After reading about Nitro's endeavors with expanding the color range of the Gameboy, I wanted to take it further. Over the past few days I've put together a program in MaxMSP that converts any image into six images that can be cycled on the Game Boy screen to give the appearance of 13 colors.
Here's the App:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/f4ekhnbhvonkntw/13Color.zip
(Sorry, Mac only for now. I can look into making a Windows build if there's enough interest.)
Why six images instead of three, (as per Nitro's article,) you say? I'm not sure how Nitro did his demo, but in order to get things flashing every three frames AND every 2 frames, the lowest common denominator is six.
Instead of cycling the colors in a pattern, I decided I'd try randomizing the phases of each pixel. This way the picture doesn't look like it's moving anywhere. Since the phases are randomized, each individual frame looks very noisy, however when cycled, the composite looks surprisingly good.
The thing is, I have no way of testing this on a real Game Boy. It would be great if Nitro or anyone else could test it out. Here's some image comparisons:
Original // 13 Color Redux // Single Frame (4 color) // Animated GIF (4 color)
While I set the GIF to cycle at 50 fps (the closest I could get to 60fps in Photoshop), the fps you actually view it highly depend on your browser, OS, computer, monitor refresh rate etc.. On my computer it stutters a little bit, but I was surprised at how those Game Boy Camera-esque stills merged into something that really does look much more detailed! And it should look even better on a DMG with its laggy pixels.
Let me know what you guys think 