Hand drawn pixel graphics heavily relied on the hardware's color palette (and monitor properties) for dithering and 'lighting' tricks, and especially the C64 color palette is quite 'exotic' and didn't have overlap with other home computers of the time. You need to consider that essentially each pixel was carefully placed by hand to 'enhance' the limitations of the builtin palette through color bleeding with the neighoring pixels on CRT monitors.
Automatic conversion of images between different hardware platforms usually stood out as looking quite poor and a sign of a 'sloppy port'.
You see that the C64 palette has a much more muted, pastel look and does not map one to one to the CGA/default EGA palette. C64 has a lot less vivid colors, but it also has much better luminosity ramps which can make dithering look a lot better.
In addition, the C64 has restrictions on the number of colors you can use in the same 8x8 block which I don't think EGA had.
It takes an artist to turn a CGA/EGA image into a C64 image.
I think the C64 palette you linked has been "tweaked" by the artist who uploaded it, this is probably closer to the original: https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Color
But your point is still valid: while IBM PCs and other machines of the time had a propensity for "pure" colors (cyan, magenta etc. - so 100% for one or two of the basic colors and 0 for the others), the C64 designers opted for more muted colors.
On my screen that doesn't match videos of actual C64's on actual CRT's. (It also doesn't match my memory of them, but that's a whole lot less reliable)
Videos of actual C64's on actual CRT's are pretty consistent other than brightness, though, so if it doesn't at least somewhat match those, the model is broken.
I won't go over the details, but if you look at the website mentioned in the other thread from 2021, you'll see I'm not being hyperbolic.
EGA Loom is a work of art. VGA Loom misread the style and completely obliterated it, in its eagerness to deploy that early VGA "pillow shadow" style so typical of games of that era. (I love the term "pillow shadow", so apt now that I've learned it!).
Every nightly blue gone, light sources broken, every shadow gone, ominous deep-black tree shadows converted into gray/brownish things, etc.
To be clear, I think this is less a limitation of VGA and more a case of the conversion done lazily and/or by an inferior artist.
Hi, I’m the author of the article. Thanks for the feedback.
I cleaned up the shader code to make it easier to read/follow. If anything’s still unclear, feel free to comment on the post and I’ll try to clarify.
Would have been awesome if there was step by step visualization where simple color transforms slowly upgraded until you get final result for easier understanding of what each thing is doing.
Otherwise quite hard to visualize changes in you head.
Hi, I’m the author of the article. Thanks for the feedback.
I’ve pushed an update to the post with more implementation details, and I also cleaned up the shader code to make it easier to read/follow. If anything’s still unclear, feel free to comment on the post and I’ll try to clarify.
Off topic, but why are you one of those people who do a full screen “subscribe to my mailing list” overlay? I never understand why you’d wanna do that.
Oh, many years ago I bought into the whole 'write a blog, collect subscribers, create a training product and sell it to them, retire on the beach' idea and gave it a go. I now think that's exceedingly unlikely, of course. Sorry you find it annoying, i'll have to get around to removing it sometime.
He gives reasons why it didn’t work for him. He gives 10 pillars of his personality, 4 of these pillars were standing due to his company ownership. You don’t need to have the exact same pillars, but you need to project it upon your own life and see how selling the company would effect your personality. Then consider it for yourself if it’s worth it.
I am hoping this gives publishers an important role of becoming the quality gatekeeper. The publisher has the relationship with the writer and ensures a certain level of quality. If a writer keeps coming up with nonsense (AI or not), they’ll cut ties. For me as someone who reads about 3-4 books a year, I don’t see an issue with this. It sucks for this indie market, but even before AI, someone had to plough through the shit.
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