User avatar
bnilsson

Posted Tue Feb 16, 2021 12:28 pm

Recently I came across some high quality pixel art made very recently. For example by Daniel Riise and other very talented pixel artists.

These are not Amiga specific per se. They are in PNG format and often made in 4x4 or 3x3 pixels. The resolution of many images are close to PAL and use 32, 64 or 256 colors.

Wouldn't it be cool to view these on a real Amiga, OCS or AGA in IFF/ILBM format? It could actually work and look nice.
thumbnails.png
After some time spent tweaking in various image editors on my Mac I found a process to optimize and convert these for viewing on unexpanded Amigas.

Anyone find this interesting? I can share the images and also write a bit of the process I used to teleport these back to way back when.

User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Tue Feb 16, 2021 2:28 pm

I love this idea - thanks for sharing! And yes, I'd be interested in your result and the process you took.

User avatar
Silverstreak
YouTube

Posted Tue Feb 16, 2021 2:58 pm

Very interesting! Nice idea

User avatar
bnilsson

Posted Thu Feb 18, 2021 12:08 pm

Here is the ones I converted so far:
pixelart1.zip
(519.86 KiB)
The artists name is part of the filenames. All credit goes to these artists.

I use Deluxe Paint IV AGA to view these on my A1200.

Inside the zip I have organized the files like this:
lowres - Standard 320x256
overscan - These should fill the screen completely with max overscan selected in Dpaint. At least this was my intention. Not tested on real Amiga monitor yet.
panorama - These are larger and you have to pan to see everything.

For those of you that have real CRTs, lets see some photos :D

I will post some about the process I used at a later date.

User avatar
MOS6569
Sweden

Posted Sat Feb 20, 2021 9:30 am

I saved them to my Amiga HD and watched them on my 14" CRT Monitor/TV. And they look great! The overscan picture worked too.

I had problem loading the largest panorama picture due to limited CHIP RAM (512K).

Really nice pictures.

/Thomas

User avatar
bnilsson

Posted Mon Feb 22, 2021 11:48 am

I have been experimenting with animated gifs. My goal was to convert them to ANIM files that can be opened and played back in Deluxe Paint.

Take this awesome gif by Romain Courtois
RomainCourtoisLoversAtDusk.gif
I have managed to make it 1x1 and cropped it a bit using gifsicle

Code: Select all

gifsicle -O2 --careful --scale 0.5 --no-extensions -i RomainCourtoisLoversAtDusk.gif > LoversAtDusk1x1.gif

gifsicle -O2 --careful --crop 19,3+-19x-2 -i LoversAtDusk1x1.gif > LoversAtDuskCropped8.gif
That got this result:
LoversAtDuskCropped8.gif
But here I am stuck how to convert this to the obsolete ANIM format. Some suggested using Personal Paint on the Amiga, but I didn't mange to get it to work. There is an Arexx script but it failed after a while.

Other options I tried:
grafx2 seemingly cant save in ANIM format.
ffmpeg can only decode, not encode.

User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Mon Feb 22, 2021 12:15 pm

If you open the GIF in Photoshop, each "frame" will be on a separate layer. Photoshop also still supports IFF files. So, I think you could export each layer as a separate IFF file. But I've not made any animations in Deluxe Paint yet, so I don't know how those are stitched together, or if you can do entire frame swaps, or would need to create brushes for the individual moving parts. Like I said, I don't have experience there yet.

But I do know Photoshop might be able to assist.

This particular animated GIF, however, is a knee-buckling 120 frames (with 256 colors)! That would not be a ton of fun to export to your Amiga. It might want to chew up that color palette, too. But perhaps only 1 or 2 frames are necessary to move over, and the rest done on the Amiga side.
dusk.jpg

User avatar
bnilsson

Posted Mon Feb 22, 2021 1:50 pm

Thanks! I dont have Photoshop, but I can get the individual frames also with

Code: Select all

gifsicle --explode
Only first frame is the picture rest is a very small set of pixels that change frame to frame.

Could probably assemble that manually in Deluxe paint, but 120 frames, not really.

Actually very little changes frame to frame in these style of pixel art gifs, so I think if I had a conversion process it could play very smoothly in Deluxe Paint or another ANIM player.

Closest I have come is following the suggestions here:
http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=20821

But it is something with this gif Personal Paint and the Arexx script doesnt like. I think its the transparency optimization.

User avatar
LocalH
Kingsport, TN

Posted Tue Feb 23, 2021 7:06 am

Perhaps this might help?

https://aminet.net/package/gfx/ifx/IFFAnimGIFAnim
IFFAnimGIFAnim wrote: IFFAnim2GIFAnim.ifx

Ever seen a web page with a neat animated GIF and wanted to create a anim
yourself? Well, this script for ImageFX and WhirlGIF can't create your
neat anims, but it can convert your IFF anims to GIF anims, such as DPaint
anims. And you don't even need an AGA Amiga to create 256 colour GIF anims.

Changes since 1.1 of the script:

- Spaces in drive names and filenames allowed (although not recomended using
spaces in filenames for web use).
- Loop option fixed, previously this didn't work.
- Timing option fixed, this also didn't work. (hey, I'm new to ARexx ;)
- Removed the disposal option as my copy of ImageFX can`t save transparent
GIF's. This will be reinstated when I can get it to work properly.
- User is able to select number of colours used in the gif anim.
- Added brightness and contrast options which execute in that order before
any scaling is done.
- Added a sharpen option, which is done to the images after any scaling that
may happen.
- The AmigaDOS command "echo" is no longer needed.
- Fixed the bug when cropping an anim, the image used to be 1 pixel smaller
(both x and y) than indicated.


Features:

- Very simple conversion process, no need to make lots of GIFs anymore.
- Cropping your anim. You can select just a small portion of your IFF anim
to be turned into a GIF anim.
- Scaling you anim. Scale down your IFF anim to any size (2x2 being the
smallest size), even after cropping.
- Does not use extra hard drive space for conversion of anims.


Requires:

- ImageFX1.5 upwards. V1.51 was given away on a magazine but that does *not*
mean it is pd, 2.0 is also commercial.
- The Foreign render module for ImageFX so that even OCS/ECS Amigas can
create 256 colour GIF anims. (should be in your ImageFX setup)
- WhirlGIF version 2.01+, available on Aminet.


Read enclosed .txt file for full instructions of use.

Rid.

User avatar
bnilsson

Posted Wed Feb 24, 2021 10:27 am

Thanks but that works the other way around. I want GIF -> ANIM

I found some other old software on aminet that can create ANIM from a bunch of IFF files, experimenting with this now. First program I tried worked but messed up something with the palette.





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