Building Retro Dither: Dithering Algorithms, Run-Length Encoding, Resource Forks and More!

Today I launched a new novelty Mac app, Retro Dither. Retro Dither gives any photo a cool retro look using just black and white pixels. You may want this for artistic effect, or you may want to export your photo to MacPaint for display on a retro Mac. Retro Dither launched on the Mac App Store today.

Note that we’re talking about just black and white, not grayscale (no grays here!). Amazingly, dithering algorithms make pure black and white images look like grayscale. You’ll get an old-school newspaper look, or a look like your photo just came off of a Mac from the 1980s. And this works with any photo in any bitmap format (JPEG, PNG, HEIF, etc.). Retro Dither can then export your dithered image to MacPaint format for display on black and white Macs going all the way back to the 1986 Mac Plus.

This is the story of how I developed Retro Dither…

I was working on my next programming book, which will be an intermediate Python projects book, when I came across an article about Atkinson Dithering on Hacker News by John Earnest. Dithering algorithms can be used for approximating the look of an image with less colors. Atkinson Dithering is one that is particularly well suited for approximating an image using just black and white. I was in the middle of developing a project for the book related to computational art and I was thinking I would need another art project to fill out the chapter. And Atkinson Dithering really caught my eye. First, because it looks cool. Second, because I was a Mac user growing up and I remember all the software and games that actually used it.

But there was a problem. After reading John’s article, I found the algorithm too simple to sit alongside the other projects I was developing for the book. I can explain the gist of it to you in a few sentences. You take each pixel in an image one at a time from the top left of the image to the bottom right. You check if it’s closer to black or white. Whichever it’s closer to, you turn it into (if we stopped there, we’d have a simpler dithering algorithm known as Threshold and it wouldn’t look great). Then you take the difference between black or white and the original pixel and call that the “error.” You spread that error into some of the pixels to the right and below the original pixel. Then you continue to the next pixel. John explains it in more detail in his article.

Then I got an idea. Bill Atkinson, the creator of Atkinson Dithering, was also the creator of MacPaint, a program I loved growing up. What if we not only dithered the image, but then we exported it to MacPaint format? That would be really cool and would add a bit more heft to the project. So, I started researching the MacPaint file format and found this article. It’s not a particularly complicated file format, but it at least includes another useful algorithm, Run-Length Encoding, a simple compression scheme where instead of writing out repeated sequences like “AAAAAAAAA” we essentially would write 2 bytes that say “9 As”. Now we have two simple, but interesting algorithms. That’s perfect for a project in the book.

I had to learn a bit more about the MacPaint file format. For example, it encodes pixels at 1 pixel per bit before it does the run-length encoding on the pixel-packed bytes. 0 is for white pixels and 1 is for black pixels. It runs the run-length encoding on a per-scanline basis. Every MacPaint file contains exactly 720 scanlines and 576 pixels per scanline (basically a 576 x 720 resolution). I found my hex editor, Hex Fiend, really helpful when debugging. I would look at my output MacPaint files and compare them to example MacPaint files, including some I still have saved from my childhood. I also found an open source project that converts files the other way (MacPaint -> modern bitmap). I could run my program’s converted MacPaint files back through it and see if the same image came out the other end.

With the help of Pillow for reading the initial bitmap image for conversion, I was able to build the whole thing in a couple hundred lines of Python. Again, this was the perfect size project for the book, so I was feeling really good about it. Then I tried my MacPaint files in actual MacPaint and there was a problem. They wouldn’t open!

Thinking back to my early days in computing, I remembered about type and creator codes. These were metadata that the Classic Mac OS (versions 1 through 9) used to associate a file with the program that should open it instead of using a file extension. The problem was my files had none. I used a Classic Mac program to add them back in and my images successfully displayed in MacPaint! But this wasn’t an ideal workflow. I wanted my users to be able to just double-click their finished files. So, I wanted to add the type and creator codes into the exported MacPaint files from my Python program.

The problem was, the Classic Mac OS stored files in two separate sections, known as data forks and resource forks. It stored the type and creator codes in the resource fork. Almost every other operating system, including modern macOS, Linux, and Windows doesn’t have resource forks. Files are just a single blob. And my research was showing me that there would be no easy way to add a resource fork to my file for transport so that the Classic Mac OS would see it as one file. I needed a work around.

Of course tons of people had the same problem before. Classic Mac OS users had to work with people on other operating systems. So transport file formats were developed that could combine data forks with resource forks together in one file for transport and then “unbundle” them on Classic Mac OS so they could be used. The simplest and most common (other than the later developed .sit, Stuffit archives, basically Zip files in Mac land), was MacBinary.

Turning my MacPaint files into MacBinary files for transport with correct type and creator codes was as simple as adding a 128 byte header to the file in MacBinary’s specified format. This is still not a perfect solution, because the files need to be unstuffed by a program on the Classic Mac OS side that understands MacBinary before the MacPaint files can be double-clicked, but programs that understand MacBinary were common on the Classic Mac OS and include the aforementioned and ubiquitous Stuffit.

I got this all working in a couple nights for the book and then I thought, surely someone else must make a commercial MacPaint converter. The retro Mac community is pretty huge right now. But I couldn’t find any, other than the venerable Graphic Converter, which is a full-featured graphics program that I recommend (its creator, Thorsten Lemke, was actually gracious enough to let me conduct an interview with him for a research project in college back in 2006) but that costs $30.

I decided to make something lighter weight. Thus, Retro Dither was born. I ported my Python code to Swift. I added 4 more dithering algorithms (they’re all similar to implement). I built an AppKit frontend. I tested it. I tested the output files in emulators like SheepShaver for MacPaint 2 on Mac OS 9 and Mini vMac for MacPaint 1.5 on System 6. I did find a couple bugs, like that MacBinary expects each fork to be in exactly 128 byte chunks (I just had to fill extra space with some 0s). Even though later versions of Stuffit will ignore this, other MacBinary unbundlers like the built-in MacBinary command-line app on modern macOS and the original MacBinary program from the the standards authors in the 1980s will not (by the way, the modern macOS’s Archive Utility will unbundle MacBinary files).

I hope you enjoy Retro Dither. And if you want to be made aware of my next Python book when it comes out, which will include the project described here, please join my very low volume mailing list.


About Me

I teach Computer Science to college students, develop software, podcast, and write books about programming including the Classic Computer Science Problems series. I'm the publisher of the hyper local newsletter BTV Daily.

You can find me on Twitter and GitHub. Check out my podcasts Kopec Explains Software and Business Books & Co. You can subscribe to my very low volume newsletter to find out about my future book, media, or software projects.

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Based on tdSimple originally by Lasantha Bandara and released under the CC By 3.0.