About Fuzzy Pumper Palette Shop...

Hello there Doomworld,

I just want to address something about a little program called 'Fuzzy Pumper Palette Shop'. Never heard of it? It's a program that either John Romero/John Carmack developed. It was designed for Unix-based systems, but mainly NeXTSTEP. The name is based off of the Play-Doh toy 'Fuzzy Pumper Barber/Beauty/Monster Shop', most particularly Fuzzy Pumper Monster Shop, which was the Sesame Street version (Thanks Gez!). Here is a picture of the toy:



So, where were we? Well, it's purpose was to capture frames from a video camera, and export it as graphics, like the 1992 game 'Mortal Kombat'. The icon looked like the iconic Sesame Street character Cookie Monster. More proof into that is this photo:



It shows in the right hand side, the NeXT taskbar, there is an icon of Cookie Monster there. Now, so far Romero has released DoomEd and some graphics. Now, if he has the files, he should release Fuzzy Pumper. If he doesn't have the files, we should ask Carmack, if he has them.

[offtopic]

Romero or Carmack should release the original source code, because the source to the DMX API is somewhere. Somewhere.

[/offtopic]

Now, that's my analysis of Fuzzy Pumper Palette Shop. Any thoughts?

EDIT: I found the download for the DMX. http://www.doomworld.com/linguica/dmx_source/dmx.zip :)

Superluigieth1 said:

The name is based off of the Play-Doh toy 'Fuzzy Pumper Barber/Beauty/Monster Shop'.

More precisely the Fuzzy Pumper Monster Shop, which was the Sesame Street-themed version of that toy, which is why Cookie Monster is used as the icon.

Gez said:

More precisely the Fuzzy Pumper Monster Shop, which was the Sesame Street-themed version of that toy, which is why Cookie Monster is used as the icon.

Never knew that, adding it to the OP.

My bad, it's not the Monster Shop, it's this one.

I always wanted this as a youngster because importing graphics from photos tended to give them a horrible grey colour. If you edit the picture's palette before you import it to Doom, AKA make anything skin colored have the same range as doomguy's hand colors and so forth, it will look pretty good once imported.

That said, I really do agree that it would be interesting to see this program, I'm curious how exactly it worked.

I expect Romero has the source to it, but it's likely to be even harder to make useful than DoomEd's source has been.

From what little I've been able to determine about it, it seems that FPPS was the image capture program they used to photograph the models for import into the game. The photos would have been true-color images directly from the camera. There's then a big initial step required to convert those images into 256-color format, which it's known was part of the functionality of FPPS. Presumably it made sense to do this part directly on the NeXT workstation rather than on the PCs in Deluxe Paint, as the NeXTs probably(?) had true-color displays.

At the very least I'd be very interested to see how FPPS worked. Purely conjecture, but I'm imagining a bunch of color balance controls and a real-time preview for the converted image. Most image editors have the ability to convert to 256 color but it's very much a case of "convert and see what you get; undo; try to tweak the original image and try again". FPPS sounds like it was a dedicated tool for optimizing this whole workflow.

fraggle said:

Purely conjecture, but I'm imagining a bunch of color balance controls and a real-time preview for the converted image. Most image editors have the ability to convert to 256 color but it's very much a case of "convert and see what you get; undo; try to tweak the original image and try again". FPPS sounds like it was a dedicated tool for optimizing this whole workflow.

This is also how I'd think FPPS would work, and is exactly the kind of thing I was idly pining for in another post. There really aren't that many good tools I know of for working with true-colour images with the intent of making an indexed image as the final product.

I'm wondering if it had some kind of color mask feature, where it would take a greyscale version of the image and translate to a palette range.

Given the way that the clay models look in-game, they must've done something like that, either in FPPS or afterwards.

My guess, and this is just a stab in the dark, is that today, modern tools can do everything and more that this software could. Back then, id's tools were pretty much the bare minimum required to get the job done. They probably wrote it from scratch, and then tinkered with it until they got decent results. Empirically designed to provide decent results with what images they had, less user-friendly for general use.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, and I'd love to see it in action, and check out the source. But, for actual use, your modern Doom WAD editors are probably every bit as good.

Apologize for the ungodly necrobump, neither Carmack nor Romero have access to the program or source code. However! I do know a guy that does, he's the same person that last interacted with the only NeXTcube in which the program and its source resided on (Carmack's NeXTcube to be precise).

You'll have to somehow reach out to Don MacAskill, the owner of smugmug, he was the last person to have gotten any data off of those old NeXT computers but he apparently never gave the FPPS to Romero so there's a slight chance that it still exists in some form, provided that he hasn't thrown the hard drive away. You can reach him on his twitter at @DonMacAskill he also has a smugmug email but I'm not sure what the forums stance is on putting up email addresses so I'll refrain from doing so considering I'm already taking my chances with necroing this thread LOL

In even more lighter news, here's Fuzzy Pumper Palette Shop's icon (for the first time ever in 3 whole decades!) in complete viewable high definition