If you look through this window you'll see a little splotch, way out there. That, is the Quasar of compression or
(GBTG 01) You'll need to know about it since we are going to be handling RAW Funtographs.
When that Quesar was first discovered way back in 1995, a team of scientists at nintendo did an experiment, they wanted to know what would happen if they shot the data of a photograph around a black hole right up against the event horizon. It turned out, the data came back compressed. For the first time ever, they could fit an entire photoghraph on a gameboy cartridge! and the Gameboy could actually display the entire thing.
Then three years later we got the GameBoy Camera.
Nowadays so much image data is being created and more importantlycompressedthat what was once a humble little black hole is now a roaring quesar. Here in our color lab we proudly use the power of that same black hole to compress all of our picture data.
This knob here selects the compression radius that the cannon will fire at. Basically it tells the cannon how close to fire the data, thus how near it will orbit the event horizon.
We'll set it to 42 and initialize cannon, yes the lens is clean, yes the cover is removed, yes, yes... yes,
okay let me just take a picture of my hand
da da da,
change the frame, yes, print
aannd, printing...
Done!!
do you want to press the fire button?
yep, look here, the compression radius is off by a touch so the image comes out with lots of distortion. Not nice and clean as it should be. This happens because we set the radius to 42 which is not a mutiple of 8, and messes up the dithering when it passes through the tiler.
Ill set the radius to 40 and see where we end up.
Yeah, still not ideal, take a look. It came out square for some reason.
So really we need to set the dial to either 8 or 16, this is because the GameBoy likes to display things on a grid called a tile-map. Inside of its 160 by 144 pixel screen fits an array of square, 8 pixel tiles 18 wide & 16 tall. So we have to pick our numbers to fit both 160 & 144.
yeah, see this one was set to 8 and the dither is clear and defined just as it should be.
Isnt that neat? The GameBoy was designed to do all of it. The Nintendo Research group really was far ahead of its time, amazing how they managed to fit all that into a little plastic toy.