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Last night, a Reddit user by the name of frigis9 posted a series of six images that feature detailed graphical upgrades to classic MS-DOS computer games such as Commander Keen 6 and The Secret of Monkey Island. The most interesting part is how they did it: by using an image synthesis technique called "img2img" (image to image), which takes an input image, applies a written text prompt, and generates a similar output image as a result. It's a feature of the Stable Diffusion image synthesis model released last week.
[...] Art quality in image synthesis currently requires much trial and error with prompts and cherry-picking to achieve the kinds of results frigis9 posted—likely hours of work. But with some incremental advances in image synthesis techniques and GPU power, we could imagine an emulator upgrading vintage game graphics in real time within a few years.
(Score: 2) by Ingar on Monday September 05 2022, @06:10PM (2 children)
To quote the author, frigis9
It would be a rather tedious job to convert all the sprites of an old game.
Understanding is a three-edged sword: your side, their side, and the truth.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday September 05 2022, @08:41PM
The potential here is that once you tune the AI to be able to do a passable transform of one sprite, that same tune should do a passable job transforming a bunch of other sprite perspectives...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by looorg on Monday September 05 2022, @09:14PM
Considering that most sprites in old games are not very large, nor are there all that many of them I don't think it will be to hard or take to long. After all most of the machines doesn't have the ability to display all to many sprites at the same time, without a lot of tricks and shenanigans. Nor do they have memory or storage to store them. So you better hand optimize like a God if you want to squeeze in in there.
Another aspect I guess is that part of the transformation might be that you can't change to much with it without also changing the code that uses them. They are a bit limited in that regard. They also tend to be precision pixels involved so that parts fit with each other to form a whole so if the AI overmind start to change to what looks good that could be very very weird and wonky.
But basically you kind of have to reprogram a lot of it then if you are just going to change or scale the graphics then you might as well just rewrite the whole thing so why bother with scaling up graphics and such when you can just make new once? So unless this is just going to be some kind of emulation overlay that swaps things in near real time this seems a bit odd. After all if you are just doing a remake you are doing that and then this seems a bit over the top. But perhaps that is the next step, once the graphics are down the next AI will fix the sound beeps (or turn them into a modern quality soundtrack) and the AI after that will translate the code and adapt to something new. Not holding my breath really. I'll keep enjoying my 8- and 16-bit classics the way it was intended.