16 colours is plenty :)

[oky2000]

Golden Axe initial area in 14 colours, this leaves 2 spare colours for blue and purple and could probably squeeze it down 1 less for a yellow too. Using today's tools you could make some great looking ST games.

 

[+DarkLord]

I've always liked that game.

[ParanoidLittleMan]

It looks good because of dithering.

With some bigger resolution you could do very realistic pictures from only 4 colors - black, red, green, blue.

[oky2000]

It's a 1211x200 resolution map made from the arcade graphics, any dithering is there from the original source graphics. Of course you would only see 320x200 pixels worth of this screen at a time too. It is to be used with the standard 320x200 16 colour STE/ST lo-res mode so could still be used in an ST game (the palette would suffer a little on the greys for the ST). If I had deluxe paint 3 ready to rock I could have made an animation showing the entire screen scrolling from right to left in seconds and uploaded it using an IFF to AnimGIF converter...don't fancy doing 1211-320 cut and paste and save operations to be honest

 

The arcade uses about 64 colours (hard to tell as it's not the same total everywhere and the player/enemy objects are not given (I used the Megadrive/Genesis character sprites and tweaked them).

 

I also did some with Street Fighter 2 graphics a while ago but probably on the old laptop somewhere. If I find them I will post them also

[mattlacey]

That's impressive! ALways amazes me what can be done with limited palettes.

[oky2000]

What I now need to do is paste in all the characters that appear in each level at the same time but just wanted to show what is possible without days of tweaking. The major change was making the rocks completely grayscale initially.

 

If I find a nice machine for dev work (ie with an autobooting HD etc) I may see what is possible with compiled STOS code after being inspired by some pretty impressive STOS Compiler DEMOs on the internet including complete border removal with shifter etc.

[swapd0]

Looks great, witch tools did you used?

[swapd0]

Looks great, witch tools did you used?

\o/

Which tools did you use to convert the graphics?

Edited July 17, 2013 by swapd0

[oky2000]

I found the graphics on a couple of websites, one has the arcade backgrounds and another had the Megadrive/Genesis characters. I just used an image processing package and paint package to reduce colours and tweak them to get the best possible compromise.

 

This is currently pushing it with the blue and purple dragons, the arcade uses four shades of blue/purple I have to get by with just one or two shades max. But I am quite pleased with the results so far

 

If I finish all the graphics and find a real physical copy of the STOS compiler with manual I could possibly make a one level demo which is a remix of the enemies you fight and in which order on each level which would be great. I wonder how much you could squeeze into 1mb (not done any sort of calculations on size of graphics inside a real ST.

 

The arcade uses between 64 and 80+ depending on area and the copper/rasterbar type effect so it's quite a struggle beyond the basic background to get characters I am happy with.

 

Edited July 18, 2013 by oky2000

[GadgetUK]

Looks great! The problem is using limited palette for all enemies and backgrounds of any given level. Its easy to get a good looking screen like that with limited background and sprites, but extend that image to the whole first level with all enemies and characters etc in there and it deteriorates.

[oky2000]

That is all of level one 1200 pixels wide from what I can tell but not specifically the things you see on level one, well not from memory. There is a lot of brown green and grey in there so the enemies that use those colours won't be too taxing. However I don't think there are any more challenging things than the purple and blue unnatural dragon colours left to do though so should be OK. All frames of their animation use the same colours too so again that shouldn't be a problem. What would be a problem is the 8 step RGB palette controls of a regular ST. I will edit the palette for colours which are multiples of 32 in their RGB value to simulate a stock 520ST, on the STE and Amiga it's less of an issue with 16 grey scales and 32 shades of red/green/blue/purple/yellow/red.

 

If you let the computer pick the palette it is usually very bad at it, you have to think a bit like a C64 coder when choosing the palette and replacing a pale blue with a grey here and there or a dark purple with a dark red stuff like that. I did tweak the contrast up and brightness down on the backgrounds too and manually desaturated the rocks to pure greys etc before reducing the colour in stages. At the moment though I am manually changing colours in the characters to what I already have on the image, and sometimes tweak one of the colours to go midway between what I have and what is used to colour the character.

 

It's challenging for sure but armed with a blitter/STE enhanced set of STOS instructions I reckon you could get close to what was released for the ST speed wise but with much much more authentic graphics. Maybe a TT/MSTE specific version using the faster CPU too who knows...early days and I still haven't got the drivers working for my hard disk unit stuck to my ST for now .....plus no desk to put it on ATM lol

[griz]

Hey Oky, having fun?

 

What about the recycling of color registers (as seen on A8)? For example, you could create two horizontal zones each with 16 unique colors. Not sure if that would work well with Golden Axe but I thought I'd mention it as a possibility to increase the # of available colors in some cases.

 

p.s. No you can't have my copy of STOS + Manual + Compiler + 3D + Sound digitizer + Sprites 600!

[oky2000]

At the moment lots of fun

 

I did think about palette switching but it doesn't help too much with this game because the characters can go right up to the tree-line level. It's still not too much of a problem and will keep the speed up. I have the colours as standard for the score and magic etc. The later levels however have over 16 colours for the sky/clouds and that will be a problem no doubt so would need to do palette switching on the sky (have 5 greys for the clouds to work with).