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

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    • Used2BeRXU
      Used2BeRX @Used2BeRX
      last edited by Used2BeRX

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

      0_1521852608120_Shen Qi De Mao Zi.png

      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:

      0_1521852881086_Feng Yin Dao.png

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

      lilbudL 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • lilbudL
        lilbud @Used2BeRX
        last edited by

        @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.
        0_1521854136304_11ce46a4-b4ad-48c1-b0ef-7dd4b919a169-image.png

        Creator of the Radiocade: https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/6077/radiocade

        Backlog: http://backloggery.com/lilbud

        Used2BeRXU 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
        • Used2BeRXU
          Used2BeRX @lilbud
          last edited by

          @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:

          0_1521857179826_Shen Qi De Mao Zi.png

          And here's what I made with your label:

          0_1521857206198_Shen Qi De Mao Zi.png

          Thanks again :)

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • darkniorD
            darknior @Used2BeRX
            last edited by

            @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:

            0_1521857179826_Shen Qi De Mao Zi.png

            And here's what I made with your label:

            0_1521857206198_Shen Qi De Mao Zi.png

            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/

            0_1521895847042_1521852884992-feng-yin-dao.png
            0_1521895856300_2c20c37156ff62bc89c4d135f23ae9a5f074d474_s2_n1.png

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

            0_1521896650643_01.png

            Life is game, just play it !

            lilbudL Used2BeRXU 2 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 1
            • lilbudL
              lilbud @darknior
              last edited by

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

              Creator of the Radiocade: https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/6077/radiocade

              Backlog: http://backloggery.com/lilbud

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
              • Used2BeRXU
                Used2BeRX @darknior
                last edited by

                @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:

                0_1521857179826_Shen Qi De Mao Zi.png

                And here's what I made with your label:

                0_1521857206198_Shen Qi De Mao Zi.png

                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/

                0_1521895847042_1521852884992-feng-yin-dao.png
                0_1521895856300_2c20c37156ff62bc89c4d135f23ae9a5f074d474_s2_n1.png

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

                0_1521896650643_01.png

                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.

                lilbudL 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • lilbudL
                  lilbud @Used2BeRX
                  last edited by

                  @used2berx have you tried gimp?

                  Creator of the Radiocade: https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/6077/radiocade

                  Backlog: http://backloggery.com/lilbud

                  Used2BeRXU 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • Used2BeRXU
                    Used2BeRX @lilbud
                    last edited by Used2BeRX

                    @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.

                    darkniorD lilbudL 2 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 0
                    • darkniorD
                      darknior @Used2BeRX
                      last edited by

                      @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.

                      Life is game, just play it !

                      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                      • lilbudL
                        lilbud @Used2BeRX
                        last edited by

                        @used2berx Ok, if you need help, feel free to ask!

                        I do have some NES carts if you want pics of them.

                        Creator of the Radiocade: https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/6077/radiocade

                        Backlog: http://backloggery.com/lilbud

                        Used2BeRXU 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                        • Used2BeRXU
                          Used2BeRX @markwkidd
                          last edited by

                          @markwkidd Hopefully I'll have some time in the next few days to try uploading some things to github. Even if I'm not close to an actual release it would be nice to have this stuff backed up somewhere else. I'll let you know if I run into any problems. :)

                          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                          • Used2BeRXU
                            Used2BeRX @lilbud
                            last edited by

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

                            @used2berx Ok, if you need help, feel free to ask!

                            I do have some NES carts if you want pics of them.

                            I have carts for all of the games in the collection now. Currently 2,020 of them. Most of them are very high quality. What type of cart images do you have?

                            lilbudL 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                            • lilbudL
                              lilbud @Used2BeRX
                              last edited by

                              @used2berx off the top of my head:

                              Mario 1
                              Gyromite
                              Ninja kid
                              Pinball
                              Centipede

                              Creator of the Radiocade: https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/6077/radiocade

                              Backlog: http://backloggery.com/lilbud

                              Used2BeRXU 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                              • Used2BeRXU
                                Used2BeRX @lilbud
                                last edited by

                                @lilbud Oh. I read that wrong. You mean you have the actual physical cartridges. Lucky dog.

                                After I moved out and my younger brother went into the army, my youngest brother traded in our entire video game collection we had growing up for new games until all he had left was a PS2 and one or two games for it. Then he had to get a job to support his addiction.

                                Some times I want to strangle him when I think about that. Especially with how inflated the prices of all those old games are right now.

                                lilbudL 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                • lilbudL
                                  lilbud @Used2BeRX
                                  last edited by

                                  @used2berx I'd strangle him too. If my brother sold all my games, this is how i'd feel.

                                  0_1522238397528_0d6088b5-5da4-4d73-9633-59b9274faf43-image.png

                                  Creator of the Radiocade: https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/6077/radiocade

                                  Backlog: http://backloggery.com/lilbud

                                  Used2BeRXU 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                                  • Used2BeRXU
                                    Used2BeRX @lilbud
                                    last edited by

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

                                    @used2berx I'd strangle him too. If my brother sold all my games, this is how i'd feel.

                                    lol :)

                                    What kills me is that the time period he was selling them, they were at about the lowest price point imaginable. He probably got 2 new PS2 games for our entire NES library of around 100 games. Some of those were fairly rare too, because we had this great swap meet around us where this guy sold all sorts of carts you'd never find at Toys R Us or the video game stores. We had games like Baby Boomer and Chiller and one of the Dizzy games and a few of the other Codemasters Quatro games. I'm thinking he got about $0.25 - $0.50 per game in credit when he sold them. :(

                                    We had NES, Super NES, Atari 7800, Atari 5200, Gameboy, Genesis, 32x, Sega CD, TurboGrafx 16, and the Virtual Boy, and literally hundreds of games in total.

                                    When I found out he had done this, all that was left was the Virtual Boy. Nobody would buy it from him. Sadly, that didn't even work anymore. :(

                                    I took the PSX and N64 with me when I left since those weren't gifts from my parents and I outright bought them. I ended up giving the PSX away with a few of the crappy games I never played to somebody I worked with who had a pretty tough life, after I got the PS2. I gave my N64 to my good friend's son. Me and his old man used to play the hell out of Mario Kart and Goldeneye 007 with a bunch of other friends back in our day, and I thought it would be a cool way for him to bond with his kid.

                                    I'm hardly a purist though. When emulation works, I'd much rather have a small unit that can play few thousand games with all of the artwork and stuff combined like I'm putting together. It is a shame that we've never gotten perfect 007 Goldeneye emulation on the XBox for multiplayer. Hoping that it works on a Pi 3. I only have a Pi Zero now so I haven't been able to try it.

                                    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                    • Used2BeRXU
                                      Used2BeRX
                                      last edited by

                                      Next part of the project is to enlarge Action and Title screenshots and standardize them. The images from the 1.0 release were very small because most of them were taken in MednafenX which takes super small screenshots. Many others, however, were either taken with different emulators when a lot of the games still didn't work in MednafenX or were taken off the web, so the pixel ratios can vary wildly.

                                      As it turns out, this job won't be as bad as I had originally thought. I thought I would have to re-take every single Title/Action shot in an emulator that takes larger pictures. I will only have to re-take those that have a non-standard ratio. In order to re-size the rest without degrading the image quality, all I have to do is increase them by a percentage of 200%, 400%, 800%, etc. using the "Nearest Neighbor" filter and you end up with a pixel perfect image that is double or quadruple or more the size.

                                      The strange thing is that MednafenX takes two dimensions. They are 256x240 and 256x224. (These are also common ratios found in online searches for NES images) I have a question into the guy who works on the emulator to answer that one for me. My plan is to increase all of these images by 400% using this method. The 256x240 images will be 1024x960. The 256x224 would be 1024x896.

                                      We will probably have a nearly 50/50 split of these two image sizes because I think this different ratio happens for a good reason. There is no way to "force" the ratio of one to the other size after the fact other than simply cropping pixels which is obviously not an option. If you try to force the different size with a filter you get a blurry mess.

                                      This project shouldn't take much more than a few days hopefully. Definitely not going to be as bad as the Cart project was. :)

                                      Updates to follow.

                                      Used2BeRXU 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                      • Used2BeRXU
                                        Used2BeRX @Used2BeRX
                                        last edited by

                                        Hmmmmmm...

                                        It seems that MednafenX didn't make all of those images. It only puts out 256x224. Many of the images I have however are 256x240, so I must have gotten them from another source. I can't remember that far back since it was about a dozen or so years ago that I did it.

                                        Mobygames has a list of accepted screenshot image dimensions for all gaming systems. For the NES the only two accepted image dimensions are 256x224 / 256x240 png/gif

                                        Anybody have any thoughts on what the ideal size should be? I've seen a ton of forums about this issue regarding not just screen shots, but the aspect ratios that should be used when emulating games. It seems like there is a ton of arguments about it and no one side is "right".

                                        I want them to all be the same, so I'm probably going to do them all 256x224 and then enlarge them since that's the easiest for me to do on my rig.

                                        Used2BeRXU 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                        • Used2BeRXU
                                          Used2BeRX @Used2BeRX
                                          last edited by Used2BeRX

                                          Nope... That's no good. The 256x224 ratio is bad. It gets there by removing 8 pixels from the top and bottom of the image.

                                          RetroArch and Nestopia EU take garbage screenshots as well at 320x240. They're extremely blurry.

                                          The only good way to get them seems to be from NestopiaX at 256x240 pixels, although there are problems with that which would make it take a long time for me to get all of them.

                                          I'm going to have to think about this and talk with some people who know more than I do about it before I start working on this.

                                          lol... nothing is ever easy, is it?

                                          mediamogulM 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                          • mediamogulM
                                            mediamogul Global Moderator @Used2BeRX
                                            last edited by mediamogul

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

                                            RetroArch and Nestopia EU take garbage screenshots as well at 320x240. They're extremely blurry.

                                            320x240 is the native 4x3 resolution for those games. To resize the images to a larger size without blurring, you need to select the option in your image editor for 'Integer Scaling', sometimes named 'nearest neighbor'. Just make sure that the larger size is always a factor of 200%, 300%, 400%... etc to get a perfect scale.

                                            Edit: I see now that you're saying they come out of Nestopia blurry. I have no idea why that would be outside of poor scaling from the core.

                                            RetroPie v4.5 • RPi3 Model B • 5.1V 2.5A PSU • 16GB SanDisk microSD • 512GB External Drive

                                            Used2BeRXU 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
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