The Awful Truth: The Beginning of it AllGothbench I is a very old project I buried long ago, mainly because I didn't want my name on it any more. It is possibly the most dreadful thing ever released in dark.enterprises history, perhaps even worse than the precursor to dark.enterprises, the "Shades of Black" personal site, which I hate to admit having created. To be fair, Shades of Black beat some of the worst goth pages I've seen, since it had some actual content and a sense of humor, but it's something I'd still rather forget. I hesitantly produce its front page only here. This was the first real attempt at designing a actual page I'd ever made.The beginnings of Gothbench I began to take place after I purchased an upgrade ROM and newer Workbench software for my Amiga 500. (Amiga geeks: The upgrade was AmigaOS 3.1. I had a 68020 14MHz M-Tec board with an 8 meg SIMM onboard and a 100MB SCSI hard drive plugged in the left side expansion slot. It was a Commodore drive, but I can't remember the model. It had a game switch.) I was quite happy to discover that the new Workbench allowed you to use tiling images for both the desktop and window backgrounds. I had spent a year or so at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, and had a rudimentary knowledge of design. (Although, it won't be obvious once you've seen the following.) So I used the few imaging tools I had, DeluxePaint IV and some version of ImageFX off a cover disk, and tried to make some decent patterns.
The Plot ThickensUnfortunately, due to my Amiga's display restrictions at the time, my desktop had eight whopping colors I could choose from a palette of 4096. I could have even used 16, but it slowed down screen drawing just to have eight. So all of the Gothbench I patterns used black, white, and five shades of grey. No red was used in any of the patterns. There were a few sounds included (as well as a few somewhat decent pointers), but you'll have to download it for these.Here is a screenshot I found of what my desktop typically looked like at the time: (I didn't have my expansion board yet.)
The backgrounds are from Gothbench I. (The Bruce Lee dock item loaded a C-64 emulator. I have been in the sk33n for more years than most, probably, heh. Ph33r me, or something.) I'd still prefer that dock program to the Start Menu any day.) Even many of the pattern names left a lot to be desired. Here is the pattern preview image included with Gothbench I:
Yes. I actually released this with my name on it on Aminet. So for the sake of humour and completeness, I present Gothbench I with both nostalgia and a bit of chagrin. It is strictly Amiga-only. (And if anyone has any interest whatsoever in doing a port, promptly seek professional help.) So, I suppose that technically, over the entire series, there are actually
120 patterns. I just don't count these for obvious reasons.
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