Graphics remapping techniques?

[ccovell]

Magician Lord on the Neo-Geo is a beautiful game.  Let's see if -- just hypothetically -- its graphics can be brought to the PCE.

First, I played with the title screen.

Neo Geo original on left.  Around 80 unique colours (not counting "Alpha" text). 
Middle is a simple constraining to PCE colour space.  Not bad, but down to 50 colours and it's looking a little like a rotten egg.
Right is a touching-up that I did to make the colour balance better and have few or no "lost" colours on the egg, the tree, or the logo.  (Twisty thing on the right edge got some colour loss, but who cares?)  58 colours.


Next, I imagined if I ported the game, I'd expand the screen size to something befitting the PCE.

Neo-Geo original.  192 colours.

Simple constraining.  Not bad actually.  108 colours.

Finally, here's a recolouring and re-compositing of all the layers.  123 colours.  Not a great gain, but there's less colour banding in several areas.


The final is 352x242 compared to the Neo's 320x224.  Well, a guy can dream...

[grahf]

The PCE is really capable of some colorful games, isn't it? Too bad we didn't get more Neo ports back then...

[sunteam_paul]

Nice! Does this take into account the max PCE palettes / colours per palette limitations?

[ccovell]

If remapped to the SGX (as intended) to preserve the parallax, then, more or less.

The pyramids in the sky are sprites, 16 colours each.  The instrument panels also would take up a single sprite palette.

The sky/mountains are 32 colours and easily split up into top/bottom halves of 16 colours each.  The foreground platforms are 32 colours and could be split up too.

That leaves the statues, etc in the foreground, which use 48 colours and would need a bit of work.

There's actually a middle layer of faded grass and ruins between the FG and mountains, but I don't think that could technically be made to parallax.

[Edit] But if that middle layer is made to slide around below the mountains, it could be part of the same BG layer.  (The middle layer of ruins would have to be sprites.)

[roflmao]

Wow, that looks great! 

[Bonknuts]

The final is 352x242 compared to the Neo's 320x224.  Well, a guy can dream...

 The NeoGeo's 320 res and 304 pixel res is the same. The 320 mode has unecessary overscan. Anyway, my point is the NeoGeo dot clock is exactly 6.0mhz. PCE low res is 5.37mhz and mid res is 7.16mhz dot block. The mid point between 5.37mz and 7.16mhz is 6.265mhz. So NG dot clock (horizontal width pixel size) is closer to the low res mode on the PCE than the mid res mode. I.e. you could get away without even rescaling, but just cropping a bit.

[Bonknuts]

Also:



 That image would need quite a bit of editing still (it chokes on my image converter).

 Some more statistic of the above image:

[touko]

wow, what's pc-engine image converter,a custom tool ??