http://eastfarthing.com/blog/ Andrew Kensler's Blog 2020-09-14-decoder/index.html Mon, 14 Sep 2020 00:00:00 -0700 I was mystified when I first came across the “Most Inflationary” winning entry in the 2018 IOCCC. Written by the incredibly prolific Fabrice Bellard, this tiny program with just 4KB of source code emitted a 128×128 resolution version of the (in)famous Lena test image. Voodoo! The IOCCC judges wrote “We could understand some of the arithmetic but none of the magic.” I was determined to figure out the magic and inspired by Fabien Sanglard to try to write up how it works.

]]> 2020-08-10-palette/index.html Mon, 10 Aug 2020 00:00:00 -0700 I was recently asked a pair of questions regarding palettes and my previous posts on them. First, I was asked about what a 48-color palette generated by my palette generator algorithm would look like. Secondly, a different person asked me what my mapping approach would make of the extended Pico-8 palette with the 16 additional colors that have been added.

]]> 2018-12-27-circle/index.html Thu, 27 Dec 2018 00:00:00 -0800 Suppose that we have the 2D coordinates for three three ordered, non-colinear points that together define an angle. We also have the radius for a circle inscribed in the angle. How can we efficiently calculate the coordinates where the center of the inscribed circle must be?

]]> 2017-09-23-dithering/index.html Sat, 23 Sep 2017 00:00:00 -0700 What’s the correct color space to compute color blends in for dithering for display on a typical monitor? At one point in my palette experiments I had written some dithering code and naively assumed CIELAB since that’s designed to be perceptually uniform. But I had noticed that I was getting some odd color casts. Initially I’d thought I’d had a bug, but I eventually realized that it was because CIELAB is the wrong color space. Linearized RGB with sRGB primaries is the way to go. Here’s why.

]]> 2016-09-19-palette/index.html Mon, 19 Sep 2016 00:00:00 -0700 I recently received an e-mail asking if I could run my palette generator to produce a 54-color palette. This is the same number of colors available on the old NES console (though it couldn’t do them all it once) and the person was curious how a palette from my program would compare. I’d always figured that if I ran my program again for a larger palette it would be for either 48 or 64 colors. But sure, I can do 54. Here’s what my program came up with.

]]> 2016-05-27-mapping/index.html Fri, 27 May 2016 00:00:00 -0700 While researching pixel art palettes, one of the things I noticed was a lot of discussion about color ramps. As I read it, these are essentially subsets of the colors in the palette that form distinct gradients and they are most commonly shown laid out on a grid interlocking with each other like a crossword puzzle. This seemed like a nice, qualitative way to assess a palette and got me wondering how to map out a palette automatically. I think I’ve come up with an interesting alternative to these crossword-style layouts.

]]> 2016-05-06-palette/index.html Fri, 06 May 2016 00:00:00 -0700 Ever since I discovered DawnBringer’s 16-color and 32-color palettes and later Arne’s, I’ve been thinking about what makes a good small but general-purpose palette (DawnBringer’s palettes are pretty neat, but they’re a bit desaturated and lacking in purples for my taste – you couldn’t do Monkey Island with them). So far as I know, their palettes were carefully selected by hand. But I write code, so I took it as a challenge to see if I could create a short program that would automatically generate good palettes from scratch. Here are the results of my experimentation.

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