Robert Kacsich's approach to graphics retouch. The following is not meant to be criticism of your wonderful simulators. I do not want to encouarage you to revise you simulators - leave them as they are, they are great already. You shall only keep this in mind for your future work. The purpose of "outlining and filling the sprites" is obviously to increase the contrast of the sprites, since they do not have much contrast in the original scans. The results actually look very good in some games (Donkey Kong, Lifeboat, Las Vegas, Penguin), but in some games it looks as if "something is wrong". Snoopy Tennis is an example for this, maybe because it does not have a colourful background and the sprites are a little larger than in the other games. I believe the reason is that the outlines become "pixelated", while in the original scans the greyscale levels on the sprite borders provide a smooth look. Another problem is that this approach can result in too much contrast. The Towering Rescue simulator has sprites that basically look quite good, but notice the difference in contrast for the backdrop graphics of the buildings and those that are produced by the LCD. I have never seen the original game, but in most games that used this "half-LCD-half-backdrop" technique you could hardly recognize what part was made from LCD and what was made of backdrop graphics. My approach is different and - as I believe - makes the display look "more realistic". The LCD display in my initial scans shows very little contrast, this is a common problem. I then produce the image with all sprites on it, and then I use Paint Shop Pro 5.01 to increase the contrast. I make a selection of the area that is covered by glass (if the display is not rectangular, then this will be a little difficult) and I apply the "Brightness/Contrast" function. You have to experiment with different values to obtain a good result. In my case I used 5 and 35. Using greater values may look "better" on first sight, but keep in mind that you should always try to get an image that has the closest resemblance to the original game. In addition, I also applied the "Sharpen" function on the same selection, but only once. It may also not be appropriate to use a single background colour for games without background artwork. With this you would lose the "crystal" effect of the background. I believe that the Banana simulator would look better with a realistic background. However, the disadvantage of keeping the original empty background is that you have to produce individual images of sprites that would normally have the same shape - for example the digits of the score display: you have to produce separate digit sprites for each digit of the display. The overall process of creating the display digits gets a little more difficult: you will have to copy the background of the "empty" scan when you want to create the remaining digits from the "8" one. Paint Shop Pro or any other graphics program may also be helpful when working on the scans for a LED game simulator. While you write that you have to use a digital camera for LED games, I believe that here a scanner can bring very good results as well. The "off-scan" should be no problem, I think that this is obvious. With the LEDs turned on, you only see faint lights on the initial scan. With Paint Shop Pro, you can make these lights look exactly as in real life. I'm not sure what functions I used for my Head to Head Soccer simulator, but I believe that I used the brightness/contrast function, maybe also the gamma correction function. I would like to encourage you to experiment with this when you create the scans for your next simulators. If you think that my approach is useful, then you may include the above lines in your instructions on your home page. Robert Kacsich, August 23rd, 2000 ----- MADrigal's comment: Actually I find your suggestions much useful, but due to the diversity between Delphi 4.0 and Visual Basic 6.0, the shift from 1-bit sprites to 24-bit ones would require too many resources for such a Delphi application, making my games buggy or unplayable in many cases. My suggestion for you is to also try using the "equalize" function in Paint Shop Pro, which can help much in finding sharper contours for all sprites. Thanks for your suggestions, my friend. MADrigal, August 23rd, 2000