INPUT magazine

[erico]

It kind of works, but still requires a lot of hand made finalization to actually look proper, in special, outlines.
Since the resolution is small, it is probably better/faster to just do it all by hand and trace over a reduced image.

edit: 2x image for better reading, there is no finalization here, just conversion.
edit2: there is a bit of pre-work on cleaning up, here a break down:
.Desaturate image
.Work levels to achieve a nice strong contrast, specially on needed areas, there must be pure black and pure white
.Posterize to 7 levels of B/W
.Reduce size
.Adjust some bad looking areas
.With the magic wand non-contiguous, change the respective gray colors to the yellow, yellow+green, green, green+red, red, red+blue,blue. (light to dark)
.Fix what looks weird (which I didn´t)

I used only 1 level of dither, the 1010 kind, I´m not sure adding up more 6 in between dithered colors would come up with anything good at this resolution.

[erico]

Here another example.

This time, I used Dan Fessler´s approach to pixel art+dither, tunned a few things to match the coco II colors and voila...a converter with extensive controls and as many dithers or none as you may need. I think this might be the best way to paint coco II pmode 3 style.

Here goes some examples output and the photoshop file you need, use the IMAGE layer to put your stuff and tune with the others.

You might wonder why do I go about all this bother...I´m hoping to put up a masters degree and want to work with art from ancient computers done with today´s tech.

[erico]

I managed to make a pmode 4 conversion too, it works visually, but I doubt the core image would come up with colors on a real coco, would have to test, but I have no idea how to load an image of today´s standard into coco.

The color clash was not hard at all to deal, in fact, it was super manageable.
I changed my mind about this artifacts, I thing the likes of spectrum or amstrad limits of colors per chunk and so on would prove much harder to reproduce and respect using today´s tools.

Here a set of images quickly converted to pmode4, would be nice if we had shadow of the beast back then uh?

[matchy]

Nice job on the conversions and that is what I was experimenting with until I did realize that tracing would suit, thus the creation of the adventure room auto mapper.

Similarly, here is a C64 image converter.
http://c64.superdefault.com/

[erico]

Yep, the conversion works fine if done in blocks, but tracing/hand pixeling is always waiting at the end, can´t escape that.
Nice c64 conversion site!

If you are tracing stuff on your pc using whatever program or an emulator (which is good to use a wacom tablet), you might be interested on this tool here:
http://drpetter.proboards.com/thread/597/new-free-utility-works-sculptris

It overlays a picture on screen and you set transparency level and works over the desired program/emulator.
Kind of like a layer software program, works wonders and works great over coco max II on mocha.

[Ian Price]

I thing the likes of spectrum or amstrad limits of colors per chunk

Amstrad CPC had no colour limits per "chunk." It was however limited to number of colours in Mode only (as per coco), although with careful use of the raster you could change Modes on the fly and have several modes in one screen.

Nice job on the conversions and that is what I was experimenting with until I did realize that tracing would suit, thus the creation of the adventure room auto mapper.

Similarly, here is a C64 image converter.
http://c64.superdefault.com/

Gernot actually did a C64 converter in a GLBasic shader.

[erico]

Hey Matchy, I seem to figure there is a way to display somehow 16 colors on a COCO on that pmode4 with the artifacts, I can´t seem to find any documentation on such but a few games have it, do you have any idea about it?

Edit: never mind, I just figured it out, it was by using composite output.

[erico]

I will talk to myself then 

aha! 17 colors!

Ps: I guess the only way is by emulation to get to the visuals

[erico]

Amstrad CPC had no colour limits per "chunk." It was however limited to number of colours in Mode only (as per coco)...

Coco was Black and white in pal(I guess). As for NTSC, It did display some colors, here we had a version called CP-400. Brazil is PAL-M, or at least was back in the days. I have no idea what was done to have it going color,as I recall, TV sets had an ntsc-palm switch, but the games I saw had the colors they intended to have...

The art is actually harder to reproduce by photoshop layers or action. I guess the best is to draw on an emulator with something like the layer program I talked about and copy image. This should work out for the adventure IF likes. Not sure about action games though.

[matchy]

The dither palette is how I imagined obtaining the artifact colors.  A better test is to render some modifiable GLB3D objects or scenes to Coco pmode3/4 rather than existing images! 

[erico]

Sure shot, but I would not know how to program its artifacts in mode 4, it is still a bit bizarre to understand if you take the composite mode.
Probably by a virtual screen, read every pixel and replot the result, or a shader.

[matchy]

For a BASIC game, I am really only interested in pmode3 because of PAL.  I've also tried some semigraphics but it crashes when plotting beyond a location (third of the screen). Have you tried semigraphics conversions? Also, I wonder if I can get 8 colors in basic like in Dragonfire? 

Rather than the hassles, I have been wondering if I'd prefer coco3 basic instead. 

[erico]

I think dragon fire was the only game to pull that trick ever, I read a bit of it, it sounds like an impossible task for basic, maybe with machine language?
Coco3´s basic is newer and the machine is stronger in all aspects. It may be a better choice for adventures?

I enjoy In Quest for the Starloard (took ages to find) on it, and I think that is an adventure done in basic (loading screens from disk).
I also recall a text adventure, something on the lines of noght of the living dead, that took 64kb memory and had a prize up for the winner (do you know this?)

I can´t relate much to the coco3 as I never owned one.

[matchy]

You should try some coco3 basic! My first texture adventure without graphics was Pyramid but I my first created a graphic adventure was with a scene image in quarter of the screen. I traded my coco2 for a 3 and it was nice for a little while before I got my C64 and Amiga.

[erico]

The semi graphics has a too low resolution for anything convertible.
Best to hand draw it, it also has a strange aspect ratio.

I created a convert file similar to those before, but the outputs are pretty bad.