Suppose you're making a game for the Genesis (or any other old console, but I have my particular interests) and want to use high-colour assets (photos, 3D renderings) for the art. Photoshop or whatever you can easily reduce the number of colours with a standard colour quantization algorithm (octree, median cut), but that doesn't quite get you far enough. The Genesis gives you four 16 colour palettes and each 8x8 tile can use one of those palettes. If you reduce the image to 16 colours, you're missing out on an additional 48 shades; but reducing the image to 64 colours won't necessarily organize the colours into four palettes such that each 8x8 block uses only one.
I thought that maybe you could:
The former is the classic colour quantization problem. But the latter is, at least on the face of it, a little trickier? It seems like it's just a higher dimensional version of the colour problem, so maybe you could adapt an existing algorithm to it, but I'm not sure how, exactly, and Google isn't helping. Does anyone know any commonly accepted solutions for this?
I thought that maybe you could:
- Reduce each 8x8 tile down to 16 colours, producing n 16-colour palettes, then
- Split the n palettes up into four groups based on similarity, then merge the palettes in each group into one
The former is the classic colour quantization problem. But the latter is, at least on the face of it, a little trickier? It seems like it's just a higher dimensional version of the colour problem, so maybe you could adapt an existing algorithm to it, but I'm not sure how, exactly, and Google isn't helping. Does anyone know any commonly accepted solutions for this?