A New Visual Experience In Emulated Games

[zacaj]

I saw a metroid(NES) speedrun on youtube that had this, no idea how it was done, but it was zoomed out atleast 5x, and it was cool seeing the sprites disapearing and reappearing offscreen

EDIT: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CoQ-wXR_iw&feature=player_embedded

 

[lulzfish]

I saw a metroid(NES) speedrun on youtube that had this, no idea how it was done, but it was zoomed out atleast 5x, and it was cool seeing the sprites disapearing and reappearing offscreen

EDIT: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CoQ-wXR_iw&feature=player_embedded

It looks like he used a video editor to compose the gameplay video over a map of the playing area. Still not sure how it works, but it probably didn't look that way when he was playing it, it's just for the audience's benefit.

 

[itsmyusername]

I saw a metroid(NES) speedrun on youtube that had this, no idea how it was done, but it was zoomed out atleast 5x, and it was cool seeing the sprites disapearing and reappearing offscreen

EDIT: http://www.youtube.c...player_embedded

uhmm, obviously, it's edited.. the map isn't sync'd with what's happening.

 

[Pleng]

I once had and idea for a 'new visual experience in emulated games'. It was a very basic and hacky method to improve colour depths in older (8/16 bit) games.

Basically if you imagine a Master Sysyem has a palette of, what, 16 colours? Well every time a pixel is rendered with, for example, the colour blue, instead of rendering the exact colour requested it picks a random slightly different shade of blue (say, pick one out of four very close shades). That way when a block of an individual colour is rendered there will be subtle tonal variations along the block. I have no idea how this would actually look, though. And am nowhere near competent enough to give it a go myself.

I think I mentioned it in another thread years ago and got shot down by purists. I thought I'd mention it here as the title suggests its a thread geared more towards progressive emulatists

 

[bzar]

I once had and idea for a 'new visual experience in emulated games'. It was a very basic and hacky method to improve colour depths in older (8/16 bit) games.

Basically if you imagine a Master Sysyem has a palette of, what, 16 colours? Well every time a pixel is rendered with, for example, the colour blue, instead of rendering the exact colour requested it picks a random slightly different shade of blue (say, pick one out of four very close shades). That way when a block of an individual colour is rendered there will be subtle tonal variations along the block. I have no idea how this would actually look, though. And am nowhere near competent enough to give it a go myself.

I think I mentioned it in another thread years ago and got shot down by purists. I thought I'd mention it here as the title suggests its a thread geared more towards progressive emulatists

So basically, you'd add noise?

 

[lulzfish]

I once had and idea for a 'new visual experience in emulated games'. It was a very basic and hacky method to improve colour depths in older (8/16 bit) games.

Basically if you imagine a Master Sysyem has a palette of, what, 16 colours? Well every time a pixel is rendered with, for example, the colour blue, instead of rendering the exact colour requested it picks a random slightly different shade of blue (say, pick one out of four very close shades). That way when a block of an individual colour is rendered there will be subtle tonal variations along the block. I have no idea how this would actually look, though. And am nowhere near competent enough to give it a go myself.

I think I mentioned it in another thread years ago and got shot down by purists. I thought I'd mention it here as the title suggests its a thread geared more towards progressive emulatists

I didn't quite understand your post, but it sounds a lot like dithering.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dithering#Digital_photography_and_image_processing

Some older PC games did this to simulate higher color quality than 16-bits, and a lot of GIFs are noticeably dithered.

 

[gruso]

Re: Pleng's idea, if it was done in an ordered fashion (say, top left to bottom right for a given block of pixels) it could be more of a gradient than a dither. I'm sure that's far easier said than done of course.

Apparently there was a Gameboy emu a few years back that added colour to the original monochrome games, I remember EvilDragon talking about it.

 

[Pleng]

So basically, you'd add noise?

Um if you class it as noise then so be it. I don't really see it that way. How is a 4-shade tone 'noisier' than a 1 shade? Based on that theory we'd all be better off stuck in black and white.

I didn't quite understand your post, but it sounds a lot like dithering.
http://en.wikipedia....mage_processing

Some older PC games did this to simulate higher color quality than 16-bits, and a lot of GIFs are noticeably dithered.

It's kind of like a reverse dithering. Dithering trys to simulate one colour by mixing two together when sampling colours down from a high bit depth to a low one. This idea is to try and add some depth to a (for example) 6-bit image which never had any higher bit rate.

The process would be applied directly as the pixels are plotted. So instead of plotting the normal colour blue, the emulator picks a random shade of blue from a list of very closely tied together shades. Same happens with red, yellow, green etc. If the shades are close enough together I guess it could produce quite a pleasing result. The big issue of doing it on a pixel-level though is that every time the frame was redrawn each pixel would end up with a new randomly generated value which could result in a weird shimmering effect.

 

[bzar]

So basically, you'd add noise?

Um if you class it as noise then so be it. I don't really see it that way. How is a 4-shade tone 'noisier' than a 1 shade? Based on that theory we'd all be better off stuck in black and white.

I may have misunderstood what you mean, but it sounds like you're adding small random values to the pixel values. You may limit the randomness by restricting the possible random values to four or so, but subtracting the original image from the modified one would still come back as noise, because each pixel would be a random value from a predetermined set of values. If I've understood correctly, this could be quite easily done with some nicely shaped HSV noise. Even if the possible alternative colors are individually determined for each original color (not calculated uniformly), the noise would just change shape in different areas of the image based on the original color.

To reiterate, the "noisier" part comes from the added randomness. A color image contains more information than a B/W image. Adding color noise to a B/W image does not make it a color image, because there is no new information about what color the objects in the image are. Reducing information (color->B/W, decimation) is easy. Giving an illusion of added information (B/W->color, interpolation, etc) is usually done with noise (randomness) or interpolated values. Actually adding information is forbidden CSI tech

 

[Aninhumer]

Um if you class it as noise then so be it. I don't really see it that way. How is a 4-shade tone 'noisier' than a 1 shade?

By definition?
The "signal" is the original image, and by adding random variations to that you are adding noise to that signal.

Now you may feel the "grain" effect produced looks nicer, but it is still noise.

 

[craigix]

Re: Pleng's idea, if it was done in an ordered fashion (say, top left to bottom right for a given block of pixels) it could be more of a gradient than a dither. I'm sure that's far easier said than done of course.

Apparently there was a Gameboy emu a few years back that added colour to the original monochrome games, I remember EvilDragon talking about it.

That's because those games have support for colour in the way the palettes work. You could make a tool for GB games which would allow you to inject colour in to them.

 

[PokeParadox]

Re: Pleng's idea, if it was done in an ordered fashion (say, top left to bottom right for a given block of pixels) it could be more of a gradient than a dither. I'm sure that's far easier said than done of course.

Apparently there was a Gameboy emu a few years back that added colour to the original monochrome games, I remember EvilDragon talking about it.

That's because those games have support for colour in the way the palettes work. You could make a tool for GB games which would allow you to inject colour in to them.

There was actually a GB hacking tool which would let you edit colour palette into monochrome GB titles... I remember experimenting with it for Super Mario Land... was pretty cool... broke some games, but most quite happily run in an emulator and use the hacked into colour palette. I have... *cough* had a Metroid II hack on my Pandora which worked fine on VBA...

 

[chame]

no way to do the wide screening without big changes in both the emus and each game code

 

[hedwards]

Re: Pleng's idea, if it was done in an ordered fashion (say, top left to bottom right for a given block of pixels) it could be more of a gradient than a dither. I'm sure that's far easier said than done of course.

Apparently there was a Gameboy emu a few years back that added colour to the original monochrome games, I remember EvilDragon talking about it.

That's because those games have support for colour in the way the palettes work. You could make a tool for GB games which would allow you to inject colour in to them.

Isn't that how the super game boy worked? IIRC both the gameboy color and gameboy advanced did something similar. Wouldn't shock me if an emulator was able to do that sort of thing as well.

 

[Alpha2]

This discussion reminds me of one of the tricks that TV shows (usually the news) pull to give the illusion of a 16:9 aspect when they're still using 4:3 video. The black bars try to mimic the pixels at the edges of the 4:3 image and blur them to give the impression of a wider image. Similar to what this thread on Videohelp.com talks about.

 

[Aninhumer]

Isn't that how the super game boy worked? IIRC both the gameboy color and gameboy advanced did something similar. Wouldn't shock me if an emulator was able to do that sort of thing as well.

Yeah I think there was a button combo you could press while it was on the logo screen to change the palette.

 

[Prometheus]

Half-right: With the Super Game Boy, you could change it at any time - it was accessible from the menus, which if memory serves you got to by pressing both of the SNES' shoulder buttons (of course, it didn't apply to some titles, such as Super Game Boy ones with custom palettes, if I recall correctly). It was the Game Boy Colour which required a button-combo at the logo screen.

 

[itsmyusername]

It looks like he used a video editor to compose the gameplay video over a map of the playing area. Still not sure how it works, but it probably didn't look that way when he was playing it, it's just for the audience's benefit.

http://vimeo.com/13354707

i just found this..


wow.....

 

[VRAndy]

Hah. I thought this was going to be about a new scaling technique, like SuperEagle or something.

An awesome trick might be to intercept sprite drawing calls, use the actual sprite in the buffer as a hash-key to an alternate image. Perhaps a high-resolution hand-drawn replacement for the original sprite. You'd have to do the same for the tiles.
That'd be a really labor intensive hack, but it'd be a cool way to 'remake' a game while still playing with all the original logic. Imagine artists releasing new high resolution "art-packs" for classic games. It'd be cool.

 

[dnlgreenwood]

HEY!! look what I stumbled accross:
http://www.disgruntleddesigner.com/chrisc/segahacking/gg2sms.html

looks like someone hacked game gear games to work on the master system, and enhanced those games, for example, some have a wider field of view and wider title screens.