A few years ago, I was digging thorough some old archive 3.5" disks and CD's and found the images I wrote about in the post Really Old Pixels. I showed the guys over on the
Arkanix Labs forum and they asked if I had any more old pixels.
After a visit to my parents, the collecting of some more old gear (including more disks and CD's) and an afternoon of perusal, I've uncovered some more old C64 art. I'm guessing these are from around 1998 as well since they were saved on a .d64 image that was on a 3.5" disk I used when I backed-up everything from my old Compaq Presario 1230.
They were pixelled using OCP's Advanced Art Studio running using the C64 emulator CCS64 V2.0 on Windows 98. At that time, these were my first attempts at C64 pixelling for over 8 years or so, so they're pretty bad. Not wanting to throw out excuses (but I will) for the poor quality, but I was doing battle with the emulator (all new to me at the time), doing battle with pixelling using a damn keyboard instead of a joystick/mouse, doing battle with an awful LCD screen whose colour reproduction was abysmal and doing battle with my own inability to remember anything about how colours on the C64 worked together.
And I was probably doing battle with a new job at the time because I hadn't long finished University.
Anyway, onto the pixels which are all unfinished and were never shown to anyone (that I remember).
From memory, this image was pixelled following the SmackDown image in an effort to improve my skin tone shading. Pretty awful use of colours here; as mentioned, it looked good on the poor laptop screen using whatever palette CCS64 was using at the time. No idea why I used pink as highlights in the hair. Maybe I was going to change it if the image had gotten any further?
Notice the blank space along the bottom of the image? When using Advanced Art Studio, some of the screen was taken up with a toolbar at the top of the screen and you had to scroll the image up and down to be able drawn on the whole screen. I obviously wasn't scrolling far enough...
This image was pixelled because I was fond of the desktop wallpaper I had at the time, which featured a city skyline at night. This is very rough because I lost interest part way through. The intention was to smooth out all the colour 'blobs' which are the result of my 'splashing' a brush around in Art Studio.
I'm
fairly sure I did continue this at some point. I have a vague recollection of showing it to
MTR at some point and he coded the water reflections to sway back and forth. I also seem to remember altering the colours so that some of the white in the buildings was red, green, yellow and so on, for more variation. Alternatively, that may be a load of waffle I imagined.
Finally, this image is of a car! The Audi TT had only just been launched and everyone was loving the sporty look, including obviously me because it became my latest subject at the time. As with the other images, this is fairly rough and unfinished. The Audi logo seems in desperate need of anti-aliasing, as do parts of the car.
No idea why this wasn't completed, but I seemed to have taken the trouble to slap my signature on it for some reason.
I've now converted the original Advanced Art Studio images to Koala, but left them untouched. The Koala files (.kla), some ready-to-run C64 files (.prg) and the images above (.png) can be downloaded
here...
