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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

Awesome atmospheric game screens by Mark Ferrari, brilliantly translated into HTML format with the color cycling animations looking "better than ever" thanks to a nice blending effect.

Does anyone know which game these screens originally come from? It's not mentioned on the site.

The resolution is 640*480 at 256 colors, which is better than VGA. That would suggest something fairly recent (perhaps 1994-96).

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Most of the scenes are from an old, animated desktop calendar app from 1993 called "Seize The Day" (can't find a link anymore). I believe the rest are from one of the Magic The Gathering games for PC.

Cool. Thank you for rescuing this art from digital oblivion!

It was my pleasure! :)

Your site is a much better presentation than his of the same art: http://www.markferrari.com/gallery/digital/game_art/

I have a question about this blending effect. In the article, the author writes "If only I'd invented this trick 20 years ago when it really mattered!" But wouldn't this blending have cost a big performance hit, since, to do this with 256 color palettes, you would need to switch to different color palettes very fast, to render all the in-between colors?

I think the idea is to interpolate the palettes "in-between" a shift of x and a shift of x+1. If you are going at 60 frames a second, but you only shift palettes every 6 frames say, then you see a jerky ever tenth of a second. If instead you shift the palette by 1/6 every frame (so after a shift of 1/6, you are using 5/6 of colour x and 1/6 of colour x+1), you get a much smoother effect. The computation is trivial, since you are only changing the palette, so you have at most 768 bytes to recalculate. You can also change palettes every frame by outputting those 768 bytes (in fact I think you can only output the changes), which is trivial to do fast.

640*480 _is_ VGA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_resolution

Sure, but VGA only supported a palette of 16 colors at 640 * 480.

Lacking an official standard, 640 * 480 with 256 colors was usually marketed as a "Super VGA" mode in the early '90s.

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