🌞   đŸŒ›
Rene van Belzen

Games

  • A “little” thing as a broken iPad won’t stop me from making art. I made this when the iPad was almost gone.

    simple animated GIF showing a cat and a pirate

    And the other piece I made with a PETSCII editor on my RPi, based on a piece I did earlier this month.

    PETSCII art of Boys Will Be Boys

    Not having a backup for my Raspberry Pi makes me a bit nervous, as it should
    🎨🐱👨‍đŸ’ģ🕹ī¸đŸ‘ž

  • As Hanna-Barbera cartoons of the eighties have taught us, cats can without most clothes, except the most essential, like a hat or a cane.
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    Commodore 64 multi-color bitmap painting of an antromorphized cat behind a pile of clothes

  • I find it always such a surprise how a pixel art drawing I made subtly (or sometimes radically) changes to conform to the rigors of the C64 multicolor bitmap.

    Other than that, I used some of the edging techniques (sharp, lost and soft edges). So there’s that too. Happy 😊 camper here!
    🎨đŸ‘Ŋ👨‍đŸ’ģ🕹ī¸đŸ‘ž

    Commodore 64 multipaint drawing of an anime version of Rick Deccard

  • Searching on Flickr for Creative Commons photos of kittens I found this cute black and white one. I used it as reference for my C64 hi-res bitmap pixel art drawing.

    Sometimes less color is better. Especially if the one depicted is staring into your soul.
    🎨👨‍đŸ’ģ👾🕹ī¸đŸąđŸ˜ˆ

    Commodore 64 hi-res pixel art drawing of a black and white kitten

  • I didn’t get to experiment with edges. Still, I drew something I love, so that’s good.

    Maybe advice from an oil painter doesn’t translate all that well to pixel art. Pixel art has more in common with decorative art (like embroidery) than with traditional art you can hang on a wall.
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    Commodore 64 multipaint illustration of two kittens, one sniffing a flower

  • Public domain now?
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    Commodore 64 multicolor illustration of a cartoon mouse holding a piece of cheese and a drink animated GIF of drawing process

  • I suppose the lesson to be learned here is:

    Don’t look into the spiral, or you’ll go cuckoo, bananas, Dada

    A quick peek is no problem, though.
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    Commodore 64 hires bitmap image showing a spiral and a confused artist

  • Another day, another cat drawing. This time our more blocky version of a feline fellow creature. Sketch in ibisPaint X and final drawing in Commodore 64 multicolor bitmap (160 x 200 resolution, 16 colors). If I could, I’d knit him a cozy sweater.
    🐱🎨👨‍đŸ’ģ🕹ī¸đŸ‘ž

    illustration of a stylized cat with chunk in blocked letters written underneath Commodore 64 multicolor bitmap image of a chunky cat illustration

  • I think I’m starting to grasp how to draw in C64 multicolor. You get three colors that can be used anywhere, and per 8 by 8 pixels block you get to pick another color out of 16 possible colors. Careful placement of the pixels is key. If you do it right, you can have a very colorful image
    🎨👨‍đŸ’ģ🕹ī¸đŸ‘ž

    cheeky multicolor illustration on the Commodore 64, stating that boys will be boys

  • Another day, another cat drawing for the old Commodore 64
    đŸ˜ģ 🎨 👨‍đŸ’ģ 🕹ī¸ 👾

    Commodore 64 multicolor drawing of a blue cat on a red background

  • I reworked an older self-portrait that I made last year as a pixel art drawing, and turned it into an image on the Commodore 64. I like that the limited color palette doesn’t seem to limit me as much as it used to. It takes some effort (well, a lot of effort), but I think it was worth the time.
    🎨 👨‍đŸ’ģ 🕹ī¸ 👾

    Commodore 64 multicolor selfie

  • I found this video game poster via an image search, which clearly isn’t from a C64 (size 640 x 400 pixels, different 16 colors than C64). I thought about recreating it in C64 multicolor for self-education. The first step in my analysis was recoloring it into the Colodore color palette, an idealized version of the C64 color palette(s). It seems to be drawn for the Amiga. It has 3 shades of red and of green; the C64 has only 2 of those. Plus, it has a flesh color, which the C64 sorely lacks.

    alternating the original coloring and my recoloring in a Colodore color palette of a video game poster

    I found an interview with the mentioned Peter Johnson on Codetapper’s Amiga Site. And it appears he rewrote the C64 version for the Amiga. No mention of who drew the poster. Peter did draw the game art, I assume. Alas, there’s no date stamp on the article, but judging from the copyright notice it’s probably from 2020, but it could be as early as 2016.

    Now will I recreate the poster? Probably not, but it’s a good reference to have, to see what good illustrators were able to whip up in a short amount of time. Even back then, the games industry was brutal. Games did last as long as they were popular. There was always something newer and better to draw the attention of gamers. Time was a-wastin', always.

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  • Luckily, the SPEEDLINK SL-650212 BKRD Competition EXTRA Joystick I bought off Dutch Amazon works with VICE C64 on my Raspberry Pi-400 computer. I read a review somewhere that it did, but reviews can be wrong, high ratings bought by the manufacturer. So I took a chance and it paid off 🎮

  • I installed droid64, a Java application to manipulate Commodore disk images and copy files between your host OS and a disk image (e.g. a file with a D64 extension). I needed it to be able to play new games. I also put a SPEEDLINK SL-650212-BKRD Competition PRO USB joystick on my Amazon wish list 🎮