runable Graphics wanted...

[groepaz]

It would be cool if those of you who are more familiar with vic20 than i am could formulate some rules that i can use to find the shared colors.

eg one that seems useful (which i dont use yet) is: "the color that appears in all HIRES blocks (with exactly two colors) must be the background color"

i am also still missing some good rules for multicolor - the goal is generally that from any given "minipaint" picture a screenshot can be saved that looks exactly the same as the original image. its close right now (judging from my tests) but still not 100% (even when ignoring the hires blocks)

[pixel]

It would be cool if those of you who are more familiar with vic20 than i am could formulate some rules that i can use to find the shared colors.

eg one that seems useful (which i dont use yet) is: "the color that appears in all HIRES blocks (with exactly two colors) must be the background color"

i am also still missing some good rules for multicolor - the goal is generally that from any given "minipaint" picture a screenshot can be saved that looks exactly the same as the original image. its close right now (judging from my tests) but still not 100% (even when ignoring the hires blocks)

Just before my main board makes popcorn: You also want to save images of non-VICs to MINIPAINT format and it does not work for VIC pictures yet?

[groepaz]

Just before my main board makes popcorn: You also want to save images of non-VICs to MINIPAINT format and it does not work for VIC pictures yet?

What are you trying to say? How does this help anyone?

Obviously the first and primary goal is to tweak the algo to produce proper screenshots of vic20 screens (and this already works quite well, except for hires blocks). And then, due to how things are implemented in VICE, it will also just work for any other system - with some limitations and quirks, obviously.

That said, it already works okish (the tables used to substitute colors still need tweaking, as said). Certainly good enough to produce a template for further pixeling.

sentinel-vic20.png (6.65 KiB) Viewed 886 times

[tokra]

One of the more obvious rules for multicolor would be:

Any color with color-code 8-15 must either be background-color or auxiliary color.

Combined with your hires-background-color-rule this would narrow down the aux-color in a lot of cases.

The border-color as the third global color in multicolor is pretty obvious as well.

This just leaves the char-color per 8x8 block, which must be of color-code 0-7.

[groepaz]

Any color with color-code 8-15 must either be background-color or auxiliary color.

yes, that i already check.

This just leaves the char-color per 8x8 block

8x16 (minipaint)

[groepaz]

OK, so... this is the result of last night's hacking. Hires blocks should work now. Produces pixel-exact screenshots from the Minigrafix examples now. For other stuff the color substitution tables still need tweaking (once again: patches welcome).

Find a test build here: https://github.com/VICE-Team/svn-mirror ... tag/r40006

hexe.png (3.52 KiB) Viewed 836 times

a.png (2.72 KiB) Viewed 836 times

Keep in mind scaling is the the default, and that will cause artefacts in many cases. To avoid this, use the cropping options.

[Mike]

Nice! And thanks!

If people happen to produce a nice screenshot from this new feature of VICE, they probably should also post the corresponding *.prg file in the MG picture file format itself, so that file then can be loaded into MINIPAINT or used with MINIGRAFIK, etc.

[ops]

Nice. Some minor glitches but overall result is pretty good.

[groepaz]

Some minor glitches (obviously) can't be avoided - unless the screen is already in "minigrafix" format

[tokra]

I know this isn't a "standard" format, but at least for PAL you could use the "Maximum Overscan" mode I released in 2019 whose graphic-data-files are also runable. This uses the full possible resolution of 224x283 of the PAL-VIC (and VICE) and has 8x8 color-blocks. So basically you should be fine to display any VIC-screen that does not use raster effects. I never did a similar mode for NTSC (yet), though. Plus, since the graphics-data is embedded into speedcode this isn't as straightforward as Minigrafik. Essentially this format really is a proof-of-concept.

With a slightly smaller resolution you get much better color-possiblities like the MFLI-format (208x256 with 8x8 color blocks and border/background/aux per rasterline). Or if you want to go all in there is also Mike's VFLI-format which is like MFLI but with 8x1 color blocks.

[groepaz]

That's all way too involved - VICE isnt a graphics converter Even those simple formats are already questionable enough =P

[Mike]

I find it remarkable the screenshot facility works so well - as seen with the in-game screenshot of Mega Vault - despite the resolution mismatch and despite the added restriction of the double sized attribute cells!

It is good to see that a rather simple counting heuristics fares that good. The algorithm I use to convert images into VFLI format is much more compute intensive and would not be suitable to produce screenshots at an instant.

[groepaz]

The approach i use (also for c64 hires and multicolor/koala screenshots) is to render a pixel exact representation of anything that is already matching the target format, but only by using heuristics and generic rules. And surprisingly, this works also very good for pictures that do NOT already match the target format

[Noizer]

.., And surprisingly, this works also very good for pictures that do NOT already match the target format

Would it be possible to make a 100% conversion without artifacts?

[groepaz]

well, of course not - when the picture does not match the requirements of the target format, of course compromises/approximations have to be made.