Purposely simplistic. We are talking about c64 inspired music here so keep that in mind.
Any comments or recommendations?
Side note just found this by searching for c64 music on google. Somebody added my videos to their blog! very cool
Looks very cool to me.
Hadn’t seen the ballblazer video yet… that shit is tight! I think the sight looks good, keep it up. 
One small suggestion. The “Times New Roman” font ruines the overall feel a bit. Maybe you could try the font “fixedsys” instead. It’s a font I think most people have and it looks a lot more c64-like.
Ack I assumed it looks the same way on my system. Maybe it’s time to make image slices… ew…
Hm, maybe, and also it’s not centered in my Firefox (with big resolution, wahey). Looks good on pic tho. 
Not a bad little site, but I have a few suggestions which should make your C64 style graphics look a lot better.
Because these images are lofi in nature - not many colours, not very high res detail, etc. - they would be much better suited to an image format such as GIF or PNG, instead of JPG. By using GIF or PNG the images will remain nice and sharp, their colours will not be degraded so much, the filesizes will be smaller, etc.
Let’s use this screenshot from Last Ninja 2 as an example:
When saved as a 16 colour GIF this image is 8.1 KB.
When saved as a JPG on 15% compression (quite a typical level) it is 29.4 KB.
Now let’s take a closer look at a part of the image zoomed in by 400%. On the left is the GIF, on the right is the JPG:
We can clearly see how the JPG format has really destroyed the image, just look at all those nasty compression artifacts! JPG is much better suited for photographs and stuff like that, not the clean pixel graphics found in video games.
Another thing is your method of resizing the images to fit on your site. When resizing these type of images you should always use a pixel resize method to keep it clean - do not use any kind of resampling such as bicubic or bilinear.
On the left is the image resized to 400% with pixel resizing. On the right is bicubic resampling… nasty!
You should also only resize by whole values such as 200%, 300%, 400%, etc., to keep the pixels looking proportionally correct. If the image is 50 x 25 pixels, you should only resize to 100 x 50, or 150 x 75, or 200 x 100, etc. After that you can crop it down to a new size which fits better if you need to.
Hope these tips help
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[quote=“dblue, post:7, topic:18195”]
Not a bad little site, but I have a few suggestions which should make your C64 style graphics look a lot better.
Great recommendations actually. I cannot believe it slipped my mind to use gif’s entirely. I am in the process of editing the entire site. I wish I had done this right from the start.
Hopefully I will have it done in a few days.
About the font.
I usually use Dreamweaver when making my sites. I started toying with a program called web dwarf. I assumed that when I was making the site it treated everything like graphics and applied links via an image map.
I should have looked at the code itself instead of relying on what I see on my end.
Ok, after a bit of recapturing the original content and some editing, I came up with this so far. I used two computers from the game Impossibe mission to show a preview of the video within. I need to maybe find a better looking computer in a c64 game. Otherwise I just made this one big gif image and was sure to not place antialiasing on.
Thinking of doing some small animated gifs within those television screens. That might be pretty cool.
I tried using the little computers in Impossible Mission, but they were so small to begin with they looked terrible scaled up. After trying a bunch of old games I settled on the big screen television from Zak McKracken.
Here is everything redited. Kept them as a gif. No diffusing, antialiasing, etc. which totally screws up the gifs/jpgs when dealing with these graphics.
Please refresh - This is the new version. GIF format. The gif is like 30k or so. MUCH better.
Good work trepain, i like your site, fits your project very well.
Hmmz… it depends how much you crush images into jpg…
Sure, of course if you save the JPG with the least compression possible you will get a much better looking image. But the fact still remains, the JPG format simply isn’t designed for this type of image and it will always create lower quality results. The data in the image can be preserved in a lossless fashion simply by using GIF or PNG. Not only is the image detail preserved, but it is done so at a smaller filesize. It’s a win-win situation 
The JPG of that image is 84.4 KB and, when zoomed in, has very obvious JPG compression artifacts.
When resized back to its true resolution of 320 x 200 pixels and then reduced to its original palette of 16 unique colours, the GIF filesize is a mere 10.7 KB and the image looks noticeably more crisp and clear. The PNG is even better at 7.59 KB.
I see a lot of stuff online that is presented in the wrong file format for no good reason and the artwork itself is suffering as a result of this. If people simply understood a little more about each image format they would be able to preserve their work in a better way, they’d save some server bandwidth/costs, they’d make their sites more accessible and faster loading for the visitors, etc, etc.
Anyway, I apologise for sounding like a broken record here, I’m just a firm believer in using the correct filetype for the job.
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Hey Trepain!
I really like your style, I saw your site because you are my first buddy on myspace (congratulations?)
I like it that you want other people to say what they want to improve on your site, but always follow your own head in following their advice.
I was looking at the trailblazer video earlier (we had a discussion earlier about this song)
I must say that the clip is very cool, and you did a great job at finishing the song.