I thought it might be fun to have a contest for best eInk art for display on the HyperFlash32 eInk display. Winner will get a free HyperFlash32 cart ($150 value). This contest is open to anyone, even existing buyers. I’ll refund your cart price if you’ve already paid or give you a second free one.
The idea is to generate eInk labels that would be associated with a loaded ROM file. This is flashed to the screen so that you know what game is currently programmed. It’s meant as a changeable game label.
You can see the visible area of the image below in the picture of approximately 226 x 168 pixels set within a 264 x 176 frame. Your image needs to be 264 x 176 in size but only the 226×168 offset image will be visible once on the cart. Image needs to be in 4 gray shades to match the display: black, white, and two intermediate shades. Saved as a 24bit BMP file (this is what I need to convert to an eInk format). I’ve also attached an image showing an example 4 shades of gray available on the display, as well as some images I’ve done already. Be aware that the images I’ve done in the examples are NOT offset properly. To keep everything consistent in the conversion on my end lets use gray levels 0xFFFFFF, 0x000000,0xC0C0C0, and 0x808080.
The images I’ve done were ripped/modified from various existing labels/places. This may not be the best approach as they were not originally designed for a 4 grayscale display. But I won’t restrict people in any way. Feel free to do what you think is best.
For judging, I’ll put the images on an eInk display and pick my favorite 3. I was going to let the community vote via a poll, but someone brought to my attention that cheating would be very easy via a poll. So I’ll be the judge on this one but I’ll pick my top 3 favorites. Then I’ll randomly pick out of a hat from the top three for the final grand prize. I’ll pick the top 3 on May 1st. Then select the top one. I’m likely to have a 2nd and 3rd place prize as well. TBD on what those are.
To enter, just post your image here in this thread when its ready. By posting and entering the contest you’re open to letting others use your image on their own personal HyperFlash carts. The idea is to share labels.
Let me know if you have any questions. I reserve the right to modify the contest slightly just in case some issues arise that I didn’t think of but the general idea will remain untouched.
A bit rough around the edges, but I’m happy with how the logo turned out. Only got five more I’m planning to attempt, which I may or may not release depending on how well they end up working. I think this is the first one I’ve done with a white background.
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It’s always a bit of a mixed bag with these, the Teleroboxer one lost a decent amount of detail in the transition, but I think it’s just good enough to put out anyway.
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Did one for Nester’s Funky Bowling. It’s simple, but I like it.
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This one was pretty much just a conversion, I didn’t really do much else to it besides remove the page number, shrink it down, limit the colours & replace with the correct ones, and then clean it up a little, still, I think it turned out nice.
(edit 4)
Oh, and this should bring the number I’ve done up to 25! Excluding variations with small changes like with Innsmouth, covering 17 different games.
Here’s a label for Teleroboxer. I might continue tweaking this one, but for now I’m pretty happy with the design. Hope you guys like it.
Edit: Forgot to add, if you have any feedback, please feel free to share it. I thought it would be fun for the cracks to go all over, like the screen has actually been broken. I could however do one where the screen is only cracked on the upper part.
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Couple more. I’ll get to the others later today. Looking good!
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Latest TheRedMenace batch on the eInk display.
Swore I posted this previously but I don’t see it in the message thread. A very nice label on the eInk display from RMZK.
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Second to last batch from me. 36 and counting.
Tried to come up with something as well. The black text on the bottom is meant to be printed by the firmware, filename probably?
EDIT: Changed from an equally distributed to the suggested palette.
Another label, Space Invaders.
I’m trying to do every game, but I’m a bit of a perfectionist and tend to be slow ahah
By the way, I’m glad you liked the banner. Hope the idea to use it in a different style for each game suits your aesthetic taste 🙂
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Cool designs everyone! I appreciate the variation.
I made a couple of more designs and a slight update to the space invaders label. I had actually done the “alternative” Teleroboxer one but was hesitant to post it as I’m not a particularly good pixel artist. Here it is anyway 🙂
I might do another one or two this weekend, but I think the ones I’ve done so far gives a nice picture of what my vision for the whole set it. Again, all will be tweaked before any final “release”. Feel free to critique/feedback if you have any!
I think going forward i’ll keep using the black background. It will make the set more cohesive.
Here it is – my final batch. I Thought it’d be cool to convert some of the patents, and I had a little fun with some mashups (even though they might not actually be useful).
With these I’ve accomplished everything I wanted after I expanded my initial scope (which expanded again a few times throughout all this), and now I’m fully satisfied with what I’ve managed to do
I really like the megaten series, even though I’ve only played one game, so I did the boxes for Jack Bros, with some changes (for the Japanese one I tried to get the side bit to look like an obi strip). The one with the baseball teams is a bit messy because it was pretty quick and I didn’t bother cleaning it up. Last but not least, I thought it’d be fitting to end off where I started by doing some more for Innsmouth No Yakata.
Tomorrow I’ll compile every one I’ve done, over 60 by now I think, done over 16 days (14 days where I did at least a little bit, and 2 in between somewhere when I took the day off) into a folder (I’ll make sure they’re all 24bit and are appropriately named), and also release a few things I had to do for all the e-ink art, stuff like art from manuals with the backgrounds removed (in a separate post to this one).
Oh, and thanks DeAthWaGer for the link to the converter, and especially to Kevin for all the work you put into making stuff like the Hyper Flash (I hope you like seeing the VB character where I incorporated it).
A little behind on these and going out of order. Here are a few from KR155E. Very nice designs. Really like the Spong one.
Few more. Very cool.
TheRedMenance, I’m getting to your latest batch next.
TheRedMenace patent ones. Very interesting idea.
