Hello guys. I'm new here. In fact, I joined just because I wanted to share this experiment I made with people on the web who might find it interesting.
My idea was to try to approximate natural colourful images with the limited color palette of the EGA spec with a HEAVY use of dithering. I understand old titles already made great use of dithering, but the limited tools of the time limited the lengths they could take the concept.
Here, I was curious if by making use of modern conveniences, like photoshop's tools to automatically dither full color images specific palettes I could reach better results than those that the game-artists from back in the day had to laboriously create by hand.
So to test that hypothesis, i took screenshots from games that had both a 16 color EGA version and a 256 VGA version, and created my custom "Heavy Dither EGA version" based on the VGA one to test if it looked any better than the original's. Here is the first result: (I've made 4 more, but I'll post them later)
King's Quest (forgot the number)
Original VGA art:
https://ibb.co/hEVOjGOriginal EGA art:
https://ibb.co/iOBkybMy Custom Dither Heavy EGA version:
https://ibb.co/cRvZrwAnd a comparison of all three:
https://ibb.co/n6AOjGI think the results are particularly good. Admittedly, they are much more noisy, but that is the obvious unavoidable result of using heavy dither. What I'm going for here is a "squint worthy" image, not cleanliness. I wonder how they would look on an actual old school EGA monitor. The CRT helps dither a lot by blurring the resulting image somewhat, but at the same time, I wonder if whatever artifacts the EGA spec introduced at sub-pixel level could break the illusion.
I admit this might not be considered "pure" pixel art. I didn't hand place each pixel one by one to generate the final result from scratch. It was an algorithm that laid the ground work for me here, but there was still plenty careful retouching and adaptation done by me here. The original 256 image was converted to EGA 16 dozes of time, with different dithering configurations and different sets of filters (color filters, blurs, sharpens, etc) pre-conversion. With those in hand, I selectively chose which created the best result for every individual area of the image. And finally, I'd hand-touch multiple pixels and lines here and there until I was fully satisfied.
thoughts?