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.
Here’s the Greenleaf one. I had to tweak the thresholding though so you need to adjust your gray levels. With some work this label could work.
Attachments:
Re-posting my Mario Clash one since I needed to readjust its gray levels.
Attachments:
Im just giving ideas because Ive never done this before. This one looks more black and white.
Attachments:
The Red Menace wrote:
Here are my submissions for a certain Virtual Boy horror game… I made a few variations… … I could probably keep nitpicking and working on them, but I’m satisfied enough now to avoid going on forever with it. Feel free to let me know if there are any problems though.
I’m posting only two of your images here with the outlined text because it again shows that text looks best with an outline. I like both the white and black versions.
I checked your gray levels and they’re not the correct values. That’s why the scene has lost a gray level. Update them and I’ll rerun. I’d recommend your versions with text outlined by the opposite gray shade. Once you fix the gray levels these should look pretty good. You can see the last attachment where I adjusted the thresholds specifically for your image.
I think moving forward I’ll only test images that are in the correct format. Otherwise I have to rerun images.
mellott124 wrote:
I’m posting only two of your images here with the outlined text because it again shows that text looks best with an outline. I like both the white and black versions.
I checked your gray levels and they’re not the correct values. That’s why the scene has lost a gray level. Update them and I’ll rerun. I’d recommend your versions with text outlined by the opposite gray shade. Once you fix the gray levels these should look pretty good. You can see the last attachment where I adjusted the thresholds specifically for your image.
I think moving forward I’ll only test images that are in the correct format. Otherwise I have to rerun images.
Okay thanks, I was a bit worried they might have some issues with the grey levels. And to be honest I’m not entirely sure how to get them to the correct levels, so if you could just tell me how you fixed the one that actually worked, that’d be sweet (and I’d probably do all 8 for the sake of it).
Anyway, thanks for a bunch for all your hard work on this project, and for adjusting one of my images so I could see how it looks on the cart itself – I’m quite pleased with how it looks! 🙂
