thefox wrote:I should rewrite this tool some day, I just noticed it makes some obviously wrong choices in some trivial pictures. E.g. if image is mostly black, and contains just some white, for some reason it makes the entire palette black. And sometimes it only fills the first 4 palette colors even though there are other colors in the source image. Seems to be a bug in the palette selection algorithm.
I can't wait for an update
I've made almost 400 conversions using this software for last 14 months. Probably 99% of all posts on my blog are Roms made with the help of 'Nes Image Converter'.
Many people here in Brazil likes this tool too. I'm about to write a Brazilian Portuguese tutorial for friends on a big Message Board.
But yeah, the only flaw of "NIC" is related to some wrong color conversions (not that I'm complaining - I'm just trying to inform some bugs).
I use to have 4 problems there:
1- Color 00 is ALWAYS converted to black. It will never appear as the color it should (dark grey)
Solution: I have to manually edit the rom on a Hex editor and change the wrong color to 00.
2- "Minimalistc" images (with few graphics of few colors) usually aren't good candidates for conversion.
Take this 4-color vertical gradient image for instance:
http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y191/m ... d8f1b5.png
Solutions: Images with a few colors usually have to be VERY detailed to be successfully converted.
Images with a few graphical elements need to have many irrelevant extra drawings added on Photoshop - to be manually removed later on progams like YY-CHR.
3- Images with many colors will hardly work. During my tests only one 12-color image was properly converted. This one:
http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y191/m ... df8ad9.png
Solution: Make images up to 7 colors. A 7 color image is usually properly converted.
4- Some random images aren't properly converted no matter how I try to optimize them.
Like this one for instance:
http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y191/m ... 40e259.png (not even reducing the number of colors will make it work).
Solution: Move over to another project. Seems there's nothing to do.
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I also have five gazillion suggestions for new features but I'll spare you from it.
The only one I would *
REALLY* like to see would be a way to also send two images (instead of only one) to NIC.
A new version of NIC could have 3 modes of conversion:
Mode 1 (1 image required) - The same, intact conversion method we already have on current Nes Image Converter.
It's perfect for conversion of photographs and all sorts of line-flickering images.
Mode 2 (2 images required) - User would provide both "odd" and "even" images. It would be perfect to make checkerboarded pattern images for instance (today I have to create 2 roms, mix them, edit many unmatching sprites on YY-CHR and colors on Hex editors to achieve this).
Mode 3 (2 images required) - First image would be made ONLY of background tiles. And second one would be made ONLY of sprites. Instead of a 2-frame screen, both images would be blended into a single screen (final result would be something like characters standing on a background). It would be perfect to create fake, static in-game images.
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Feel free to ignore my suggestion but let me thank you again for NIC, thefox.
It's probably the most entertaining and educational NES-related tool (for non-programmers) ever released.