Image Conversion

MindWall · Post by **MindWall** » Wed Jul 06, 2005 9:04 am

I was looking at some program modestly priced at about 3,500$ which does a few things as:

Image Conversion and Color Equalizer
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You can convert full color image to "PSP™" specific image format such as RGBA4444, RGBA5551, RGBA5650 and RGBA8888.

I was going to ask if the above image foramats is new information and for more information on them, but I guess I'll be better off looking up for more info on the net on those myself...

but the software had another "neat" feature...

Software LCD simulator for "PSP™"
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Even when you cannot use "PSP™" development tool, you can check the color appearance on "PSP™" LCD by "software LCD simulator for PSP™". This function emulates "PSP™" LCD on Windows display.

source: http://www.webtech.co.jp/eng/istudio/psp/func_1.html

edit:
RGBA4444
16-bit RGBA with 4 bits for each component.
RGBA5551
16-bit RGBA with 5 bits for color components and 1 bit for alpha.
RGBA5650
16-bit color mode with no alpha; 5 bits for red, 6 for green, 5 for blue
RGBA8888
32-bit RGBA with 8 bits for each component.

Agoln · Post by **Agoln** » Wed Jul 06, 2005 10:00 am

As for the emulation... get PSPE

As for your other questions, these four posts may help:

http://forums.ps2dev.org/viewtopic.php?t=2402
http://forums.ps2dev.org/viewtopic.php?t=2439
http://forums.ps2dev.org/viewtopic.php?t=2393
http://forums.ps2dev.org/viewtopic.php?t=1719

From the looks of it... sounds like they are charging $3500 for a program that looks nice and does everything that can be easily re-produced.

MindWall · Post by **MindWall** » Wed Jul 06, 2005 10:10 am

Aglon, thanx.

do you know if the PSPE compensates fot the PSP LCD?

when I was doing a background for the PSP I had to make a gamma correction in order to match what I was seeing on my monitor.

here's the original-->thumb--> thumb-simulated as seen on PSP screen

the bg file:
http://www.alienminds.ca/PSP.bmp

ector · Post by **ector** » Wed Jul 06, 2005 10:12 am

I'm working on a little PSP texture tool (written in C#, sorry guys, not gonna sacrifice productivity for portability, it should run in Mono though).
I don't have support for quantizing images with alpha yet though.

Didn't know you could charge that kind of money for tools like this, but I'm probably gonna release mine for free anyway :)

Agoln · Post by **Agoln** » Wed Jul 06, 2005 10:17 am

ector wrote:(written in C#, sorry guys, not gonna sacrifice productivity for portability, it should run in Mono though)

Release source, and guarenteed that *some day* if someone wants to port it, they will..... cause you know that when there's a will, there's a way!

ector · Post by **ector** » Wed Jul 06, 2005 10:25 am

Agoln wrote:
ector wrote:(written in C#, sorry guys, not gonna sacrifice productivity for portability, it should run in Mono though)
Release source, and guarenteed that *some day* if someone wants to port it, they will..... cause you know that when there's a will, there's a way!

There will be source. Although it's probably easier to install mono than to port it to C :)

C# should not be underestimated btw. It's amazingly productive for this kind of apps: sweet GUI apps (i will add command line mode too) that has to do considerable amounts of calculations and lots of bit manipulations. I threw an entire GUI app with functionality to reduce to all these formats (also porting an implementation of NeuQuant written in java for the palette generation) and generate mipmaps together in little over 3 hours.

Agoln · Post by **Agoln** » Wed Jul 06, 2005 10:39 am

ector wrote:C# should not be underestimated btw.

I'm not really underestimating it, in fact, I use it myself, but some of us just refuse to use windows.... The only time I use it is when I'm playing a game, or (like now) i don't have a laptop with me :-/

ector · Post by **ector** » Wed Jul 06, 2005 12:02 pm

WIP Screenshot:

Gonna try to get a first release together tonight or tomorrow. Don't know if many people actually need it yet though..

People, do you? :)

BTW, as you can see, NeuQuant gives fabulous results.. I really should try to extend it to include alpha and see if it still gives good results.

Agoln · Post by **Agoln** » Wed Jul 06, 2005 12:38 pm

ector wrote: Don't know if many people actually need it yet though..

People, do you? :)

Sounds like a good tool.

Would be much appreciated, i'm sure SOMEONE will use it :-)... you needed it right?

Post by **ooPo** » Wed Jul 06, 2005 12:58 pm

Hey, nice work. It looks very useful and easy to use.

It could also be useful on the ps2, too.

I don't suppose the main meat of the program could be separated out into a nice command-line tool that could be used in a makefile to autogenerate texture data?

rinco · Post by **rinco** » Wed Jul 06, 2005 1:10 pm

For command line, can't imagemagick do the job?

http://www.imagemagick.org/

Post by **ooPo** » Wed Jul 06, 2005 1:15 pm

You love to take the fun out of everything, don't you?

Post by **mrbrown** » Wed Jul 06, 2005 1:55 pm

On top of imagemagick, a set of libs we're fond of is DevIL.

http://openil.sourceforge.net/

ector · Post by **ector** » Wed Jul 06, 2005 2:09 pm

Blah, I like writing my own tools sometimes.. and I can easily have it directly export preswizzled textures that can just be copied straight into PSP ram or VRAM and used.

A command line mode would be easy as the UI is completely abstracted from the texture format conversion and bitmap manipulation code.

bpoint · Post by **bpoint** » Wed Jul 06, 2005 2:43 pm

ector wrote:BTW, as you can see, NeuQuant gives fabulous results.. I really should try to extend it to include alpha and see if it still gives good results.

It seems I'm not the only one that likes NeuQuant. :)

I've extended it to include alpha in the past and it still does a great job. Although if you drop the bit levels too low (4-bit is pretty bad), you'll lose the precise location of the alpha pixels. If you have a gradient alpha, it's not a big deal, but using a cut-out mask is nearly impossible to keep in it's original form.

However, you can add an option to bias the quantization towards alpha so that the texture RGB has less priority than the alpha channel. I never got around to doing that, but it shouldn't be too hard to implement.

f_bohmann · Post by **f_bohmann** » Wed Jul 06, 2005 8:18 pm

the 3500$ program is a very very good image converter that goes far beyond neuquant in terms of dithering/color reduction especially for palettized images. if you look at this from a commercial point of view, the 3500$ are cheap if compared to the cost of a programmer implementing a tool that is as advanced as this. (and you dont want to make your good programmers write image converters anyway... :)

but i also have to admit that for ps1 we made our own neuquant based solution, since we did not know about the tool back then. and the results from neuquant are sufficient in most cases. :)

Post by **ooPo** » Thu Jul 07, 2005 12:07 am

ector wrote:A command line mode would be easy as the UI is completely abstracted from the texture format conversion and bitmap manipulation code.

Then I look forward to a source release. :)

ector · Post by **ector** » Thu Jul 07, 2005 12:47 am

I don't expect to beat the commercial tool with a day of work but it should be sufficiently good for homebrew games :)

Anyway I've almost finished the tool itself, I now just have to get all the formats working on the PSP to verify that I'm writing them correctly, and figure out the exact swizzling method of each color format, then it will be ready for release. Give me a couple more days.

After that, the next step is adding dithering, right now that's just a checkbox :)