus (remember, this was before the Macintosh), the player moved a cursor up and down along a wide path and clicked the joystick button when his cursor was lined up with the menu entry. By exiting the top of the screen, the player could access the next "room" (menu). Each room had the menu listings on the left, the broad vertical band traversed by the cursor in the center, and a characteristic display on the right. Thus, the Treasury room showed Arthur's wealth and offered him opportunities to increase or decrease tax rates. The Great Hall showed the knights in their social relationships, with menu items on the left permitting Arthur to grant money, bestow honors, or even banish individuals. The Map Room showed the other kingdoms of England and permitted Arthur to learn more about their strengths and weaknesses. Merlin's Room permitted the player to consult Merlin and occasionally ask his assistance in clobbering enemies.

There was a minor technical innovation in Merlin's Room: the use of a temporally dithered image for Merlin's face. Given the low resolutions available to us in those days, we couldn't do much with faces. It occurred to me that I could dither temporally as well as spatially. The idea was to store the image of Merlin's face as an 8-bit deep bitmap. During display, the software would prepare a random 1-bit version of the 8-bit image, display it for a single frame, and then prepare a new random 1-bit version. By "random 1-bit version," I mean a 1-bit image whose pixels have been obtained by comparing a random 8-bit number with the 8-bit brightness value in the 8-bit deep image. If the random number was less than the luminance of the pixel, then I drew a white pixel in its location; if the random number was greater than the 8-bit luminance value, then I drew a black pixel. Even with the slow processor, the algorithm ran fast enough. The result was a haunting, shimmering image that was undeniably a face.