Gratitude Day 23: Dithering (Floyd and Steinberg, take a bow!)

Background / Basic Concepts Another entry in the "Things that old folks care about but young folks don't know much about" department, let's talk about dithering! Dithering was how you got your 8/16-bit computers to look like they had more colors (or shades of gray) onscreen than they could really produce. It was even used in chiptunes, to make a single-voice PC speaker sound like it actually had four or more voices by quickly switching between the different parts of the tune, sort of like PWM, if you're familiar with that. On a high-level, "dithering" just means quickly jumping back and forth between discrete values, giving the impression of a values in-between the two. For example, if you wanted to produce a graphic sort of like this: ________░░░░░░░░▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓████████ but the only values you have at your disposal are "_" and "█," then you could do something like this: ________█_______█___█___█_█_█_█_████████ Comparing the two, you can see the vague similarity:…