This seems like a good litmus test to quietly see if someone has ever used MSDOS -- tell the story with the "guy.brush" version, and see if the listener furrows their eyebrows and says, "Wait, I thought extensions could only be 3 characters?"<p>Could be useful in a murder mystery or something.
For those of you who are looking for some context, and have an hour to spare, Ahoy made a great documentary on YouTube about ‘The Secret of Monkey Island’ that touches on this topic. [0]<p>The source material linked in this thread looks to be more authoritative than the video, and if I remember correctly the video even gets this detail of the story wrong, but sometimes it’s nice to know the story around the story.<p>[0] <a href="https://youtu.be/9F9ahZQ7oP0" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/9F9ahZQ7oP0</a>
Just wanted to pop in and share a few fun facts about Deluxe Paint, Amiga and Monkey Island.<p>Electronic Arts originally made Deluxe Paint for the Amiga, along with the IFF (Interchange File Format) standard and ILBM (Interleaved Bitmap), an image format conforming to IFF.<p>They released the first version in 1985, for the Amiga 1000. The last version was version 5, in 1995, though I'm not sure how much EA was actually involved with that one.<p>The first Amiga version they released that could handle 256 colors came out in 1993, designed for the then new AGA graphics chipset. It became such a favorite that Psygnosis (after being bought by Sony) reportedly used Deluxe Paint on Amigas to create some of the graphics for Wipeout. I also know of other companies that used Amigas well into the early noughties for creating pixel graphics for mobile phones.<p>Avril Harrison is an artist whose "A.H." signature can been seen on many of the example pictures that were distributed along with Deluxe Paint, including her rendition of Botticelli's Venus and the iconic Tutankhamun gold mask[1].<p>LucasArts, however, seemed to be using PC:s exclusively. AFAIK, Monkey Island was ported to the Amiga by another company hired specifically for that task.<p>At the time when Monkey Island I and II were made the Amiga chipset didn't have support for 256 colors. The maximum was 32 colors, plus 32 darker shades of those colors, in a mode called EHB (Extra Half-brite). Monkey Island, just like most other Amiga games, was made to run in normal 32 color mode.<p>Avril Harrison later started working for LucasArts and it's claimed the original art depicting governor Elaine Marley[2] is based on her likeness.<p>[1] <a href="https://i.redd.it/hk6hkm84xv011.png" rel="nofollow">https://i.redd.it/hk6hkm84xv011.png</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.sporting04.it/general/explorers/ddb/MonkeyIsland04.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://www.sporting04.it/general/explorers/ddb/MonkeyIsland...</a>
I actually remember that I read that story and wondered in my head about the extension length.<p>But I had two possible ideas what could make the story work. One was that maybe they just hadn't used MS-DOS. There were plenty of computer systems out there and I had no knowledge what they used for programming the original MI or even which one was the original (it was available on different plattforms).<p>The second was that maybe the extension was something like .brs as an abbrevation for brush, but they pronounced it brush and eventually took the pronounciation as the name, not the literal filename.<p>Now I know both are wrong.