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Post by ommadawnyawn2 on Oct 7, 2016 10:03:27 GMT -5
Lately I've taken an interest in mockups of game ports from one system to another, specifically demakes to the SMS. Using paint.net with the selective palette plugin (or Gimp if the palette you want to convert to uses 256 colors or less), you can replicate a console's palette and then auto-convert a screenshot to that palette. The result tends to be pretty decent, but usually you can improve things a lot with some tweaking by hand. I looked up the values for the SMS and MD and had a go with some SNES and MD games, and to my surprise they look pretty good. Using color reduction to 32 or 64 colors respectively in Gimp didn't even change anything in most cases. Obviously the sprite size, resolution, sub palette and tileset limitations aren't really considered here but still. If anyone's interested in trying this themselves, below I have linked to palette files (.txt files, name them however you want) for the SMS and MD palettes to use with paint.net, and the plugin. SMS (Sega Retro): m.uploadedit.com/ba3s/14758521497.txtNES ("Kizul's definitive NES palette"): m.uploadedit.com/ba3s/1475852028162.txtMD/GEN (Gimp): m.uploadedit.com/ba3s/147585212025.txtSelective Palette plugin for paint.net (put in Effects folder): paint.net.amihotornot.com.au/features/effects/plugins/color/Selective_Palette/Auto conversions using Paint.net (right click and open in a new tab to zoom) Handpicked conversions Auto conversions. Increased brightness and contrast a bit before converting both, used auto levels before converting in the picture to the right Handpicked conversions SNES>SMS Auto conversion Handpicked conversions SNES>MD handpicked conversions. Bottom right example has the background and sprites reduced to 16 colors each (previously 18 & 17 colors), taking into consideration the sub palette limit of 16 colors (MD has four sub palettes, SMS has two) Want more? Go here for Ys 3, Super Mario World and others: imgur.com/a/hZY0t
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Post by elektrolurch on Oct 7, 2016 10:29:02 GMT -5
... And I thought it was about something like that: Bioshock on 2600
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Post by ommadawnyawn2 on Oct 7, 2016 11:16:55 GMT -5
Sorry to disappoint I guess? I thought this could be more of a community thing, since it's fairly easy to do and the results can be surprisingly good.
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Post by moran on Oct 7, 2016 11:33:48 GMT -5
I like it. I've always liked pallette swaps like this. One of my favorite features of HG101 articles are the comparison screenshots. I'll definitely be trying these out when I get a chance.
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Post by Colonel Kurtz on Oct 7, 2016 14:49:55 GMT -5
It reminds us that the SMS was no slouch graphically, also...
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Post by moran on Oct 7, 2016 19:54:01 GMT -5
Yeah, I expected some seriously downgraded color. But those still look pretty good.
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Post by zerker on Oct 8, 2016 10:53:34 GMT -5
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Post by ommadawnyawn2 on Oct 8, 2016 12:03:42 GMT -5
A nice last touch would be centering the avatars. Those do show how you can get a lot of detail with just four shades though.
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Post by zerker on Oct 8, 2016 12:19:34 GMT -5
Yeah, maybe so. I just using existing screenshots I had on my hard drive, so I was more concerned with getting an interesting scene/subject than exactly where the player character was overall. Bonus points if anyone can name all the games I used without looking at the file names
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Post by klausien on Oct 9, 2016 10:53:00 GMT -5
Color palette conversions do not show the level of flicker and sprite dropping that would certainly be present in 8 bit versions of these games. Think SMS Double Dragon or NES TMNT 2. It's still fun to talk about this of course.
The only system that was severely handicapped in the area of colors was the MegaDrive/Genesis, but its processor speed more than made up for it. Screen shots can't show the speed of a game though, so the machine does not get the respect it deserves from younger gamers. The classic dithering does make modern phenomena like the Pyron color hacks very interesting however. The MD/Gen's low sampling rate for sound also gets in the way for people raised in the 32 bit era, but those FM tunes are nostalgic bliss to many older gamers. Case in point, Genesis SF2 has superior gameplay to the SNES versions, but the dithering in color and sound spoils the arcade-at-home illusion. The Genesis 6-Button was also the best pad for SF2, but SNES still wins.
I find it interesting that so much modern music uses lo-fi sounds that would be at home on the MD/Gen, yet SNES MIDI cheese tends to be preferred... but now I'm digressing again. Sorry about that!
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Post by ommadawnyawn2 on Oct 9, 2016 19:59:35 GMT -5
Color palette conversions do not show the level of flicker and sprite dropping that would certainly be present in 8 bit versions of these games. Think SMS Double Dragon or NES TMNT 2. It's still fun to talk about this of course. The only system that was severely handicapped in the area of colors was the MegaDrive/Genesis, but its processor speed more than made up for it. Screen shots can't show the speed of a game though, so the machine does not get the respect it deserves from younger gamers. The classic dithering does make modern phenomena like the Pyron color hacks very interesting however. The MD/Gen's low sampling rate for sound also gets in the way for people raised in the 32 bit era, but those FM tunes are nostalgic bliss to many older gamers. Case in point, Genesis SF2 has superior gameplay to the SNES versions, but the dithering in color and sound spoils the arcade-at-home illusion. The Genesis 6-Button was also the best pad for SF2, but SNES still wins. I find it interesting that so much modern music uses lo-fi sounds that would be at home on the MD/Gen, yet SNES MIDI cheese tends to be preferred... but now I'm digressing again. Sorry about that! Yes, that's another legitimate aspect to consider in an actual porting scenario. I'd agree when it comes to the sub palettes and in some ways in the context of that generation (going further back the spectrum and amstrad were much worse I think, same with early DOS and to a lesser extent the C64 was too), though having tested a bunch of games in the auto converter now I don't think it really became a problem until later on with games like FF6 and Chrono Trigger, much thanks to the low resolution and how they could use dithering to fake more colors, but those games were more suited for CD-based systems anyway. There's also the shadow/highlight mode used in for example Ranger X and Lost World, which potentially increased the color count to 2x in-game, but with some annoying limitations on how you put the graphics together. Then there's the fact that many multiplatform games had a somewhat higher resolution on MD, since the max res mode some like to cite for SNES was very limited; this helped gameplay in some cases like in Cool Spot and Lost Vikings. Personally I think FM and even earlier chip tunes aged better in some ways since there isn't a sound quality loss other than the hardware the sound is played back by (to be fair the model 2's tended to sound pretty bad) and because it sounds more unique, even though the YM2612 wasn't top tier in terms of FM synth even game systems-wise and its DAC samples (pretty much only used for drums and sfx/voices with a few exceptions) tended to sound noticeably worse than on SNES or Neo Geo. The deeper bass on MD compared to SNES helped a lot with certain genres of music though. The point about modern music I agree with. I think the preference is due to a combination of things like brand recognition over time, the aforementioned model 2s, mostly crappy emulation recordings on sites like youtube, most western developers' lack of skill with FM (Kid Chameleon, Sonic Spinball etc) and how the worst sounding MD music tends to be much more grating than the worst SNES music, often more grating than the worst sounding music on earlier sound chips as well.
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Post by 320x240 on Oct 10, 2016 5:42:19 GMT -5
It reminds us that the SMS was no slouch graphically, also... In many ways a truly underutilized machine. What could have been...
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Post by ommadawnyawn2 on Oct 12, 2016 12:11:09 GMT -5
Dragon Quest I - From SNES back to 8-bit NES SMS SMS
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Post by ommadawnyawn2 on Dec 10, 2016 13:43:00 GMT -5
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Post by Dee Liteyears on Dec 10, 2016 14:01:08 GMT -5
Those Ninja Gaiden edits look great. I made this GG demake screen of Money Idol Exchanger some time ago The pallette works, but I doubt the way I set it up would be feasible for the whole game
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