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TOOL: Genesis Image Ditherer to 16 Colours (and now SNES, too)


smozoma

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  • 1 year later...

Send me the image in a message through the forums and i'll generate it. I'll have to do it next week, though, out of town this weekend.

Wish I knew what caused this!

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  • 4 years later...
30 minutes ago, SquidNerd96 said:

Looking to download the genesis dithering application. Has the link been moved somewhere else or is it "off the market"?

It's in the first post of this thread.  Seems to be working?  

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  • 5 months later...

Thought I would try out this tool, but I'm getting a weird/major issue.
Simply trying the default example Bure pic, I only get this.
image.png

And Option 2 is giving me this.
image.png
Not crashing, but after locating and pressing the "any" key. The program just closes.

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Whatever image your using, it has to be the size your going to use, but also 24 BMP when you save it. You will use "1" first to generate images and once that has been completed. You will find the one you want to use and than drag and drop into Ditherer again and select "3". It will than create a notepad with the 16 byte palette you can use in the editing process in Tile Molestar.

Correct me if Im wrong @smozoma

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3 hours ago, von Ozbourme said:

Thought I would try out this tool, but I'm getting a weird/major issue.
Simply trying the default example Bure pic, I only get this.
image.png

And Option 2 is giving me this.
image.png
Not crashing, but after locating and pressing the "any" key. The program just closes.

Hmm strange. I see "File size: 0". Is Bure.bmp a valid image, or an empty file?

The idea is that you start with a valid 256x224pixel, 24-bit BMP image that you want to put into your ROM. You drag-and-drop that image onto the program, then tell it what to do with the image. It then processes the image to give you a bunch of 16-colour images to choose from.

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6 hours ago, smozoma said:

Hmm strange. I see "File size: 0". Is Bure.bmp a valid image, or an empty file?

Yeah that's the thing. It's literally the sample .bmp file that was included in the zip folder with the Ditherer.exe file.
Properties says it's 169kb. I was able to open it in photoshop, so I know it isn't corrupt. Unless that is just too small? Rounding down to the closest Mb? But it's not like you're going to get a very big file when you're dealing with so few pixels anyway...
But yeah, not giving me much to go on.

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9 hours ago, UltraMagnus said:

Whatever image your using, it has to be the size your going to use, but also 24 BMP when you save it. You will use "1" first to generate images and once that has been completed. You will find the one you want to use and than drag and drop into Ditherer again and select "3". It will than create a notepad with the 16 byte palette you can use in the editing process in Tile Molestar.

Correct me if Im wrong @smozoma

Yeah the problem here is that It's not even getting through the "Press 1 to generate images" step.
Used a .bmp that I had already resized. Used the sample pic in the folder. Used a giant .jpg file just to see what happens.
Same result every time. File size: 0. Crash.

I mean I can just keep using photoshop, just the issue there is that even when I make an index coloured file where I manually enter and match the rgb values in the colour palettes, the way tile molester and photoshop process colours usually means that fine shading detail will get lost if two shades are deemed to close to each other.

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17 hours ago, smozoma said:

Really weird. It shows the file size in bytes so it's always something like 172576.

Try putting it in c:\temp\genesisimagedither_v100\ and trying there.

Well how about that. Weird that should be what makes it work, but there we are.

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1 minute ago, von Ozbourme said:

Well how about that. Weird that should be what makes it work, but there we are.

I wonder if I forgot to handle spaces in the file path

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Posting this here so I can refer back someday when I can't remember we started the conversation in the OHL 2020 thread...

Do you have any suggestions for what the optimal attributes are for a photo to be successfully dithered? When I'm doing a ROM I usually pick out 3 or 4 candidate photos to work with. Sometimes for one reason or another some photos just seem to be an uninspiring bland mess of pixels, other times they turn out even better than I had hoped. I generally try and select photos with a good contrast in colors, not too many colors and an ice background so that the player seems to stand out. I've also grayscaled out the background so that the colors are focused on the player(s) instead of wasted on some lady sitting in the background wearing a bright orange hat :lol:

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5 hours ago, Jkline3 said:

Posting this here so I can refer back someday when I can't remember we started the conversation in the OHL 2020 thread...

Do you have any suggestions for what the optimal attributes are for a photo to be successfully dithered? When I'm doing a ROM I usually pick out 3 or 4 candidate photos to work with. Sometimes for one reason or another some photos just seem to be an uninspiring bland mess of pixels, other times they turn out even better than I had hoped. I generally try and select photos with a good contrast in colors, not too many colors and an ice background so that the player seems to stand out. I've also grayscaled out the background so that the colors are focused on the player(s) instead of wasted on some lady sitting in the background wearing a bright orange hat :lol:

I was going to say, make sure there's not much colour in the background, but you're way ahead of me. Don't forget that greys count as a colours and there are 6 different greys possible, so maybe it would be better to use a hue shift to make the orange hat roughly the same colour as one of the team colours.

Remove ads from boards.

Like you said, only have a few core colours (white, black, maybe 3 colours in the uniforms..)

I'd need to see some examples of images that don't convert well in order to realize why they are problematic.

I'm hoping to update the software with the ability to give areas of focus so it doesn't optimize the ice or something.

You could try brightening or darkening the image a little before running it through the program and it may actually make a really big difference in the result.

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version 1.1 released!

See the first post for the download.

Updates:

  • Likely fixed the issues with the files getting lost, or crashing if you have spaces in your folders or file names.
  • Dithering patterns:
    • Added a few more dithering patterns. I like the Burkes one.
    • Renamed the pattern what was previously called "Atkinson" (atk), since it was actually something I had customized. It's now called Smoz31 (s31).
    • Added the actual Atkinson pattern.
  • Ability to select which patterns to use, and which colour evaluation schemes to use (Linear/Squared/Cubed). So you don't have to do allll the possibilities, you can just do the ones you like.
  • Fixed bug: the files that were marked as "linear" or "squared" in the old version were reversed. So now the files labelled as linear will have the lower error score, which is correct. So be aware that if you used to like, say, the "linear" results, you now should look at the "squared" results.
  • Multicore processing!! Each pattern+mode combination will execute on a CPU core, in parallel. So if you have a 4-core CPU, you might as well choose at least 4 options.
  • You can specify how "thorough" the palette evolution is. Enter a value from 1-5. I recommend 1 or 2 when playing around, but 3 or 4 when you're serious and want to get the best quality palette.

The way to enter which pattern(s) you want is a little confusing. If you want to use patterns 1, 3, and 6 from the list, you should enter "136" and hit Enter. "123456" for all the patterns.

Let me know if it doesn't run. Might need to install/update the Microsoft C++ "runtimes" package (https://aka.ms/vs/17/release/vc_redist.x64.exe)

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  • 9 months later...

This looks great, but the attached file from the original post seems to be broken. Any chance of a reupload? 🙂

Edited by EagleXIII
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2 hours ago, EagleXIII said:

This looks great, but the attached file from the original post seems to be broken. Any chance of a reupload? 🙂

What's wrong with it?

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19 minutes ago, smozoma said:

What's wrong with it?

Hm, my browser, apparently.

I checked your reply on my phone and the download is there... so I've logged onto my wife's MacBook and sure enough it's there also. On my other laptop with Microsoft Edge it still says the file is unavailable. Weird.

Oh well, no worries, I can transfer it over to the laptop now

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1 hour ago, EagleXIII said:

Hm, my browser, apparently.

I checked your reply on my phone and the download is there... so I've logged onto my wife's MacBook and sure enough it's there also. On my other laptop with Microsoft Edge it still says the file is unavailable. Weird.

Oh well, no worries, I can transfer it over to the laptop now

There's yer problem.. using Edge instead of downloading Firefox or Chrome instead :D

(but actually I don't know why it wouldn't work in Edge, that's odd)

  • Haha 1
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  • smozoma changed the title to TOOL: Genesis Image Ditherer to 16 Colours (and now SNES, too)

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