No idea, I didn’t do it. It could be a commercial rip, which wouldn’t be good.
5 Likes
Doesn’t matter if it’s ‘commercial’ or made by a random person on the internet.
Unless it’s explicitly marked as free for use, it’s no good - someone has a copyright on it.
It seems to be from a public domain mode 7 demo for gameboy color. I won’t link to any download site directly for copyright reasons (commercial roms), but googling “mode 7 demo kart sam blanchard” will find it no problem.
[edit] it’s a nice little demo 
Fair enough, it does indeed seem to be marked ‘public domain’ in most cases.
Sadly there’s no mention of who Sam Blanchard actually is though.
To be honest though, I expect we could find someone here who could make some better sprites.
Maybe some ‘programmer art’ would do for now?
@Hanski
Do you have some actual dimensions in mind?
Or any particular colour preference?
About 22x13 for the ship. 16x16 for the tiles. Not any special color preferences.
1 Like
I’m not quite happy with it yet, but it’s a start:
Ships
Tiles
3 Likes
Thanks! I will test that.
edit: Here is the first test.
edit same with F-Zero gfx:
1 Like
I’ve tweaked the colours to be 1:1 with RGB565 and started tracking the palette.
I’ve also modified the ship slightly to give the wings a better shape:
(T is for ‘transparent’)
How many ships are needed?
What other sorts of graphics are needed?
(And is the purple/pink too bright?)
DEVBLOG #1, “Mipmapping”
As can be seen above the road edge do not look very good when scaled down. The reason is likely that the scaling is done without filtering (e.g. calculating average of the pixels) for performance reasons. It just skips pixels. The way to make it better is to use a technique called Mipmapping. It means that there are pre-scaled bitmaps of e.g. sizes 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, etc of the original. The pre-scaling is done using filtered scaling. So, in run-time, when the size of the scaled scanline is 1/2 or smaller of the original bitmap, we use pre-scaled bitmap instead of the original. That should improve the quality of far away pixels.
2 Likes
I have come across mip mapping before. Good thinking!
When you have got mipmapping working, perhaps give these a try to see how they fare compared to the computer generated mipmaps:
@Pharap, sorry about the confusion. I just thought to write a general “DevBlog” entry. I am not addressing it to you 
I was expecting that you are familiar with Mipmaps
1 Like
I will.
Currently, I am doing mipmap bitmaps by hand (using Gimp, cubic scaling). If that improves the quality enough and I am taking them into use I will have to switch to mode13, 110x88x8 bits.
1 Like
Looks like the actual effect of mipmapping is really small. Below is a screenshot of mipmapping in use. It starts to effect after the fifth ball. I impelemented mipmapping just for the balls, that is why the other graphics look different from the original.
correctly
For the comparison, here is the original image again.
Here they are with one-to-one scaling:
1 Like
Which sprites did you use for the mip mapping?
The scaled down versions I provided,
some custom scaled down images,
or a mix of both?
Also, have you tried it with the pink/purple tile?
Before I forget, I found a slight mistake on the ship’s colouring, so here’s the fixed version:
I started working on a second ship but got sidetracked.
The finalised ships:
Pokitto
Manta
UFO
Two ships that I can’t decide the colour arrangement for:
I’m thinking about replacing the Pink with purple so that might help me decide.
And finally the updated colour palette (one colour still unassigned):
Note that all ships have thrusters, but in different arrangements,
and all ships have cockpit glass, but in different shapes.
It’s the little details that count.
Though now I think about it, maybe all the ship colours and styles should be interchangeable?
So you get to pick a style and colour combination.
That would give 25 possibilities instead of just 5 possibilities.
1 Like
Great! I like how the ships are shaded. “Pokitto” is my current favourite 
Can you make the ball shaped texture a bit more 3d-like? In F-zero it looks like a light bulb. Could it be shaded like a button, e.g. like Pokitto A/B-button?
I am using now the mode13, so there are more colors available
Btw. I am going to a summer cottage for a week, so I cannot code during that time, but can discuss
1 Like
I guess you can’t beat the original :P
Is Mode13 fast enough?
I would have thought 8bpp would be somewhat slower than 4bpp.
I got about 40 fps, so I suppose it is fast enough.
One suggestion for the ships. Shading could be so that they are viewed a bit more from the up angle. The viewing angle should be roughtly the same as with the road.
4bpp mode has 2 pixels packed into one byte and requires shifting and masking to read, which will be slower until @FManga implements the idea that any 2 pixel combinations can be addressed the same way in the unpacked palette.
1 Like