Optimus Prime (Transformers)... on Atari 800/XL...

[Faicuai]

Can it be done?

 

I only see a few colors and mostly gray-shadows.... Would LOVE to see it when booting the 800 / Incognito before getting to JFC BIOS.... (Already on my Z840... :-)

 

what do you guys think?

 

Edited November 13, 2018 by Faicuai

[pseudografx]

Just a quick conversions with a few DLIs. Would need a bit more manual retouching to make it look better.

Edited November 13, 2018 by pseudografx

[Mclaneinc]

Transformers????

 

Ya big lady boy

 

Anyway, nothing beats the "My little pony" screen I use

 

<Note to anyone else reading this, if jokingly calling someone a lady boy triggers you then feel free to step away from the Internet and ignore any banter of any kind>

 

Sigh, sorry about that....There's been a bit of that at times..

 

So, SERIOUSLY, it looks great and the mockup by pseudo also looks great (if not a bit demonic)

 

If you remember the old PC's first dive in to themes then you may remember there was a Star Trek one which played a sample where appropriate so you got "I cann'y repair it" or "Warp factor 9 Mr Scott" etc etc, then just imagine Peter Currans epic Optimus voice and that picture welcoming you as you boot the system...

 

Now THAT'S classy...

Edited November 13, 2018 by Mclaneinc

[carlsson]

FWIW, it doesn't seem entirely unheard of MLP/robot/transformer crossovers, so perhaps you could have the best of both worlds.

[pseudografx]

I am also doing a RastaConverter run, so far the result is like this (after about 2 hours of runtime / 360M evaluations)

Edited November 13, 2018 by pseudografx

[Mclaneinc]

Those are nice...

 

@Carlson, shall I throw Dora the Explorer in the mix as well?

 

[Faicuai]

Transformers????

 

(...)

 

So, SERIOUSLY, it looks great and the mockup by pseudo also looks great (if not a bit demonic)

 

(...)

 

 

That's precisely what I like about!

 

Plus the *TREMENDOUS* amount of work and detail required to render these surfaces at HD, 4K and beyond resolutions... Far beyond anything we saw in past productions (of ANY kind)!

 

Fortunately still young enough at heart to enjoy these...

[Faicuai]

I am also doing a RastaConverter run, so far the result is like this (after about 2 hours of runtime / 360M evaluations)

OP-RCcurr.png

WHOAAAAA!!!!

 

These came out F-SICK! Love'em!!!

 

Exactly what I thought as soon as I saw it: the dominant gray-scales and limited chroma-info on the image would lend themselves for the Atari....

 

Is it possible to output these on any file format?

Edited November 13, 2018 by Faicuai

[leech]

Is it possible to get this s kill rt of boot image on a U1MB set up? I don't recall seeing the option.

[Kyle22]

There is no space left to put something like that.

[Rybags]

The problem with that pic is it badly needs horizontal resolution.

If you did it in a 640 x 100 pixel mode it probably wouldn't matter and barely look any different to 640x200.

 

That said, medium res ST... though not sure what software enhanced modes can do to increase the colour count.

[Faicuai]

Well, decided to give RastaConverter image processor a try, because I REALLY like this Optimus Prime closup...

 

Is it just me or.... is this thing sLoOoOoW? I am getting a paltry 160,000 / 180,000 rate (probably ops. per sec?) Is that normal? CPU usage tops about 48% on Socket #1)... Had to adjust thread affinity to ONE thread per physical core, and spread them evenly, but I have a whole bunch of threads dormant, because I can only use 16 (!?)

 

Is it possible to enable Nvidia's Quadro compute resources to boost this a bit?

Edited November 14, 2018 by Faicuai

[Faicuai]

Ok, got a bit of time to play with RastaConverter's settings, and found a way to leverage more CPU resources / threads...

 

I am maxing out at 21 threads (have 23 more to go on Socket #1), but it seems Rasta somehow locks to a 1:1 logical-to-physical thread ratio, and it opens OTHER threads that do not seem image-churning related... If I try >=22 Threads, it CRASHES (?)

 

Max. throughput hovers at 230,000 runs/sec. here's the output capped at 100 million iterations (about 7~7.5 mins), and using the following settings:

 

/dither=jarvis /filter=lanczos /brightness=10 /init=smart /threads=21 /max_evals=100000000 /o=OUTPUT\%2.jpg

 

Brightness has been corrected so it shows as close to original, as possible (original runs above are a bit bright, on the specular side).

 

Resulting (L) and Target ®:

 

 

The red-chroma painting on the left-side of face is coming off a bit unsaturated, and it is particularly hard to extract tonal separation on that region (notice the "horizontally" aligned rendition, which is not exactly how the target looks...)

Edited November 14, 2018 by Faicuai

[emkay]

The used routines in the Rastaconverter don't check about details. They go for color variations and "climb" to a more fitting value.

To have more details, it is the best solution to do preparations in external tools. Mainly to reduce the colors until the details won't get killed for the sake of more colors.

The secondary negative part is that most pictures look well, in "thumbnail" size, and lose all visuals on a big screen.

 

Also several logical errors appear in the converter.

The palette is a bunch of 128 different and indexed colors. So it would be better to calculate the different luma values and allow to set the wanted colors.

The generator uses the full color range and drops it to a 256 color RGB scale, which turns the real luma level wrong , which means that a bright color is placed above the brightest white.

 

And so on.

 

If you know that issues, you can prepare the input picture, to drop the filter by giving color values and color ranges that cannot be misunderstood by the converter.

 

Here an example of most possible colors plus most possible details.

 

 

[pseudografx]

I've let it run for about a day and this is the result. Still far from optimal but perhaps will look good enough on the screen.

OP.xex

[_The Doctor__]

wasn't the rule to post the resultant xex

[emkay]

wasn't the rule to post the resultant xex

Not in this thread

op160x240.xex

[_The Doctor__]

very true, the picture doesn't have to be a rasta either... I didn't realize that.

[Mclaneinc]

Great 2nd go Pseudo......Superb...

[Faicuai]

Ok, it turns out that the algorithm is VERY spatially-sensitive. Computational-photogtaphy is one of my areas of expertise, so I fired my tools and algorithmically generated the attached mask (which anyone can use), and capped run @ 150,000,000 of evaluations, about 14-16 mins of runtime.

Here are the results (source, resulting, destination):

 

 

 

As for Emkay's and Pseudo's versions, they are all GREAT, having Emkey's the advantage on the spatial-rendition or "perceived detail" dept. Here they are all (Emkay's, Pseudo's and mine, these are FRAMES out of Altirra, captured with true aspect ratio for NTSC):

 

 

 

 

 

Two things that I am noticing:

1. Deeper shadows are NOT GREEEN anywhere on the original. The show green on Emkay's rendition.
2. The eyes have purple spokes (not just the glowing core). These spokes are not really captured in any rendition, except on mine (but faintly).
3. We SHOULD be able to hit better renditions than the above, with LESS than 150 million iterations. Not sure why we are not yet hitting the mark.
4. A good mask makes a HUGE difference.

 

Settings used on my rendition (for anyone trying to process these):

 

/dither_val=1.5 /details=Optimus_Prime-MASK.bmp /filter=lanczos /brightness=20 /contrast=0 /threads=21 /max_evals=150000000

 

 

The mask used fpr : Optimus_Prime-MASK.bmp

Edited November 15, 2018 by Faicuai

[_The Doctor__]

rasta seems more geared towards pal.... it never does reds, and shadows correctly for NTSC... the green has to go for sure, rasta is always a step or two off on dark greys and reds for ntsc... it has got to be an error...

[emkay]

To keep the colors, you always have to use the same palette.

I'm also pretty sure, there is an issue with NTSC machines. There are screenshots of Rescue on Fractalus with a field of "brown". And there sometimes the game appears looking mostly green tinted.

Never The Same Color has it's name

Don't NTSC computers usually allow to set the colors range as the creators intended?

[_The Doctor__]

No it's people who keep using arcane NTSC standards from before every damn TV manufacturer and computer compay agreed on the one to use! If the tv and computers are all calibrated RASTA is still off... Never the same color is just BS excuse for the mistake..... tint adjust was initially used to make up for slight calibration errors and frequency drift due to a number reasons at the time, pal had similar issues, propagation frequency temperature... tubes... (not just the crt) do you remember tubes? You replaced a tube in the color set after one died or burnt out it might be slightly different and you adjusted everything from the convenient knobs up front. Brightness, sub brite, tint, cantrast, saturation(color drive), hold, and some even width or height were on the front of the set. Should we start a never the same height thing because the electric company provided 110 at some houses and 120 at others... or do we adjust the knobs so the picture fits? I know we can make the computer screen half size and blame in on never the same height or width...whatever...