NES RessurctionXtras 2.0 Project (thread previously titled: Does anybody work on Emulators to fix broken games here?)

Used2BeRX · 14 Mar 2018, 00:54

Just Pirate carts and the "Blue" Unlicensed carts left to go. The blue carts I had don't look very good so I found that template cart and I'm going to be trying to find good labels to make them better. All that's left is 121 carts. If I can manage to get them all done this week it will only be 2 months of free time. I never thought this was going to take me more time than the synopsis did.

Used2BeRX · 22 Mar 2018, 12:03

CARTS ARE DONE!!!!!

Well... I still have to put them on the Pi and manually go through all of them to see if any need re-edits. Then I have to do some mass-conversions and see if everything is going to work out as well as I think it should.

Very excited to get this part of the NES project behind me. I'm going to take a break from artwork for a while before I do the Perfect Aspect Ratio conversions on the Boxart. I hope to be able to do some work on the synopsis and @meleu 's and @mitu 's scripts for a while and get everything running smoothly on that end.

Hey @darknior? Any chance you can package up those awesome boxarts you've made for the NES soon? I can't think about starting the Boxarts before I have all of your great additions first.

mediamogul · 22 Mar 2018, 14:01

@used2berx said in NES RessurctionXtras 2.0 Project (thread previously titled: Does anybody work on Emulators to fix broken games here?):

CARTS ARE DONE!!!!!

Congratulations. I know you've been working hard on this. You should celebrate by playing a few games ;)

darknior · 22 Mar 2018, 15:21

@used2berx Hey congratulations :)

Sorry with the RVGM THEME and the BEZEL work i can't found the time to finish my NES work :(
I'm in late ... so many stuff to create.

I share you the actuel set, not done, but with all my work on my MEGA here

Used2BeRX · 23 Mar 2018, 11:15

@mediamogul said in NES RessurctionXtras 2.0 Project (thread previously titled: Does anybody work on Emulators to fix broken games here?):

@used2berx said in NES RessurctionXtras 2.0 Project (thread previously titled: Does anybody work on Emulators to fix broken games here?):

CARTS ARE DONE!!!!!

Congratulations. I know you've been working hard on this. You should celebrate by playing a few games ;)

Thanks bud,

Hah... Too much to do man. My bro gave me his old XBox 360 and a bag of about 30 games back in August some time and I haven't even looked inside to see what games there are to play in there.

I'd probably just end up mindlessly grinding for Platinum Trophies with my OCD instead of putting it to good use. :)

@darknior said in NES RessurctionXtras 2.0 Project (thread previously titled: Does anybody work on Emulators to fix broken games here?):

@used2berx Hey congratulations :)

Sorry with the RVGM THEME and the BEZEL work i can't found the time to finish my NES work :(
I'm in late ... so many stuff to create.

I share you the actuel set, not done, but with all my work on my MEGA here

Wow... Those logos are fantastic! What a cool idea.

I'm a bit confused about your box art in there though. It only goes to the letter K as far as I can tell, and I thought you had a lot more of them done on your NES thread. Didn't you?

darknior · 23 Mar 2018, 12:05

@used2berx said in NES RessurctionXtras 2.0 Project (thread previously titled: Does anybody work on Emulators to fix broken games here?):

I'm a bit confused about your box art in there though. It only goes to the letter K as far as I can tell, and I thought you had a lot more of them done on your NES thread. Didn't you?

Oups, sorry i forgot to upload the half of them lol
It's done now.
But the second half after is not 100% verified, i want to redraw some of these covers, and add Japanese covers for translated games.
But you can begin to work with this set.

Used2BeRX · 23 Mar 2018, 12:12

@darknior Hey man,

I'm not real knowledgeable about file types. I know I needed to make the carts PNG so I could have transparancy, and that overall the filesize for my carts are about 3 times as large, but I'm wondering why they actually seem to load up reasonably quick on my Pi Zero without even resizing them down at all?

They're nowhere near as large as the Box Front images are overall, but I'm really surprised about this development. There really isn't any unreasonable lag time on the carts except for the ones that are over 2.5MB to 3MB each, which really aren't that many.

I mean... if they're working this good on a Pi Zero, they might not even need to be sized down at all for a Pi 3. There is only one single image I can't seem to open at full size. It's for Pokemon 4-in-1 at a file size of 4.61MB. A few others that are smaller but still over 4.0MB will open, but they take a few seconds to load up.

Could this maybe have to do with compression or some other difference between JPG and PNG files and how they are handled on the RetroPie? I know that there was no way I could go through all of them this quickly before I converted them from JPG to PNG at this size.

Used2BeRX · 23 Mar 2018, 12:15

@darknior said in NES RessurctionXtras 2.0 Project (thread previously titled: Does anybody work on Emulators to fix broken games here?):

@used2berx said in NES RessurctionXtras 2.0 Project (thread previously titled: Does anybody work on Emulators to fix broken games here?):

I'm a bit confused about your box art in there though. It only goes to the letter K as far as I can tell, and I thought you had a lot more of them done on your NES thread. Didn't you?

Oups, sorry i forgot to upload the half of them lol
It's done now.
But the second half after is not 100% verified, i want to redraw some of these covers, and add Japanese covers for translated games.
But you can begin to work with this set.

Thanks bud. :)

I'm in no huge hurry to get back to artwork manipulation, although I would like to get something finished in the next few months so I can finally give the Pi Zero back to my brother so he can make a few of them for his nephews. He gave this to me back in May of 2016 and I still haven't gotten it back to him!!!!!

Oh well... If I have to wait on your artwork until after that I won't rush it. I'll just give him a sloppy version and let him know I'll update it when I can.

Used2BeRX · 23 Mar 2018, 13:10

Making a few tweaks now that I got a lot of file name stuff done over the last day or so.

These carts look AWESOME!!!!!

I was happily able to finally upgrade the absolute worst cart in the set that was only 140x90 pixels. Fortunately, some time in the last year it looks like this game went up on ebay and I was able to grab a much better image than the one I had. It wasn't centered, but Paint.NET makes short work of that.

Here was the original image I had in the set:

However you're seeing it on your device, that's the full size and quality of it. It looked absolutely terrible when stretched on an HD screen.

Here's the image I found online just a few minutes ago:

Not a great shot, right?

A little graphic wizardry from a relative art-noob and a few minutes later and now we have this great upgrade to the set:

Not even close to the top tier images in the set, but it's good enough that it isn't a massive eyesore while scrolling that just screams for attention. You wouldn't even notice it now while scrolling through the romlist. :)

Used2BeRX · 23 Mar 2018, 15:59

Sweet. I was able to fix the second worst image we had. Chinese Pirate game Titanic was only 196x126 pixels and looked like crap in the rom list:

I think it wasn't the "original" cart either. I got that image from a picture of a guy holding it up. I was able to find a much nicer image on ebay though and finished it up like this:

I actually had to reduce the size by 50% to upload it here. The new image is 1050x675 pixels. :)

I also found a box image that I will be able to use instead of using a Generic Boxart for the game.

......

So here was the original box:

And now the new box in the set:

Pretty typical quality of Chinese Pirate boxes that I've been able to get. Awesome finding another one though. :)

Used2BeRX · 24 Mar 2018, 00:09

It's really nice to be able to view this on an HDTV now and spend some extra time trying to improve the worst of the bunch. Auctions are a huge help getting some of these more obscure carts. Usually the pictures are really bad for them, but with a little effort they're salvageable and a lot better than what was already out there on official gaming websites.

Here was our old cart for Happy Pairs (210x231 pixels):

Found this image on ebay:

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/S4kAAOSw8b1aN9lH/s-l1600.jpg

And now we've got this (Reduced 50% to fit here, actual image is (831x914 pixels):

Used2BeRX · 24 Mar 2018, 00:54

If anybody has this cart and could photograph it, that would be awesome:

It's a Chinese pirate called Shen Qi De Mao Zi. It's a Famicom backport of The Minish Cap for the GBA. I was only able to ever find a very low quality photo of it.

Maybe we have a graphic artist here who has the talent to touch it up a bit? The cart itself doesn't really matter, as it looks to be a pretty standard shell that could just be replaced with an image of a similar color.

I was able to get a pretty decent pic for Feng Yin Dao, which is a Chinese Pirate backport of Link's Awakening:

We could just use that cart if somebody was able to re-create the label.

lilbud · 24 Mar 2018, 01:15

@used2berx I gave my best attempt at half-assing the Minish cap label. Kinda hard to make out all the details, but I gave my best shot. Let me know if you want me to send it to you.

Used2BeRX · 24 Mar 2018, 02:07

@lilbud Thanks bud.

I took your image, the cart from Feng Yin Dao, and I found a decent quality pic of the title screen online and removed some of the Chinese text from it to try to make it look like the original as much as possible. Unfortuantely, there's no telling what number the cart was supposed to be on the upper right of the original, so we can't re-create that.

Anyway... Here's the original again:

And here's what I made with your label:

Thanks again :)

darknior · 24 Mar 2018, 13:05

@used2berx said in NES RessurctionXtras 2.0 Project (thread previously titled: Does anybody work on Emulators to fix broken games here?):

@darknior Hey man,
I'm not real knowledgeable about file types. I know I needed to make the carts PNG so I could have transparancy, and that overall the filesize for my carts are about 3 times as large, but I'm wondering why they actually seem to load up reasonably quick on my Pi Zero without even resizing them down at all?

JPG is always smaller because more compression. I always use 80% compression for the covers. Files are smaller with it.
PNG, no really compression and transparency support, images are always better than JPG if you have a big source file. But for me it's not important, i think covers in JPG are enough on HD TV.

To compress PNG for my RVGM theme, and not loose any quality, there are some software really cool like this one i use. Try it on your Logo and Carts and report to me, you will love it :)

PNG Gauntlet : https://pnggauntlet.com/

@used2berx said in NES RessurctionXtras 2.0 Project (thread previously titled: Does anybody work on Emulators to fix broken games here?):

@lilbud Thanks bud.

Anyway... Here's the original again:

And here's what I made with your label:

You really make a good work on your carts, i love it ... and only with Paint.Net !!! Incredible.
So bad for you, you don't use Photoshop ... you can make some better things with it ...

On this Cart, why don't you remove the ZELDA title to replace it by the Chinese ?

I have an other MAGIC option for you @Used2BeRX ... i discover it last month, and in some case it can save the life and help to have a good stuff with a big size to work on :)
I don't use it for my final result, but to up-size an RAW image size, found over GOOGLE, and with a little size. With this soft i make the image bigger, and after i can clean it and redraw the missing parts :)
Because the problem with an little image is to up-size it without having so many pixel. This software up-size your image without any PIXEL !!! It use machine learning. Use default settings, MEDIUM and x2.
Try it and report me, you will love it too ;) :p

Waifu2x image resizer : https://waifu2x.booru.pics/

And now after 10 minutes of Photoshop work to hide (fast) the bad logo and let you paste the Chinese one :)

lilbud · 24 Mar 2018, 13:07

@darknior Waifu2x is sometimes down, so it could be unreliable.

Used2BeRX · 24 Mar 2018, 14:00

@darknior said in NES RessurctionXtras 2.0 Project (thread previously titled: Does anybody work on Emulators to fix broken games here?):

@used2berx said in NES RessurctionXtras 2.0 Project (thread previously titled: Does anybody work on Emulators to fix broken games here?):
@darknior Hey man,
I'm not real knowledgeable about file types. I know I needed to make the carts PNG so I could have transparancy, and that overall the filesize for my carts are about 3 times as large, but I'm wondering why they actually seem to load up reasonably quick on my Pi Zero without even resizing them down at all?
JPG is always smaller because more compression. I always use 80% compression for the covers. Files are smaller with it.

I know the file size is smaller. I'm wondering about the speed at which RetroPie displays the images though. Even though the PNG images are quite a bit larger by file size, they seem to load quicker on the Pi Zero than the JPG images of the same dimensions.

I hope that question is clear this time, because I'd really like to get an answer on this one. It's kind of a big deal when it comes to me making my Pi Zero artwork set. It's actually the difference of a few Gigabytes of space if it's better for me to go with PNG for the boxes just for the sake of loading speed.

PNG, no really compression and transparency support, images are always better than JPG if you have a big source file. But for me it's not important, i think covers in JPG are enough on HD TV.

To compress PNG for my RVGM theme, and not loose any quality, there are some software really cool like this one i use. Try it on your Logo and Carts and report to me, you will love it :)

PNG Gauntlet : https://pnggauntlet.com/

Thanks man. Now that I'm using PNG for cart images, the size of that folder is about 3 to 4 times higher than it was at JPG. Anything I've tried makes the PNG look bad. I'll give this one a shot and see what happens. It's on my to-do list. Probably won't get to this for a while since I'll still be adding games.

@used2berx said in NES RessurctionXtras 2.0 Project (thread previously titled: Does anybody work on Emulators to fix broken games here?):

@lilbud Thanks bud.

Anyway... Here's the original again:

And here's what I made with your label:

You really make a good work on your carts, i love it ... and only with Paint.Net !!! Incredible.
So bad for you, you don't use Photoshop ... you can make some better things with it ...

On this Cart, why don't you remove the ZELDA title to replace it by the Chinese ?

I have an other MAGIC option for you @Used2BeRX ... i discover it last month, and in some case it can save the life and help to have a good stuff with a big size to work on :)
I don't use it for my final result, but to up-size an RAW image size, found over GOOGLE, and with a little size. With this soft i make the image bigger, and after i can clean it and redraw the missing parts :)
Because the problem with an little image is to up-size it without having so many pixel. This software up-size your image without any PIXEL !!! It use machine learning. Use default settings, MEDIUM and x2.
Try it and report me, you will love it too ;) :p

Waifu2x image resizer : https://waifu2x.booru.pics/

And now after 10 minutes of Photoshop work to hide (fast) the bad logo and let you paste the Chinese one :)

Wow. You can't even tell that you blew that image up! I've never seen that before. That's going to be a huge help for me, even on images I don't intend to fix up on my own. When the sets are released, I'm going to be making all of the images for each type the exact same size. That's why I've been going for "pixel perfect ratios" when doing all of this work on them. The ones that were smaller than the desired size for the system that will be displaying them I was just going to blow up with Paint.NET. I'll be using this program for that now. Thanks for the link. :)

Oh, and about that Zelda cart... If you look at the super small actual image I found, you can see that the "Zelda" logo is on it, and there is chinese writing to the left of the sword. Chances are there is chinese writing below the word Zelda instead of "The Minish Cap" as well, but I can't tell.

I think it's really impressive how you can remove the logo like that and what was behind it still looks so good. I have no clue how to do that kind of stuff, so I'm rather limited in the touchups that I can do.

lilbud · 24 Mar 2018, 14:06

@used2berx have you tried gimp?

Used2BeRX · 24 Mar 2018, 14:16

@lilbud said in NES RessurctionXtras 2.0 Project (thread previously titled: Does anybody work on Emulators to fix broken games here?):

@used2berx have you tried gimp?

I did. It was too complicated for me. I'm an idiot. I just surround myself with smart people. :)

I like things to be simple. Whenever I've needed anything that Paint.NET didn't natively do, I was able to find a plugin and instructions on how to use it.

Maybe Gimp can do some more artwork magic than Paint.NET can do, but I'm no artist. All I'm really doing is some technical stuff, and when I can I make some fixes to the damaged boxes in areas that are basically solid colors. I wouldn't even touch the artwork stuff if I didn't have to. I'm glad that in the last 10 years since I was away from the scene that the overall quality of the art available online is better by about 10 fold. I'm hoping my luck holds out on that statement whenever I move to the next system I'm going to work on.

darknior · 24 Mar 2018, 14:57

@used2berx Really i think you must lost some time, hours, days to learn how to use Photoshop (the best for me) or Gimp.
Yes you will lost some days, but after that you will save many more when you work on your images.
All is explain on Youtube with video tutorials ...
I'm sure if you understand how to remove a logo in 10 minutes you can use it many time and make a better work and work faster.
Same with video filters, light filters, etc.
On this cart you can now paste the zelda logo, remove the "Minis caper" and replace by Chinese title. And add the other logo we can see on top right. And release a perfect update of the original card.