Showing posts with label msx. Show all posts
Showing posts with label msx. Show all posts

Monday, November 08, 2010

MSX Picture Filter for The GIMP

Now that Paulo Silva's (nitrofurano) ZX Spectrum filter for The GIMP was working nicely, I thought I'd like to try converting one of his other sdlBasic picture filters into a Python GIMP plug-in.

I chose the MSX1 Screen 2 filter, as it looked quite similar to the ZX Spectrum filter. I'd never actually seen an MSX computer working (I saw some switched off in a shop once) so I didn't really know what to expect until I read up on Wikipedia.

Whereas the ZX Spectrum suffered from attribute clash on the character square level, MSX1 suffered from attribute clash on the character row level so I was expecting the resulting images to look like slightly better ZX Spectrum images. And so it turned out.

To compare, here is John Liven's photograph of a cottage:

Cottage - Photo: John Livens

And here it is processed by the ZX Spectrum filter:

Cottage - ZX Spectrum

And finally by the MSX1 filter:

Cottage - MSX1

Converting the filter was straightforward, and I managed to find and fix a small bug in the sdlBasic original whilst I was going along.

As always, the finished MSX1 filter can be downloaded from here.