64 color ehb mario bros Wii screenshot

[fishy_fiz]

I was bored and playing around with PPaint earlier tonight, and for no particular reason decided to convert a few game screenshots into ocs/ecs ehb graphics. Bare in mind there was no manual tweaking here, no customised palettes, simply loading a png image and changeing screenmode to ecs ehb. I had a look and for this particular image there's only 51 colors so with a better custom chosen palette and a little manual tweaking it could look better than it does, but I was still sort of impressed with the quality of gfx we could have for games using a gfx chip designed 25 years ago. Sure, we couldnt have the actual game in the image with its effects, but just as a random example, if we still had people pumping time and money into 68k amigas we could still have games that dont look too out of place still these days (handheld minimig or similar for a cheap enough price could be cool).
Anyway, just thought it was cool and got feeling nostalgic.

http://i41.tinypic.com/wss8ba.jpg

[fishy_fiz]

While EHB can get some good results you really need to be selective about the sorts of images being displayed for best results. One of the most important things for lower color images is having at least a few colors/tones that can be used per "range", and getting the additional half bright palette to share "ranges" with the user selectable palette doesnt always work unles care is taken. For the right gfx style though you can get about 8-10 ranges each with about 8 shades (no absolute rules, but for example), which can produce some nice results not too dissimilar to a "real" 64 color palette. Still though, I guess the main point really was just that its cool something resembling modern retro gaming could still in theory be possible on a 25 year old custom chipset