Ben Fry

Ben Fry, the creator of Processing, created a beautiful visualization of the disassembled machine code of Super Mario Bros with arrows representing jump instructions: http://benfry.com/dismap/mario-large2.jpg via: http://benfry.com/dismap/ I've always loved this as a visualization of machine code. It's simultaneously amazing how complex it is and yet how simple it is when you consider that it represents the entire game all in one graphic. This is from 2007 I believe. I love that 10 years later the machine code is now fully annotated and understood.

My wife got me this poster (framed) for Christmas a few years ago - I have to say its one of my favorite pieces of art. http://benfry.com/distellamap/150dpi/advnture-illus-150dpi.png

Ben Fry is amazing. I've done a lot of info-viz work and his PhD Dissertation was incredibly helpful. He is much much easier to read and comprehend compared to Tufte. I highly recommend it: http://benfry.com/phd/

I would highly recommend learning R (http://www.r-project.org/). It is very easy to directly query databases and R has many visualisation packages, including the awesome ggplot2 (http://had.co.nz/ggplot2/) based on the grammar of graphics. I'm writing an R graphs cookbook and my startup's visualisation product is also built on R (see profile and feel free to email me if you need any help). Also, look at Ben Fry's Processing books (http://benfry.com/). Here's an introductory tutorial - http://blog.blprnt.com/blog/blprnt/your-random-numbers-getting-started… If you're familiar with Python, check out Matplotlib (https://www.packtpub.com/matplotlib-python-development/book).

Ben Fry's dissertation 'Computational Information Design' [http://benfry.com/phd/] is a great start. He breaks down many of the skills needed to succeed at information design and processing. He's recently released Mastering Data with O'Reilly, which is essentially an expanded second addition to his dissertation.

Check out Visualizing Data by Ben Fry http://benfry.com/, one of the authors of the Processing language. The book is based on his doctoral dissertation, and has a technical (as opposed to artistic or design) focus, but is easy to understand. The Processing language/environment is Java based.

Combat is, frankly, one of the greatest videogames ever made. Easily in the top ten. If you don't understand why, you've missed out on a great deal of history. The Atari 2600 was designed, almost exclusively, to play Combat. It has the ability to animate only 3 sprites: player 1, player 2 and "ball". There are many hacks to get around this, but we're talking about the pre-release period of the Atari Video Computer System, AKA VCS, the Atari 2600. The only other game in mind for the system was Pong, which actually come out for the system in the form of Video Olympics, and it was created by one of the 2600's TIA chip designers, Joe Decuir. That chip literally synced up the processor with the television's refresh rate, and had each scan line drawn out of processing exactly when the electron beam was moving over the proper position on screen. The 2600 has no frame buffer. Essentially, when it's in the CPU, it's drawn on the screen. The machine only had 1024 bits, not bytes, of RAM. But that's neither here nor there. For more info on the fascinating hardware that was the Atari 2600, read Racing the Beam by Ian Bogost and Nick Montefort. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/racing-beam Video Olympics could be considered to be the 100-in-1 of Pong games, with dozens of variants on the Pong theme. Combat takes the same sort of approach, with lots of game modes, but the actual gameplay was based on another arcade game. Rather than just recreating the arcade game, however, Combat…

Thought it was going to be this (from 17 years ago): - https://www.benfry.com/zipdecode/ - https://hw.leftium.com/#/item/446666 Of course, the results are pretty similar. --- Another interesting ZIP code visualization: https://eagereyes.org/zipscribble-maps/united-states

A different look at the program structure of Adventure https://benfry.com/distellamap/ ;)

This is a perfect place to mention Ben Frys distellamap project https://benfry.com/distellamap/ It creates stunning visualizations of vcs game code.

There's https://benfry.com/distellamap/ but I think it works better with data than code: consider the sprite sheet.

One format I liked is distellamap, [1] a visualization of some Atari 2600 games in poster format. https://benfry.com/distellamap/

Really cool! Reminds me of distellamap by Ben Fry (co-creator of Processing) - http://benfry.com/distellamap/

Another example of the same zip code interaction idea, with some pretty UI: http://benfry.com/zipdecode/

The thing is, there's no "right format" for sprites, as they're used in the game. See http://benfry.com/deconstructulator/ for an example of how sprites are handled by the NES for Super Mario Bros. Mario is split into 8x8 pieces that are swapped out as needed: how do you determine which pieces are "Mario's sprite" and which are "that coin's sprite"? Remember that some pieces will change while others won't.

There's a neat interactive version of the same thing here (Java required): http://benfry.com/zipdecode/

I wish someone would translate Fugpaint (http://www.benfry.com/fugpaint/) to be Canvas based.

http://www.amazon.com/Visualizing-Data-Explaining-Processing-Environme… beautiful book by http://benfry.com/ http://infosthetics.com/ http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/ http://processing.org

Bah! Silly BevHills holds nothing on Schenectady, NY. http://benfry.com/zipdecode/

related: Atari 2600 Pac-Man code in one big poster. http://benfry.com/distellamap/

Ah, yes, in the days of yore when the code could fit in an 8k memory chip! :D https://benfry.com/distellamap/ Sorry to hear it was not an enjoyable evening. With the higher resolutions many TVs support, there's only so much bandwidth and memory headroom to support textures that big, and DVD drives just don't have the seek speed to support. Heck, in the 360 generation we were carefully laying out files broken apart and spaced so the platter would be under the read head at just the right time to reduce that latency. As for the updates... well, I'm intimately familiar with why patching the four concurrent titles is they way it is. I have hear our feedback was incorporated into a new update system. It's been personally frustrating, when Microsoft/Bungie pioneered the Play-While-Install concept all the way back in Halo 2 Vista. We'll see! The feedback in this post is my own, and is not meant to reflect that of my employer 343 Industries.

direct link: http://benfry.com/writing/archives/608

Ben Fry (of Processing fame)'s PhD thesis: "Computational Information Design". Abstract: The ability to collect, store, and manage data is increasing quickly, but our ability to understand it remains constant. In an attempt to gain better understanding of data, fields such as information visualization, data mining and graphic design are employed, each solving an isolated part of the specifi c problem, but failing in a broader sense: there are too many unsolved problems in the visualization of complex data. As a solution, this dissertation proposes that the individual fi elds be brought together as part of a singular process titled Computational Information Design. This dissertation first examines the individual pedagogies of design, information, and computation with a focus on how they support one another as parts of a combined methodology for the exploration, analysis, and representation of complex data. Next, in order to make the process accessible to a wider audience, a tool is introduced to simplify the computational process for beginners, and can be used as a sketching platform by more advanced users. Finally, a series of examples show how the methodology and tool can be used to address a range of data problems, in particular, the human genome. http://benfry.com/phd/