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http://blog.gg8.se/wordpress/2013/01/06 … -of-green/

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 smile

Last edited by fluxer (Jan 10, 2013 8:52 am)

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Wow, so I just read the part in the article about there only being 384 tiles available on a DMG game. FML

I should probably read the whole article next time...

Last edited by fluxer (Jan 10, 2013 10:25 am)

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.

Last edited by BlakePalmer (Mar 20, 2018 10:53 pm)

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Jackson, MI

I'd really appreciate a windows build if you have the time.
Otherwise this looks really cool, I can't wait to play around with it!

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hiding under your bed

I'd also love to see a Windows version of this, it looks great.

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Matthew Joseph Payne

Now someone just needs to make a tool for putting these images into a .gb rom file that automatically cycles through them...

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Except from what I understand, this is impossible because there isn't enough room in the ROM file for six full-screen images, only three. Unless it's possible to expand the graphics memory on a ROM?

I'm probably going to make a 9-color version of this with three frames at some point.

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Melbourne, Australia

Really awesome stuff, dude!

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Freiburg, Germany

Reminds me of how some games create transparent shadows, with a very fast flashing black sprite