The beauty of low-res artwork

[S1500]

The TI-99/4A. 8x8 pixel tiles to play with. What could you express in 64 pixels of freedom?

 

Lately at work I've been firing up Paint Shop Pro and making a new image with 8x8 and doodling. I could envision what a scaled-down Ultima would look like. Well, here's one example:

 

 

 

Here's a messed-up Ultima screenshot. I have to re-do the fonts as I finally found a TI-99/4A font(which I've seen on many embedded systems). You get the spiel:

 

 

Right now I have about 70 files consisting of little 8x8 pixel pics of things like people, smiley faces, etc. Now only if I had enough programming knowledge to make a game out of it(like Crossroads, etc)

[Mark2008]

The TI-99/4A. 8x8 pixel tiles to play with. What could you express in 64 pixels of freedom?

 

Lately at work I've been firing up Paint Shop Pro and making a new image with 8x8 and doodling. I could envision what a scaled-down Ultima would look like. Well, here's one example:

 

 

 

Here's a messed-up Ultima screenshot. I have to re-do the fonts as I finally found a TI-99/4A font(which I've seen on many embedded systems). You get the spiel:

 

 

Right now I have about 70 files consisting of little 8x8 pixel pics of things like people, smiley faces, etc. Now only if I had enough programming knowledge to make a game out of it(like Crossroads, etc)

 

The TI-99 4/A was one of the first computers I owned.

I didn't know it then, but it shares the same video chip as the Colecovision.... a system I like to play with these days.

 

Even though Graphics mode II, has quite the challenge, in that only 2 colors can be used in a 8 x 1 area of a tile.... and it doesn't have any scroll registers, so if you are going to scroll, you have to reduce your character set by a factor of 8, because you generally have to do each graphical object, about 8 times in order to pre-shift the objects....

 

but still, you technically have 768 tiles to work with in that mode, and that reduces one to 96 per level....enough to get some graphical detail in there...

 

I'm generally, using 24 x 16 pixel tiles... I don't know about your TI-994A library, but, I'm sure its similar to the colecovision in that you can fairly easily work with a set of characters, rather than having to work with them individually, so you can have 16 x 16 tile if you want.

[Tursi]

Even though Graphics mode II, has quite the challenge, in that only 2 colors can be used in a 8 x 1 area of a tile

 

For still graphics, I've been working on an image convert to Graphics Mode II. I know there are a few of them out there (especially in the MSX scene), but my contribution so far:

 

http://harmlesslion.com/software/convert

 

Some samples from it (running through TI Artist on Classic99)