What serendipity.
There I’m sitting, at work, the time is 03:22am and for some reason I’m googling pictures of the old boardgame HeroQuest when one image catches my eye. It’s by this guy; Mattias Gustavsson, posted over at RetroGameDev, who has made a pixel shader for a project he’s working on. The shader makes your images look like tmhey are viewed on an old worn-out TV. As it happens, Mattias made an executable of his filter, but unfortunately, it’s for Windows only…
As I’m in love with (or, at least, very fond of) all things retro, this was right up my alley. Clearly, nostalgia is the proof of that you’re getting older.
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I have been looking for ways to mathematically convert RGB colors to other color standards. My intention is to create some script or routine that would, either automagically or manually, make it easier to pick similar colors out of a predefined one. My first thought was that the HSB standard would be a good choice but forum posts pointed to Lab instead. A quick google later I found EasyRGB, which came very much in handy. The people over there have a long list of functions in a generic programming language for converting between several (if not all) of the most common color standards.
Much to my joy, they also listed a function for calculating ΔE, color difference. More on this subject can be read in this Wikipedia article. Lets just say that I went with the CIE94 (or Delta E 1994 or ΔE94, there doesn’t seem be a formal name for it).
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I have bundled together a collection of swatches based on old computers and video games that may come in handy for any project involving the retro style of games from the 80′s, pixelart or whatnot. Most colors come from various Wikipedia articles such as these two [1, 2], so I can’t vouch for their fidelity, except for the gamma corrected Commodore 64 which is probably as close to the original as humanly possible.
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Just as a way to get my brain going I have put this little script together. I found a similar thing in a Flickr gallery and thought that it wouldn’t be at all hard to replicate and it might just get me back in creative mode. Or, at least keep my brain from going soft and forget everything I know. It doesn’t do much, it just draws some concentric circles in different colors depending what color scheme is used (RGB, CMY, Gray or Black/White).
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