Making Hercules screenshots look a bit more authentic

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David
The Prince of Persia
The Prince of Persia
Posts: 2846
Joined: December 11th, 2008, 9:48 pm
Location: Hungary

Making Hercules screenshots look a bit more authentic

Post by David »

Hello everyone,

As you may know, PoP1 can run in Hercules screen mode, among others.
http://www.popuw.com/images/prince_h1.png
http://www.popuw.com/images/prince_h2.png

In fact, this is how I played it in the first years, as I briefly mentioned here.
(Bonus question: Do you know where are PoP's Hercules graphics stored?)

Now, I remember that on the actual hardware, it looked somewhat differently from what DOSBox shows us.
For example, the aspect ratio is wrong. But this can be fixed in dosbox.conf.
Another thing is that adjacent grey pixels should merge into a brighter white line. (Which is a bit greenish, actually.)
And then there are the scanlines. Not those annoyingly thick black lines that DOSBox can produce, but some lighter ones.
(This is kind of like what's in the article linked from this post, and in the other article linked from the first.)

So I wrote a small utility in HTML+JS that can convert the above screenshots to something that looks more like what I remember.
See attachment.

The aspect ratio might be a bit off, though.
And I didn't do curvature/bulging yet.
And, thankfully, I don't have to deal with color bleeding and RGB shadow masking...

You need to download the screenshots above (or make your own ones), browse for them in the utility, and press OK.
[off]
Or maybe you don't have to download them first?
Under Windows, the standard file open dialog will accept http URLs.
The system will download the file, and give the path of the downloaded copy to the program that opened the file open dialog.
Neat, isn't it? I bet you didn't know this!
[/off]
Attachments
hercules_sim.zip
(1.07 KiB) Downloaded 111 times
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