pouët.net

I spent more time than I intended making a more or less artist-friendly tool to make graphics for the zx spectrum.

Basically, turning this

from this

to this

or maybe even this

although that apparently flickers on most CRTs on real devices.

Anyway. More info at http://sol.gfxile.net/spectrumizer/, and sources and link to win32 binaries at https://github.com/jarikomppa/img2spec.

I was reading the page and you mentioned using Pythagoras for finding the closest colour and it got me thinking.
Does it have a benefit to adding together the absolute component differences (multiplied by component brightness) for getting a relative distance value?

Well yeah, I skip the square root. But tossed that in there so that less-technically-inclined people might still get what I'm talking about.

Why less technically inclined people would read about converting graphics to a 30 year old 8-bit home computer is another question entirely.

@sol_hsa, very impressive work. Something like this was long overdue.

Can you convert it to something that looks like it was drawn by a scene graphician?

Of course not.

I didn't make it clear in this thread, but this is not an automated tool - you can use it for batch processing if you want, but the result is probably not what you want.

You load up your image, and then apply a bunch of filters on it, and see the result of adjusting said filters in real time.

You can also open the same file in both spectrumizer and, say, photoshop, and let the artist work that way. If the image changes, spectrumizer reloads it.

I made a converter somewhat like yours for the MSX some time ago.
http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=55681

In the end the pictures still look like converted/digitized photos. What would be even more interesting is to be able to have a semi-automatic tool that can separate picture elements, resize and move them around to get everything nicely on 8 pixel or whatever boundaries, and then paint and scene-ditherize them. There are many common style tricks and techniques used by graphicians. Like for example, the "different colored light from left and right side". Bring in elements, do composition, lighting, palette stylizing... I'm not a graphician so I can't actually do that stuff, but having the techniques available in a "computer aided" fashion is an intriguing idea.

I made that non-clickable link on purpose to highlight the need for url autodetection or even a one-minute post editing grace period.
http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=55681

sol_hsa, thx for making scale/offset modifier!

btw, what is the system requirements to run img2spec?
half of the computers, where we have tryed to run it show white windows instead of pictures.

Sounds like the MSX graphics is surprisingly close to spectrum =)


It uses opengl 1.x, but I do use npot textures.. fixing that shouldn't be difficult.

great tool, but I need some brightness fixes

Please elaborate. (There's some stuff under options).

I love conversion tools. The aesthetic of (mostly) machine converted graphics has something special about it. Definitely will have to play with it a bit (:

Seem to get this error occasionally, though :(

If you can repro it somehow, I'd love to know the steps..

And one usefull feature: batch convertion for images( Imade it for bmp2scr)

This is, again, an artist tool, not a totally automated one.. but you can do that from command line.

Come on it's not rocket science.

bash:


Windows cmd

"Come on" directed at g0blinish

it is rocket science indeed.

sol_hsa, thx for the fix! now it seems to work on all machines.

Thanks for checking.

btw, there is one type of batch conversion when GUI is needed - conversion of AVI files (bmp files as frames in AVI container), when you adjust all the modifiers for the first frame and can save all the frames in SCR with the same settings.

Is... that a common thing to do? =)

..anyway, about the modifiers thing, if I was to batch convert with the same settings for some reason, I'd open up an image in spectrumizer, save the workspace, and then when batch converting from command line I'd just give said workspace as a parameter.

But .. converting AVI files? Seriously?