8Bit Image Processing...
Tuesday, April 25, 2017 by codewar65 | Discussion: Personal Computing
In case anyone wants to play around with my latest project (Retroize), it's available at my usual place for odd ball software. My software is free. No source code is available for this one. I want to hang onto my process.
http://www.vtxemu.com/misc.html
It uses my own specialized algorithm for tight ordered 2x2 dithering using custom color palettes. I wanted a process that dithers much in the way old timey 8bit graphics were. It has the ability to emulate many of the Commodore 64 graphic modes using block restrictions. Load premade palettes (JASC-Pal or CorelDraw), create our own, 'lick' colors off an opened image. Adjust image settings, etc. Lots of fun stuff! (IMHO).
Have fun. Let me know if there is any problems.
Reply #2 Wednesday, April 26, 2017 7:41 AM
Off topic:
Hey codewar......how about you pickin' up on Sysmetrix. You could make that sucker sing!
End off topic: 
Reply #3 Wednesday, April 26, 2017 2:19 PM
Off topic:
Hey codewar......how about you pickin' up on Sysmetrix. You could make that sucker sing!
End off topic:
I'm not even sure what Sysmetrix is. If's it system resource monitoring widgets, it's not really my cup of tea. I use Sysinternals Process Explorer or WinSpy++ for most of what I can't see from a command line prompt.
I don't even run much of ObjectDesktop. I only use WindowBlinds pretty much. I try to keep background processes down to a bare minimum, my desktop only has the taskbar and desktop icons, my tray shows the time and other important indicators. Everything else gets turned off or removed.
Reply #4 Sunday, April 30, 2017 9:18 PM
I am currently porting this from .NET to a real platform to speed it up. I had a false start at doing it in straight up C. There is a huge lack of any resources on the web. I might as well be porting it to COBOL or Assembler. I am not a huge fan of object oriented programming. so...
I've settled on Lazarus / Free Pascal. It's coming along very nicely. I've almost forgotten how beautiful of a language Pascal is. I have my IDE setup to mimic the old DOS Turbo Pascal. It's all coming back to me and there are vast amounts of reference docs online.
I will run some speed test to compare the two once it's ported over and will share my findings.
Reply #5 Thursday, May 4, 2017 11:36 PM
The Lazarus / Free Pascal port is nearing completion. I am really digging Pascal. I think it may be the platform for all my future projects. The Lazarus IDE is a dream to use and the speed of the applications built with it run circles around anything I have done in .NET.
I will see about a Linux build as well once the Window one is completed.
Reply #6 Thursday, May 11, 2017 9:29 PM
Version 1.0 is available. This is the first version of the Free Pascal port of the C# .NET source. Requires 64bit Windows. Unzip into a clean folder and run. No modification are made to registry, all settings are saved in an INI file (the good old fashioned way). It's about 3 to 4 times faster than the C# version. All the functionality that was in the C# version is there except the Accuracy setting (it now does 100%) plus I added a 'Reduce Palette By 1' to auto combine two of the closest colors (using color distance computed on CIE LAB color space).
Notes: I avoided as much Object Pascal as possible because I am under the belief that OOP is bloated, slow, unnecessary, and difficult to read. 95% of this is straight up Pascal with some inline x86 assembler to combat speed bottlenecks.
http://www.vtxemu.com/misc.html
Enjoy. Holler if you find a bug.
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Reply #1 Wednesday, April 26, 2017 1:20 AM
Looks like fun....shall have a look...
I 'started' skinning with icons using a 4 bit Fixed palette [with 64 pixels]....made getting it right 'entertaining' ...