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 last two. Both very cool.
The Mario Clash one maps really nicely to the display. The brick colors and dithering play very nicely with the various shades. And I love the modified Do-Do character.
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Congrats everybody! I hope to see more quality labels produced in the future, so we can compile complete sets of labels for all commercial and homebrew games. 🙂
Forgot to post my label template BTW, so here it is.
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Just made a VUEngine-themed template so future ROM releases can come bundled with an e-label. This could also function as a template for other games using the Virtual Boy logo instead.
Congratulations to all the winners!
I reworked the shading of my Mario Clash label to hopefully be easier to read.
It’s been really fun seeing how everyone’s designs work on an E-Ink display! Thank you Mellott for running the contest and for showing us how they look. 🙂
Cheers,
Ben
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le geek wrote:
Congratulations to all the winners!I reworked the shading of my Mario Clash label to hopefully be easier to read.
It’s been really fun seeing how everyone’s designs work on an E-Ink display! Thank you Mellott for running the contest and for showing us how they look. 🙂
Cheers,
Ben
Does look nicer. You were tied for a 3rd place position actually with this label. It was a tough decision. I spent about 4 hours going back over all the labels and re-evaluating them.
Great job.
