Looking smooth: New program smooths out 8-bit graphics

Ever notice how old games look pixelly and so damn OLD? Well researchers Johannes Kopf and Dani Lischinski did, and evidently it pissed them off because they developed a program to smooth down pixels. As a result, you can now make everything in Mario’s world look sandpapered to heck.

Designed specifically to work with 8-bit games, Kopf and Lischinski’s algorithm takes every pixel in a 2D image and turns it into a soft, gooey blob. It’s something of a step forward: whereas other programs may discard pixels it deems unimportant, this one hangs on to every pixel, allowing for completely smooth, accurate gradations (the following pictures are from dvice):

It’s not perfect, however – its creators acknowledge that it isn’t too hot on more anti-aliased graphics, as this image of the marine from Doom demonstrates:

Also, I just can’t get used to curvy Space Invaders. I don’t want to surrender to these. I want to cuddle them:

[ExtremeTech, via dvice]