Hello all,
I am new to this forum, but I have heard a lot of great things about this place from the CUPodcast, so I thought I'd stop by and share what I am working on. Over the past six months, I have been working on an algorithm that could accurately redraw 8-bit (and some 16-bit) spites into vector images. I am aware there are filters and some applications that do something similar to this, but none of them returned the results that I was looking for. I recently got my algorithm to work (mostly) and now I can move forward with my plans of creating a standalone image converter and an emulator.
The standalone is pretty straight forward and there is not much to do other than creating a GUI for it, but the emulator is a sticky ball of wax. Right now, I can process a 256x224 image in .5 seconds to 1.2 seconds depending on how complex it is, and to make an emulator playable, it needs to be closer to .02 seconds. This is a possible goal, but it is going to take some time and effort to do. The application at the moment is only using the CPU because that is easiest for mock ups, but if it implemented OpenGL, I have no doubts it would be able to produce 60 frames per second.
Moving on from here, I have been considering starting a Kickstarter because getting this done is going to take time, and a lot of it, and I have to work and go to school, but if I had some extra money I'd be able to devote more time to working on this project. If I go that route, the final product would be free and opensource most likely. The other option would be to sell licenses through HumbleBundle, and people who purchased one would be getting the most recent builds of the project. If neither of those are favorable to the community, I will continue working on this in my free time and release it when it is 100% done.
Here are some demo images to show what this even does, and if you have any comments, ideas or feedback I'd love to hear it!