Tiles pixels 2x, 4x (or more) - HD remaking of NES games

A place for your artistic side. Discuss techniques and tools for pixel art on the NES, GBC, or similar platforms.

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joabfarias
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Post by joabfarias »

tokumaru wrote:On the NES, it would be better if the same tiles could be mapped to different upscaled bitmaps depending on their palette, otherwise it would be hard to make good looking high-resolution bushes and clouds in SMB, for example. Enemies that are just palette swaps could benefit from this too, and receive extra details.
I think that the palette swaps are the main reason to keep the same colors used originally. It would save a lot of work.
With more pixels, it is easier to make shades using the same colors.
Perhaps it will be possible to use some dithering filter in the future, and make images like this one:

Image

Using 3 colors to do this would make awesome images.
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Dwedit
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Post by Dwedit »

Dithering and 3 colors? I thought this was about expanding NES graphics to new high-color graphics.
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koitsu
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Re: Tiles pixels 2x, 4x (or more) - HD remaking of NES games

Post by koitsu »

joabfarias wrote:But after some tile editing, we could have graphics like this one, for example:
Image
Image

I'll take the original any day of the week. Just an opinion (doesn't represent the world or anything): I wish people (including companies) would leave classic games alone. Trying to make money off nostalgia irritates me, but that's probably because "remade" classic games tend to be crap (yeah, including that Bionic Command remake), art and all. It's a sign of the times: people just want to make a quick buck rather than actually come up with something new/inventive.
joabfarias
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Post by joabfarias »

Dwedit wrote:Dithering and 3 colors? I thought this was about expanding NES graphics to new high-color graphics.
Well, putting more colors would be beautiful, but I think it would be far more difficult. How would we manage the palette swaps?
If we keep the same colors, everything will work.
Imagine a MegaMan body sprite with several colors. After a weapon change, the palette will swap. The original colors will swap normally, but not the additional colors. How you intend to make it work?
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Dwedit
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Post by Dwedit »

You look up a different 256 or 16 color palette for each possible 3-color palette. Tepples suggested a way to auto-generate a 16-color palette: darker and brighter versions of the 3 colors, and blended colors. But you don't have to use it, you can just use a custom-made palette.
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joabfarias
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Re: Tiles pixels 2x, 4x (or more) - HD remaking of NES games

Post by joabfarias »

koitsu wrote:
joabfarias wrote:But after some tile editing, we could have graphics like this one, for example:
Image
Image

I'll take the original any day of the week. Just an opinion (doesn't represent the world or anything): I wish people (including companies) would leave classic games alone. Trying to make money off nostalgia irritates me, but that's probably because "remade" classic games tend to be crap (yeah, including that Bionic Command remake), art and all. It's a sign of the times: people just want to make a quick buck rather than actually come up with something new/inventive.
koitsu, I made that image in just a few minutes, and I don't have any experience in pixel art. I am very certain that people who know how to do this (and love the game) would make it look beautiful.

I did not understand why you are talking about money. Everything would be made purely by passion, by gamers and for gamers.
joabfarias
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Post by joabfarias »

Dwedit wrote:You look up a different 256 or 16 color palette for each possible 3-color palette. Tepples suggested a way to auto-generate a 16-color palette: darker and brighter versions of the 3 colors, and blended colors. But you don't have to use it, you can just use a custom-made palette.
Sorry, now I understand. You are right, it would really look beautiful.

But we have to be sure that everything will run in an average CPU.
The quantity of pixels has reached almost a million. Of course, we can use 2x2 matrixes with more colors instead of 4x4, with a final resolution of 512 x 480.
3gengames
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Post by 3gengames »

Yeah, 2x pixel graphics are better than anything else IMO. Look at Sonic. Sonic 4 on 360 doesn't even phase me, while the original Sonic is awesome to me.
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tokumaru
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Post by tokumaru »

3gengames wrote:Sonic 4
Poor example, that game just plain sucks.
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Post by 3gengames »

tokumaru wrote:
3gengames wrote:Sonic 4
Poor example, that game just plain sucks.
graphics don't, game does.
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Movax12
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Post by Movax12 »

Couldn't this be done with Lua scripting? It would seem to be the most flexible way, but I'm not sure if any emulators with Lua support creating higher res graphics than the nes resolution.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvDXZmS2MAU
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Gilbert
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Post by Gilbert »

Similar things had been done in a really old arcade game emulator (for DOS) called EmuDX, in which you can replace the graphics and sound clips with new ones. There was also a certain SMS emulator that popped up a few years back in which you can replace its graphics by high resolution ones (read the tutorials; it's similar to what you want to do here).

So all this is possible (provided some people make the tools) but honestly unless the enhanced graphics are really good enough I'll stick to the original. Personally I think a much more worthwhile enhancement to Famicom graphics is to increase the colours (like from 4 colour to 16 colour for each tile; but then games with palette effects would need more attentions) than the resolution.
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rainwarrior
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Post by rainwarrior »

Hmm, perhaps instead of 4-colours it could be a 4-bit palette index multiplied by a 4-bit greyscale value, or perhaps an HSV colour offset from the palette colour. That would allow some extra colours without making palette-swaps a hassle. (Probably would need a dedicated tool for coming up with HSV offsets; I don't know if this exists anywhere.)

I like Tepples' idea of hashing, or having some sort of lookup based on the tile's position on the CHR page and its content, to be able to deal with CHR-RAM easily.

Just creating a CHR-ROM files that is 4x the size of the regular CHR-ROM though would be about the simplest possible file format, and have relatively low ambiguity though.


On another note, has anyone ever made an automated sprite ripper for NES? I was thinking you could play the game normally, and any block of sprites that are placed contiguously onscreen could be automatically rendered to an output bitmap (filtering any already used). It'd come up with a ton of false positives (e.g. two characters stuck together) but it would probably do a pretty good job otherwise. Maybe sprite ripping isn't all that hard to accomplish to begin with though.
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Dwedit
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Post by Dwedit »

The automatic sprite ripper would really come in handy, because it also contains the tile numbers that make up that sprite.

I tried making a tool that matched sprite pieces on a sprite sheet back to CHR data, and it's not quite ready yet. For example, it doesn't like overlaid sprites that cover up things. Megaman's helmet covers up one pixel of his face, and it's not matching it. Also, Megaman 2's graphics have a couple of duplicate tiles.

But anyway yeah, automatic sprite ripper, then manually correspond the images to enhanced images. Easy to take it from there, and get the replacement graphics ready.
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joabfarias
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Post by joabfarias »

I remember that the DOS version of NESticle allowed the user to edit the sprites during emulation. It was not a very good interface, but was pretty easy to change things.
If the tool to redesign the sprites could be inside the emulator like in NESticle, with the results being show in real time, it would be really good.
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