#vgapride

[foone]

Happy International Asexuality Day!

[hawkuletz]

@foone created and shared the vgapride program for DOS, so I couldn't resist the temptation to run it on some appropriate hardware. I don't have any older computer at hand (that also has VGA), so this Siemens Portable had to do. The images show part of the process, as well as some of the flags.

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[foone]

the Brazilian flag makes me irrationally angry.

no, wait, that's incorrect. the brazillian flag makes me rationally angry.

but first let me explain that I have nothing against Brazil or Brazilians. They're cool people in my experience, and I'm sure it's a great country. but that flag has personally victimized me.

Look at this flag. What country has a flag this complicated? VERY FEW, LET ME TELL YOU THAT

and as someone who had to recreate this flag for their VGAPride program, because of the Brazil Gay Flag... ARGH this flag is so complicated.

It's not the case anymore because I reorganized how the program worked, but at one point it had EVERY SINGLE OTHER FLAG in one file, and BRAZIL in another file, because if I put Brazil in with any other flags it would crash the program. I had to modify the max limit on how many graphical commands a given flag could take, because the Gay Flag of Brazil was MORE COMPLICATED THAN AT LEAST HALF THE OTHER FLAGS PUT TOGETHER. I had to add the a new command for drawing different sized stars as otherwise this flag would be way too complicated to implement.

and the worst part? Scroll back up and compare those two flags. I didn't even do that good a job of implementing the flag! Some of it is because I'm limited to 640x480, but some of it is just that this flag was so complicated that it was hurting me too much to create.

And that's after I wrote a secondary application to let me design flags outside my program, because manually designing this thing like I did EVERY SINGLE OTHER PRIDE FLAG I EVER IMPLEMENTED would have been too hard, especially with the text (which is again, isn't done that well. especially that "E", which is way too straight, especially for a gay pride flag).

Like, I'm sorry Brazil. You're cool, but your flag gives me PTSD flashbacks.

[foone]

VGAPride is my DOS program for displaying pride flags. So happy pride month, everyone! Here's a selection of pride flags as displayed on a Pentium 60.

[foone]

Happy Aromantic Spectrum Awareness Week!

Here's the Aromantic pride flag, displayed on my Pentium using my VGAPRIDE program for displaying pride flags in DOS.

[foone]

We all like to joke about July being "Gay Wrath Month" but it's actually Disability Pride Month, so have the Disability Pride Flag from VGAPride and my AST Premmia LX MS-DOS machine

[foone]

Happy Aromantic Visibility Day, from VGAPride!

[foone]

I was trying to capture some images from VGAPRIDE for an upcoming project, and accidentally generated the BIGLITCH pride flag.

[foone]

Happy International Lesbian Day, from VGAPride!

These pride flags are, in order:

The 5-stripes-only variant of the Emily Gwen flag

The Lipstick Lesbian flag itself, by Natalie McCray

Maya Kern's reorganization of the Lydia Dragon flag

Lydia Dragon's flag

A 7 stripes-only version of the Lipstick Lesbian flag

The Labrys Lesbian flag

Emily Gwen's 2018 Lesbian Flag

EDIT: I misattributed the first one, and forgot the picture for the 7-stripe "sunset" flag.

[foone]

VGAPride 0.6 is out!

VGAPride is my program for displaying assorted pride flags on MS-DOS Computers with VGA (or compatible) video cards. You can download it and run it in DOSBox, or stick it on a floppy disk and display it on your local neighborhood 386 if you want.

For this update, 6 more flags were added!

Autistic Pride

Objectum Sexuality

Pangender

PS/2 (by me! a joke flag for retrocomputerists)

tricolor polyamory

voidpunk

This update brings VGAPride up to 61 flags.

(I also fiddled with the readability of the title for the Intersex-inclusive pride flag, but then tumblr ate my text. The title was too long, so I shrank it and changed the colors. It's still not great, but it's better)

[foone]

Happy International Asexuality Day, from me, Shinji Ikari, and VGAPRIDE.exe!

[foone]

Why are "Crabs" and "Brazil" different flag categories? Arent they both "some image centered in the middle of a maybe-patterned-maybe-not field"? What's the difference and why's it enough to split the categories? Also would Mexico be a Crabs or a Brazil

so, to explain crabs:

The way VGAPride works is that it has a simple vector drawing language which is used to compose almost all the flags. so, like, a simple pride flag like the pansexual pride flag, which is just three stripes, will be coded like this:

static GraphicsCommand pansexual_pride_flag_commands[]={ GraphicsCommand(Rectangle,Left(h_3_0),Right(h_3_1),RGB(255, 33,140)), GraphicsCommand(Rectangle,Left(h_3_1),Right(h_3_2),RGB(255,216, 0)), GraphicsCommand(Rectangle,Left(h_3_2),Right(h_3_3),RGB( 33,177,255)), GraphicsCommand(EndCommandList) };

It's basically just "draw a rectangle from here in this color", then another two stripes done the same way. Nearly every flag is done this way.

Now, the crab pride flags, are way more complicated. They are pixel art, technically: they needed manual dithering to fit into the right number of colors. That was tricky and involved a lot of me zoomed way in on an image, redrawing individual pixels and shit.

So instead of doing it like this with the vector commands, they're instead compressed as just pixels, but separated into multiple planes (because EGA is... weird) and then compressed with the LZ4 algorithm. So to display them, instead of doing a lot of vector shit, it just decompresses it into VRAM, job done. But they are in separate files because the "source code" for them is automatically generated by a python script, and I don't want it stomping on the manually defined vector commands.

And Brazil... Brazil is still a vector-defined flag. But it's one that's SO COMPLICATED compared to EVERY OTHER FLAG that I had to put it in a separate file to keep Borland Turbo C++ 3.0 from crashing trying to compile it.

Just about every other flag is some stripes and maybe a triangle or two. the Gay flag of Brazil is 6 stripes and a big diamond and a circle and a bunch of stars of different sizes and a white ribbon and some text. It's just SO COMPLICATED compared to everything else.

The second biggest pride flag is the Intersex-inclusive Progress Pride Flag:

(which I just realized the title doesn't fit on screen. Whoops. Gotta fix that!)

That complicated flag with all the stripes and chevrons and circles is an amazing 21 commands!

Brazil is FIFTY SEVEN commands. (I even added a "Star" command to the vector language just to make it simpler!)

The second biggest and third biggest pride flags could fit inside the brazil pride flag WITH ROOM TO SPARE.

Anyway, the real question: Mexico: Crabs or Brazil?

Given the complexity of the mexican flag, if I had to add a mexican gay-pride flag, it'd probably be a crab.

[foone]

I added a new pride flag to VGAPride: it's the Tumblr Pride Flag! This variant is local to Tumblr and was invented sometime since December 17th, 2018, and is used to celebrate your pride in the fact you're a trans woman on Tumblr and are about to get permanently banned for life.

Here it's displayed on my Pentium-75mhz running DOS 6.22.

(user was banned for this post)

[foone]

the wartime flags discussion is reminding me of this https://twitter.com/delatoid/status/1739070143370862906

That's great. I'm gonna have to add the wartime enby flag to VGAPride!

[foone]

Merry Trans Day of Visibility! I'm trans, purple, and I've got a cool crab flag.

Also my Pentium computer agrees, thanks to my program VGAPride: