The effect looks even better in motion.

Super stoked for Metallica now, it's going to look amazing.

I think I still do, I love the old school feel. I haven't seen the new color smoothing in person yet though, only on an iPhone video. I have to admit, TSPP in full color, smoothed, in motion looked pretty damn sweet.

There's no question when I get Metallica I'm going to try it out. If I like it better I'll admit Randy won me over.

One thing that's cool about the no-dots deal is it makes the display feel brighter, because you're not running all those black pixels. So that may help sway me, we'll see.

Don't quote me on this, because I may be remembering wrong, but I thought they said Spring. Whether I run dots or smoothing there's no question I'm getting the Metallica ColorDMD. The dots on that game are just brilliant, might be my all time favorite DMD, and the amount of details they're adding to the color is going to make it look incredible.

See what I mean about the brightness? Move back from your monitor a bit, maybe even squint a little, and then compare the brightness level of the middle dots image to the upscaled on.

That might be enough to push me into giving up dots.

Show me those Metallica reference frames with smoothing on and I'll ponder it some more!

I like to pop out a couple great ideas before lunch, then save the really great ones for the evening.

Once you go color it's pretty much impossible to pass up making more games in color. It's just so much better. No question I'm buying a ColorDMD for Metallica, Star Trek and Tron. Well, Star Trek only if Stern upgrades the code first. I might pass on color for it until then.

I dunno that I'm gonna upscale, I love dots. But I'm definitely going to at least try it.

Sure, no argument there. But until the code is updated Star Trek is gonna keep gathering dust in my collection, so I'm not wasting money on a new display for it.

They've already announced it's coming this year.

Heh, this sounds like almost the word for word conversation I had with Randy about how I'd do it too.

Speaking as a Tron owner I'd be totally cool with that. Green shaded Quorra video works for me.

The truth is these videos are super low rez, you're never going to get them looking that good even with full color. I've experimented with what a full color (16 colors) video looks like in 128x32 dots (and Tron is less than that since it uses only the right side of the DMD) and it's just not all that spectacular.

Here, look at this example from Iron Man I did:

ironman-dmd2.gif

Now the color helps, but it's not like it turns it into HD video magically, you're still dealing with a very low rez image. And just look at how the dots change from frame to frame. Hand coloring that in that style would be a nightmare.

I dunno about in color, but I've seen games like Spider-Man upscaled in Sigma mode. It's not a complete mess, it might even help some, but there's just only so much you can do with such a low rez video clip.

Just as a reminder, this is the actual size of the DMD screen in pure pixels:

ironman-actual-rez.gif

It's just super tiny. That's why doing dots is such an art form, and as a general rule ripped movie clips look like crap. You need to hand craft the dots so that each one counts, the general noise of a movie clip just doesn't translate well.

As Rarehero points out, on Tron they at least adjusted the contrast and black levels to frame most of the images clearly against a black background, so that does help.

There's a limit to what ColorDMD, or anyone else, can do with this stuff. They're squeezing a lot of blood from the stone already.

Ugh, no way did I hand color that, too much effort for that kind of result.

This was a proof of concept I did as part of a conversation Randy and I were having at league one afternoon. I was curious to see what it would look like.

I just grabbed some animated gifs off Google from Iron Man, cropped and scaled them down to 128x32, then blew them up 10x with a nearest neighbor algorithm to preserve the hard pixel edges and added a dot mask over the end result. Exported as a looping animation with a 16 color palette to simulate the restrictions of a ColorDMD.

Quick and dirty, but got the job done as far as showing you a "best case scenario".

If I had a clip from the actual game I'd could do it with that, but I just grabbed what I found on Google, I'm not even familiar with the game enough to know what scene to look for.

Yeah, that was the entire idea that started the conversation. I don't know how possible that even is, but that's why I mocked this up, so show how that might look if was done.

They've already announced they're doing Twilight Zone, so I imagine this year. I think it's been left so long because it's an enormously difficult one to do.

Easy there sport.

Yes. It was said maybe next week, but at this point I would guess it's just "when they're ready". I can tell you they're actively working on it, I already have fixes for the minor bugs I found. So just be a tiny bit patient and you'll get the goodies soon, and it's worth the wait.

I'm confused, you took the display out of the game to do the install?

I'm pretty sure Randy mentioned DE in one of his recent posts. Too lazy to go back and try and find it though.

1399-00.jpg

http://www.adafruit.com/products/1399

21 connections per digit! 672 to do Funhouse.

Gah, I want Shadow! At least we know Metallica is coming and will be awesome.

Downloads just fine for me. If you can't get it PM me and I can email it to you.

Metallica is already being colorized. I guess it depends on your definition of "a while".

It's gonna be awesome too. I'm super stoked for it. The game has such great dots.

They are. I wouldn't expect any updates before next month at the earliest though.

If you can document the sequence that causes that it's an easy fix for them.

Yeah, he's saying that right now, running it in single color mode, (maybe he means with the smoothing on too) looks good, and then when the color update comes out you'll just have to plug in the USB and you're set.

You don't need to do anything, because IM hasn't been colorized yet. So you'll just run it in single color mode, which already has the upscaling. What's new is the upscaling now working for colorized games too.

You might have your machine set to not show extensions, so it was hiding the .rom, and you were technically renaming it to colordmd.rom.rom

Welp, time to download an update! Thanks Randy, I know I was a pain in your ass about DOTXL but I'm stoked to see it across all titles.

I installed a ColorDMD in my Metallica yesterday, in anticipation of the full coloring being done soon. Can't wait, it's going to be a masterpiece, I really think it's the best dots on a DMD ever. There's just a ridiculous amount of great animation.

image.jpg

Hehehe, epthegeek wins the first person to notice what I leaked in that photo. Still a prototype, I'll talk more about that project in a bit.

lol, I was just flipping through them, I haven't settled on anything yet. It won't be single color for long anyways ...

I'd try JM first. Addams is cool, but honestly the game just doesn't have a whole lot of cool dots and animation. I haven't seen Johnny with a ColorDMD yet, but I bet it's got more going on in color.

Yup, you're screwed. Expect your Betty Ford pamphlet in the mail.