Origins

The work for this Christmas Card began in 1985. My parents had bought an Atari 800, and I found a program called Animation Studio for it. Animation Studio gave you one 160 x 192, 4 color page that you would draw all your cells of animation. It then also gave you a 160 x 192, 4 color page for the background.

Using that program I created a little five peice rock band called Fozzof. It was very crude animation, but you really could not do much with 160 x 192 pixels. Each member had four to five different frames and either rolled through them or randomly displayed them, my memory is fuzzy.

In 1992 I purchased my first 486 which ran Windows 3.0. My friend Marc was working for Microsoft at the time and I asked him to buy me a copy of Visual Studio 1.0. Even though VS 1.0 had the MFC library I wrote most programs in native Windows. I had one of Charles Petzold's books on Windows programming and I followed it for writing this Christmas card as a Windows Application.

Windows still did not have a good screen resolution, however, it did give me 16 colors. This alowed me to really expand the colors on the characters. Since the resolution was not the best, my animations were still very blocky. I kept this blocky still for this rework. The only thing I did between the originals and these re-writes are the images are all 2 times larger, with one exception. On this card the clockhands were originaly bitmaps, on this card they are lines.

Later in 1994 or 1995 I converted the app to a screen saver, which back in those days of the flying toasters were quite the rave.