Back in the 1980s, I came home from school to happily hack away on the family computer, an Apple //e (that's pronounced "apple two E" for you young'uns), a beautiful machine released in 1983. In 1984, the movie Ghostbusters came out — still my favorite movie to watch every Halloween!
Sometime shortly after that, I wrote this program:
I recently found this while going over some old program files from my childhood (now running in an Apple //e emulator). There wasn't much actual game to it; you just press the spacebar, and a colorful cone of suckage slowly sucks the ghost into the trap. But I remember being pretty proud of it at the time. (Pro tip: always be proud of your creations, especially when you're new to coding, as even a small program is a success worth celebrating.)
I was especially proud of that little ghost sprite. So, when I was looking to add to the built-in sprites included with Mini Micro, I decided to include this little guy!
When this sprite was originally created back in the 80s, there were no such thing as PNG or JPEG files. Sprites in Applesoft were defined in a complex format called a shape table. So, to convert this to a modern format, I just took a screen shot, blew it way up, and then copied it pixel by pixel into FatBits.
The current version of Mini Micro now includes this sprite, at /sys/pics/Ghost-tiny.png.
As this was originally drawn circa 1984, and it's now 2024, this sprite is forty years old, giving it the honor of being by far the oldest sprite in active use, at least among stuff I've created.
But pixels today, even in a retro-style machine like Mini Micro, are much smaller than pixels on the Apple II. (Mini Micro's display is 960 x 640 pixels; Apple II's hi-res mode was 280 x 192.) As a result, this little guy looks quite tiny in Mini Micro. You can scale him up, of course, but he gets rather blocky. So, I also made a new sprite — inspired by the original as much as possible — but at a larger size.
This too is available in Mini Micro (/sys/pics/Ghost.png). Think of it as Ghost-tiny's younger-but-larger sibling.
With Halloween coming up, now's a great time to consider how you might put these guys to use in your own project. Or, perhaps you have some asset of your own that has survived the decades? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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