An easy way to do 8-bit art?

February 20, 2004 9:36 AM

I was interested in making a flash animation that looks like an 8 bit nintendo game, and was wondering if there's an easy way to do 8 bit art?
posted by drezdn to Media & Arts (8 answers total)

What do you mean by "8 bit art"? If you mean art that can be displayed on an 8 bit display, just don't use more than 256 colours. If the 8 bit display you want to look like doesn't allow setting colour entries, find out what the 256 colours it supports are, and use only those. If you want to convert existing pictures to this, check out the dithering tool of your image editing program of choice. It'll probably look terrible though.
posted by fvw at 9:52 AM on February 20, 2004

i think he means 8-bit like Nuklearpower.com comics..
posted by lotsofno at 10:13 AM on February 20, 2004

i think he means 8-bit like Nuklearpower.com comics..

Yes, except with the backgrounds to look like an old nintendo game too.
posted by drezdn at 10:18 AM on February 20, 2004

depends. if you're doing it in flash, the question is how is your performance going to be impacted using all bitmaps versus vector images. I imagine you're going for the pixellated/mosaic kind of look, which is a breeze in photoshop since there are filters for that kind of thing (and even one of the resize image options will produce a similar effect), but to actually draw out the jaggies in vector form would be a ton of work. I'm not sure which actually ends up being better for you performance-wise, my guess is that it'll depend: bitmaps would likely require more loading, vector require more processing.
posted by juv3nal at 11:06 AM on February 20, 2004

you could use a simple rectangle as a movie clip in flash. make a few different basic colors and then place a bunch of them in a movie clip to make the jaggy shapes you want.

time consuming but effective.
posted by darkpony at 11:21 AM on February 20, 2004

You could also make the graphics in photoshop at a really small size, then scale them up in Flash, so you'd get small file sizes and the pixelated effect you're after, as flash doesn't interpolate, AFAIK.
posted by signal at 11:49 AM on February 20, 2004

If you really want an authentic feel, you can use this approximation of the NES palette.
posted by reynaert at 1:13 PM on February 20, 2004

What you need is an editor that will work with ANSI/ASCII formats, what people used to use to make graphics in the BBS days.

I seem to remember ACiDDraw being popular.

Also, this RAGE program looks like it might be helpful.
posted by yangwar at 4:36 PM on February 20, 2004