AI upscaled 2D games

[phart010 | 1,708]

Back in the day on ZSNES, we had the Super Eagle engine and the Super 2XSAI filters to smooth out the pixels on Super Nintendo games. It was pretty neat to play with, but often didn’t look quite right. Eventually I just went back to becoming a sharp pixel purist.

I don’t have anything against filters. It’s just that if you want as close to perfection as possible, it’s easy to go all in on pixels. You can’t go all in on upscaling because we’re just not close enough to perfection on that end of things.

 I was looking at some videos of AI upscaled 2D games, and it seems things are moving along quite well. For those that don’t know, AI upscaling is basically artificial intelligence that can be programmed to redraw an image the way it’s supposed to look. Think of it like if you gave a pixelated image to an artist and told him/her to redraw it with pens and paint. They would redraw the frame from scratch in high resolution while making some interpretations on how the drawing is supposed to look. Computers can now do this for every frame at high speeds. And it’s starting to look pretty good.

Anyone that’s keeping track of things in this space? How close are we to playing the full library of NES games in AI upscaled high resolution? 

shout outs to this guy Omar World, looks like he made all these vids

 

 

 

 

Edited December 19, 2022 by phart010

[Sumez | 2,994]

Wow this looks quite bad for most of the examples. I think the technique is useful for actual downscaled/pixelated images (like FF7 backgrounds and such), but it really has no business near hand crafted pixel art

[DefaultGen | 5,433]

There is probably some AI tool setting that can achieve "interesting results" with something like this, but whatever stock settings this guy used universally looks worse than emulator HD scaling algorithms, which already look awful.

Gimme sharp pixel.

[RegularGuyGamer | 2,017]

I'm not mad about all of it. I thought this shit looked nice but peaches eyes are a little derpy to say the least lol

[Tanooki | 4,952]

@RegularGuyGamer What filter is that one?  Or is that some photoshop job?  That looks surprisingly cartoon like and balanced, unlike those decades old eagle/sai/etc filters that just look awful.

[RegularGuyGamer | 2,017]

1 hour ago, Tanooki said:

@RegularGuyGamer What filter is that one?  Or is that some photoshop job?  That looks surprisingly cartoon like and balanced, unlike those decades old eagle/sai/etc filters that just look awful.

It's from that first video. Idk if it says which ai filter it used but I thought it was the best screen of the bunch. Admittedly I watched more of those videos than I'm proud of. 

[Sumez | 2,994]

2 hours ago, Tanooki said:

@RegularGuyGamer What filter is that one?  Or is that some photoshop job?  That looks surprisingly cartoon like and balanced, unlike those decades old eagle/sai/etc filters that just look awful.

Look closer at the details. That smoothing looks even worse than 2xsai etc. filters to me.

  

Edited December 21, 2022 by Sumez

[Tanooki | 4,952]

Well whatever it is, at least in a cropped or whatever still it seemed fine.  I didn't watch the video, so, if it's worse then it is.  I've not been a fan of those things since the 90s, and seems no one has bothered to do anything nicer which is kind of weird with two decades of processing and memory increases.