Scott's Blog

I've been wanting to make a plastic print to cover my my son's MAME console for a while now (3 years already?). All I need to do is get some bitmaps, or even better some scalable vector images, from a couple of games, put them together and send it to the printer, right? I knew I was in trouble, when after a few searches I got my own blog listed. Seems there aren't that many game fans making nice svg images of popular videos game characters. I did find, however, the spriters-resource.com which has the sprites from a lot of games, the problem is, they are all tiny. For example, here's what Megaman looks like . Zooming that up 8 times, for instance looks kinda crappy: Using the cubic interpolation 8x does only a so-so job: I tried various filters and effects and got the look I think I wanted which you can see here: I wanted to fiddle with the steps so I put it all in a python plugin which you can find here (here's a direct link to the code which may have some u...

I was thinking why I keep using GIMP instead of, say, Photoshop. Here are my main reasons in bullet form: It's free and open source and I support that. It uses Python as one of it's scripting languages. I've created two mini utilities using that fact. Using Python-Fu instead of say PIL is that it uses the same object and object names as GIMP uses. Learning more about Python-Fu makes me a better GIMP user since I know better how GIMP works. Create the images using GIMP by hand I can decide later if it might be easy to script. If not, I'll just do it all by hand. I can install GIMP on anyone's machine in minutes, no legal hassles or possibilities of installing a virus from pirated software. Once I install GIMP on a machine, I can use it immediately. I don't have to figure out the interface of a program I'm not familiar with. Some cool new features come out first for GIMP. GIMP can load files directly from the web or FTP. GIMP has everything I need: cli...