Images generated by RastaConverter

[Sheddy]

20 hours ago, Rybags said:

Has anyone created an "RC animator" yet?

16K frames would probably allow a narrow DMA mode with 100, maybe more scanlines with the remainder to do the kernal.

Though from looking at some RC binaries a fair while back, there is a fair bit of wasted space in there with long strings of NOPs that could be reduced by using other instructions for same cycle consumption but less memory.

Well there is this https://github.com/lybrown/RastaMovie

from way back when RastaConverter was new. @Xuel based it on RastaConverter beta3. Up to 64 frames. 

[Sheddy]

16 hours ago, Atari8man2004 said:

I have many pc the one I'm using is 8 cores 16 threads at 4ghz . I been converting 4 or 5 images at a time and it puts a load on the processor almost like crypto mining at temps of 70c.   I was wondering if a processor with AVX512 would shorten the converion time. 

the attached was uploaded here... way back, somwhere. It has a AVX512 "fastpath" compiled version in there. If you replace "RastaConverter.exe" with the program in there called "RastaConverterBeta7.icl17.AVX512.exe" (copy and rename to RastaConverter.exe" after moving the original RastaConverter.exe" it may do something. Not sure I ever had an AVX512 capable processor to try it on, and I struggled to compile anything, not being familiar with C++ but it might be interesting to see. The AVX2 version also in there made not the slightest difference to speed that I could tell though.

RastaConverterBeta7-icl17.zip

[Atari8man2004]

4 hours ago, Sheddy said:

the attached was uploaded here... way back, somwhere. It has a AVX512 "fastpath" compiled version in there. If you replace "RastaConverter.exe" with the program in there called "RastaConverterBeta7.icl17.AVX512.exe" (copy and rename to RastaConverter.exe" after moving the original RastaConverter.exe" it may do something. Not sure I ever had an AVX512 capable processor to try it on, and I struggled to compile anything, not being familiar with C++ but it might be interesting to see. The AVX2 version also in there made not the slightest difference to speed that I could tell though.

RastaConverterBeta7-icl17.zip 2.69 MB · 1 download

Thanks!  AVX512 is very good at heavy duty workloads and emulation a move to GPU computing would be ideal for raster heavy workloads.   Thanks again.

Edited September 22, 2023 by Atari8man2004

[Atari8man2004]

Mushroom

 

I'm going to redo this one with a much higher solution.

Atari8man_Mushroom.xex

[Atari8man2004]

I'm trying to run a new version of the Raster converter GUI and I get message  any ideas If I click continue the program loads fine

Edited September 22, 2023 by Atari8man2004

[+Stephen]

1 hour ago, Atari8man2004 said:

I'm trying to run a new version of the Raster converter GUI and I get message  any ideas If I click continue the program loads fine

I've started getting that error too.  Not sure if it's a Windows 11 issue or not.  My only initial guess is it could be an error when trying to fill the dropdown which lets you choose the number of threads?  I have a much newer machine (i9-12900K   3.20 GHz), 60 16 cores but 24 logical processors.  Might be trying to add a value to the dropdown for threads that is too high or something?

[+MrFish]

17 minutes ago, Stephen said:

Not sure if it's a Windows 11 issue or not.

Possibly. I'm running Windows 7 and I've never gotten any such errors.

 

[+Stephen]

1 minute ago, MrFish said:

Possibly. I'm running Windows 7 and I've never gotten any such errors.

 

The problem is, I not only updated my hardware, but also downgraded from Windows 10 to 11.  So two major changes which is not helpful for narrowing this down.

[+MrFish]

32 minutes ago, Stephen said:

The problem is, I not only updated my hardware, but also downgraded from Windows 10 to 11.  So two major changes which is not helpful for narrowing this down.

I've got a similar situation with a problem I'm having on my server, and a third variable: Windows 7 tendencies towards some strange behaviors that have a million useless solutions on the net.

 

[Atari8man2004]

27 minutes ago, Stephen said:

The problem is, I not only updated my hardware, but also downgraded from Windows 10 to 11.  So two major changes which is not helpful for narrowing this down.

I'm running windows 10 on most of my system I also have windows 7 on a few pc and windows 11 only on one . I don't like windows 11    Win 7 and 10 rule!

[pseudografx]

Another weird observation of mine regarding RastaConverter is that it often runs much slower when the window is in focus. Sometimes as sluggish as <100 evaluations per second while when out of focus it runs at >200K. So my advice for conversion is to minimize the RC window.

[+MrFish]

1 hour ago, pseudografx said:

Another weird observation of mine regarding RastaConverter is that it often runs much slower when the window is in focus. Sometimes as sluggish as <100 evaluations per second while when out of focus it runs at >200K. So my advice for conversion is to minimize the RC window.

This isn't my experience at all. I get nearly equal performance in either case. I'm only running Windows 7 on all my machines. So, I can't comment for other versions.

 

[Beeblebrox]

Having run windows 10 for most of my conversions over the last few years, on an hp gaming lappy, and more recently windows 11 on the same, I run 8 threads out of 12 and it's always faster with a window selected in my experience. I run no more than 3 x conversions simultaneously, but ideally 1 or 2. I always use yuv across the board, always use masks and generally 15000 to 25000 evaluations as standard. Of late, contrary to most of my earlier conversions, I have now found using dithering (and double dithering), has seen some really good results. Taking the initial destination image and making this the source image after restarting the conversion has seen some great results. Playing with contrast and gamma in RC settings is vital in my experience after the initial preprocessing. 

 

In my experience the most important aspect of any conversion is the preprocessing and knowing what makes a decent candidate for a source image. A lot of trial and error. Masks are so important. 

Edited September 23, 2023 by Beeblebrox

[Atari8man2004]

2 hours ago, Beeblebrox said:

Having run windows 10 for most of my conversions over the last few years, on an hp gaming lappy, and more recently windows 11 on the same, I run 8 threads out of 12 and it's always faster with a window selected in my experience. I run no more than 3 x conversions simultaneously, but ideally 1 or 2. I always use yuv across the board, always use masks and generally 15000 to 25000 evaluations as standard. Of late, contrary to most of my earlier conversions, I have now found using dithering (and double dithering), has seen some really good results. Taking the initial destination image and making this the source image after restarting the conversion has seen some great results. Playing with contrast and gamma in RC settings is vital in my experience after the initial preprocessing. 

 

In my experience the most important aspect of any conversion is the preprocessing and knowing what makes a decent candidate for a source image. A lot of trial and error. Masks are so important. 

Useing the destination image did cross my mind . i'm using a 12 core gaming pc now with the newest version of the Raster Gui and it has masking options I'm going to checkout. I'm using AVX2 on 2 images now with 4000 solutions as a test, I'll increase to a much bigger number 15000 next time. And again thank you and others here for all the help and tips

Edited September 24, 2023 by Atari8man2004

[+gnusto]

On 9/22/2023 at 5:47 PM, Stephen said:

I've started getting that error too.  Not sure if it's a Windows 11 issue or not.

The error is a C# one - the CLR has drifted away from how it was originally used with RastaGUI. If I can track down the original source it's probably just a recompile to avoid it.

[Atari8man2004]

On 10/6/2016 at 4:08 PM, a8isa1 said:

RastaConverter gets real

 

]

 

 

a8isa1_cheeseburger2.xex 22.17 kB · 178 downloads

Great conversion !  also made me hungry.

[Beeblebrox]

On 9/25/2023 at 6:04 PM, Atari8man2004 said:

Great conversion !  also made me hungry.

One of the reasons source images like this burger are such good candidates for a RC conversion is because it is a horizontally layered image. From the bottom up, in simplistic terms, the image from the bottom up is predominantly brown, yellow, green, brown, yellow, red, purple, etc, with added white and grey. That and the fact the background is black. 

 

IIRC RC can manage 9 different colour changes on each horizontal scan line, plus the use of pmgs, but obviously the number of colours you can have vertically is a lot more. The max number of colours in a RC image is 128. 

 

This comes back to picking source images that are ideal for RC conversion. 

 

So converting this horizontal image is far easier for RC :

 

 

 

... Than this vertical image:

 

 

Edit : Dr Peter et Al... Correct me if I am wrong here.

Edited September 26, 2023 by Beeblebrox

[+Philsan]

That image was a good candidate too (I added logo and text to original image).

 

 

[Beeblebrox]

10 minutes ago, Philsan said:

That image was a good candidate too (I added logo and text to original image).

 

 

Funnily enough I had this very conversion in mind as an example but rather than try to find it in the hundreds of pages in this thread I opted for finding Google images to illustrate my points.

 

BTW I've always loved this conversion.

[+MrFish]

Classic airmail postage. Any stamp collectors out there?

 

Colors match up with the original image better on the NTSC version. Also, the aspect ratio was intended to match NTSC; so the PAL version is a bit squished.

 

NTSC

 

PAL

 

24c Curtis Jenny NTSC (2).xex

 

24c Curtis Jenny (2).xex

 

[+MrFish]

[Edit]

Image is 52 colors.

 

PAL

 

NTSC

 

frog.xex

 

frog ntsc.xex

 

[+Philsan]

Very nice conversions @MrFish, without Rastaconverter artifacts.

PAL and NTSC versions of the same image involve a lot of work and are very appreciated.

 

Could you please use filename format "Author's name_imagename", eg "MrFish_Frog_pal.xex"? Thanks!

[Beeblebrox]

3 hours ago, MrFish said:

PAL

 

NTSC

 

frog.xex 22.05 kB · 6 downloads

 

frog ntsc.xex 19.06 kB · 4 downloads

 

Nice. 

The source images are from another conversion program thread I saw the other month on Atarionline.pl

 

Ham converter - interesting program:

https://atarionline.pl/forum/comments.php?DiscussionID=7145&page=1#Item_0

 

The HAM_Convert 1.92 program implements a mode for converting images to 5 colors in a line using the ALTIRRA palette. It was chosen due to the most even distribution of colors in the RGB space, but you will also be able to choose other palettes.

->link<-

[+MrFish]

Just now, Beeblebrox said:

The source images are from another conversion program thread I saw the other month on Atarionline.pl

Yep, it's a blatant ripoff.

 

Seriously, though, I wanted to see how RastaConverter would handle it. Handled it with ease actually (got to 0.68 normal distance, and it was still improving it).

 

I have a hand-edited version that I'm going to run through RastaConverter soon too. I changed some of the colors from the image above and added some dithering here and there that I thought it could use. I also have a higher-color version that I'm working on, which is being created from the original photo (rather than this one which was preprocessed for my enjoyment).

 

[+MrFish]

1 hour ago, Philsan said:

Very nice conversions @MrFish, without Rastaconverter artifacts.

Yeah, see @Beeblebrox's comment.

 

1 hour ago, Philsan said:

PAL and NTSC versions of the same image involve a lot of work and are very appreciated.

Nope... if you go into the generator folder of RastaSlide, you'll find PAL->NTSC and NTSC->PAL batch files that will remap colors. Only downside is that everything can't be mapped, due to the way in which RastaConverter reuses some color information. For the most part, it does a good enough job. I won't point out any missed colors in my conversions.

 

1 hour ago, Philsan said:

Could you please use filename format "Author's name_imagename", eg "MrFish_Frog_pal.xex"? Thanks!

Next time boss. I forgot the rules again.