SpikedRN
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It's been a while since I've posted any images, so here are a few that I thought were worth sharing. A couple are from a hike on a recent trip to Las Vegas, a couple from close to home, and one from work. srn_vegas01.xex srn_vegas02b.xex srn_vegas03.xex srn_vegas03pal.xex moss01.2.xex icelake01.2.xex srn_hospital01b.xex
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Hey Atari friends! I thought it would be fun to see how well our Atari can do when compared to the NES. I think the 6502+ANTIC+CTIA trio do an amazing job here, but feel free to judge for yourself! First I have some images from Contra on the NES. Seems like the Atari can easily reproduce the graphics. Some of you may know this game as Probotector. srn-contra01.xex srn-contra01-pal.xex srn-contra02.xex srn-contra02-pal.xex srn-contra03.xex srn-contra03-pal.xex srn-contra03b.xex srn-contra03b-pal.xex srn-contra03c.xex srn-contra03c-pal.xex Here are a few from Super C on the NES. srn-superc01.xex srn-superc03.xex srn-superc03-pal.xex srn-superc04b.xex srn-superc04b-pal.xex The Atari makes the NES graphics look easy, so how about if I step it up to the Megadrive? Here's Streets of Rage 2 srn-sor2-10b.xex srn-sor2-10b-pal.xex srn-sor2-12b.xex srn-sor2-12b-pal.xex srn-sor2-5b.xex srn-sor2-5b-pal.xex I'm honestly amazed at how well the Atari does with these. What do you think?
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Castle2b.xex Castle2b.pal.xex Gaiares16.xex Gaiares16.pal.xex MM2.stageselect5.xex MM2.stageselect5.PAL.xex Castle2b.xex Castle2b.pal.xex Gaiares16.xex Gaiares16.pal.xex MM2.stageselect5.xex MM2.stageselect5.PAL.xex
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Here's some PAL love for my Atari 8-bit friends! Synth02.PAL.xex Here's how this one looks on my NTSC system... And here's the NTSC version that I posted earlier. Sunset01.PAL.xex PAL version on NTSC NTSC version Forestlake01.PAL.xex PAL version on NTSC NTSC version Forestlake02.PAL.xex Forestlake03.PAL.xex
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Thanks for the detailed info on this bug. I'll have to get into the habit of checking my images on real hardware around 50m evals if it still looks like it's going to resolve more detail and I need to let it run longer. As for the colors, I found settings that look good on my NTSC hardware, but I think I'll run some PAL images too. What's a good palette to use? Laoo?
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I wanted to let the tropical sunset pic run a while longer as a test to see if it would maybe go back over the spot with the black line, but it never did resolve. I normally will let my images continue to run if I can still see visible changes happening and the normal distance is improving, and on some of the more complex ones this continues to happen well into the hundreds of millions of evals. I'm not convinced too many evals will cause issues. I started the tropical sunset image over and had a busy couple days at work and didn't have time to mess with it -- when I stopped it just now it was at 4.3 billion evals! I do appreciate your advice Gunstar, and I actually follow some of it :-) sunset01.xex CyberShadow_08.xex CyberShadow_10.xex ForestLake03.xex solar01.xex leaves01.xex
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First up are a couple of "what if?" pictures from the Sega Genesis/Megadrive. What if we had games for the Atari with title screens that looked this good? I mean the computer can display it right, so it's within the realm of possibility? SEGA.xex castle3.xex I couldn't decide which ForestLake01 I liked better, so I kept them both. Which one does everybody like better? These went for about 1.4B evals. SpikedRN.ForestLake01.xex SpikedRN.ForestLake01.Dither.xex Here's a couple more... ForestLake02.xex synth02.xex I've got a few more that I'm working on that look promising -- I'll probably post them in a few days. These all look great on my 800xl and Trinitron monitor. I'm hoping a black line in this one will resolve... Happy converting!
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I'm sharing a copy of the batch file that I use with RastaConverter in the hopes that somebody else may find it useful. I'm running an AMD Ryzen CPU with 8 cores and 16 threads, and I have found that by carefully selecting which CPU cores the processes run on I can greatly improve efficiency and throughput. For me I have 2 "core complexes," and if I make sure each process has all of its threads on the same complex it helps tremendously. With 4 instances of RastaConverter running simultaneously I'm getting around 120,000 to 140,000 evals/s using the settings in the batch file. I find that 4 threads per process seems to be the sweet spot for me, anything higher and I start to see greatly increased kernel CPU usage -- probably related to increased interprocess communication and coherency. Using the Windows start /AFFINITY feature makes it easy to get the processes running on the correct CPU cores. I use 8 batch files, starting with rasta1.bat through rasta4.bat, and then rasta1d.bat (for dithering) through rasta4d.bat. The parameter for start /AFFINITY is a binary mask to select logical CPU cores, and each batch file is adjusted to start on the desired group of cores. So "F" would be 1111 or the first 4 cores. "F000" is 1111 0000 0000 0000 or the last 4 cores. See attached calc image for an example. My source images are in the directory above hence the /i=..\. Also, for some reason Windows decided to switch to powershell instead of the command prompt so I adjusted the batch file accordingly. @echo off if "%1"=="" goto usage start /AFFINITY F000 .\RastaConverter.exe /i=..\%1 /pal=ntsc30 /contrast=%2 /brightness=%3 /gamma=%4 /s=10000 /threads=4 /distance=cie94 /dither=jarvis goto end :usage echo Usage ./rasta.bat input_file c b g (where contrast=[-100,100], brightness=[-100,100], gamma=[0.0,8.0]) :end pause Please let me know if anybody finds this information helpful!
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Images are from the Sega Genesis/Megadrive game Gaiares, and from Blue Lightning on the Atari Lynx. Gaiares12.1.xex Gaiares11.1.xex Gaiares10.1.xex BlueL02.xex
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Here are some 16-bit games getting the Atari 8-bit treatment, and I have to say I'm impressed with what this system can do! NTSC palette used for all. Konami.xex castle1.xex castle2.xex turtles1.xex chrono1.xex (I had to increase brightness to 0% in Altirra to match my actual hardware) chrono2.xex dkc1.xex dkc2.xex
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It's everyone's favorite blue erinaceinae! Sonic1.xex Sonic2.xex Sonic3.xex
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First up is the title screen for an upcoming action RPG called Hazelnut Bastille from Aloft Studio. The developers said that they are going for a retro 16-bit aesthetic with the art style. How would an Atari 8-bit version look? Maybe something like this! Hazelnut.xex The same developer is also making a prequel called Dawnthorn that is using an art style similar to something on the NES. Here's a cutscene image and a gameplay image. Dawnthorn1.xex Dawnthorn2.xex The last one is just a picture of a butterfly that I liked. Butterfly.xex I used an NTSC palette and height of 224 for everything. Unfortunately I'm on crutches for a while here and can't get downstairs to test these on my 800xl. Hopefully they look ok on real hardware.
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Which version of RastaConverter is everybody using? Is it this version posted by Sheddy https://atariage.com/forums/topic/200118-images-generated-by-rastaconverter/page-30?do=findComment&comment=3666330 or is there a newer version somewhere? Using this version I find that I get the best performance by using 4 threads per process and setting the processor affinity to 4 cores. If I go higher on the thread count the kernel time really starts to increase probably due to more inter-process communication. Anyway, I'm getting about 105,000 tries per second total with 4 processes running on my AMD Ryzen 7 1700. All of the awesome work by Gunstar has inspired me to start doing some images again.
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Here are some examples showing the output of different palettes using a common image as input. Using these should allow you to find a palette that most closely matches the actual output on real hardware. Common settings: ciede with no dithering. Source image Colors_ciede_altirra.xex Colors_ciede_atari800winplus.xex Colors_ciede_Default.xex Colors_ciede_g2f.xex Colors_ciede_jakub.xex Colors_ciede_laoo.xex Colors_ciede_NTSC.xex Colors_ciede_NTSC30.xex a8isa1 NTSC saturation 30 Colors_ciede_NTSC40.xex a8isa1 NTSC saturation 40 Colors_ciede_NTSC50.xex a8isa1 NTSC saturation 50 Colors_ciede_OlivierP.xex Colors_ciede_Real.xex Colors_ciede_Xformer.xex
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I'll give them a try later when I get a chance. I did a few images using your NTSC 30 saturation palette @a8isa1 Seeing how many colors I could get in one image. 135 million evals with NTSC palette. SpikedRN_color_gradient_135m.xex Another try at Ciri but using an NTSC palette this time. Skin tones look much better on my 800xl than the other one I did. SpikedRN_Witcher3_Ciri_NTSC.xex Here's one of Jupiter. 100M evals with laoo palette and knoll dither. Jupiter.100M.laoo.cie94.knoll.xex
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