Thread by @senn_twt

[1/🍔] A THREAD ON RESTORING "FOUR-BYTE BURGER"

For the past week, I decided it would be a cool project to digitally recreate Four-Byte Burger as accurate as I possibly can. Pixel Perfect.

"Hasn't this been done before?" Yes. Although Ahoy's video was really well made [...]

[2/🍔] he had made a few decisions that compromised his recreation, such as not correcting the distortions present in the original image and downsampling the image to the Amiga's internal resolution. This severely distorts the image and loses a lot of information

[3/🍔] My methods to correct the distortion was to draw lines in the center of each scanline, and then warp the lines and the hamburger to stay completely vertical. Pictures is the lines isolated, and superimposed on the burger.

[4/🍔] After correcting the image, I compensated the NTSC pixel aspect ratio from 1.2 to 1, so pixels are perfectly square, I also applied a horizontal blur so that the scanlines were eliminated and you could see the pixels perfectly.

[5/🍔] From there I opened Aseprite and started work. It was obvious that I had to correct the picture once more as I noticed pixels slightly drifting away. But once that was taken care of, all I had to do was match every. single. pixel.

[6/🍔] Let's talk 🟨Colors🟥:

It is very unfortunate, but since the original image is an analog photograph of a CRT screen, copied, printed and then scanned, the colors will NOT be exact and will be distorted. All is that is left is to use our artistic eye to our best ability.

[7/🍔] While we can use Haeger's surviving digital files to analyse his color palettes, there are indications that none of Haeger's work uses the same color palette, save for colors like pure red.

To me, Ahoy's rendition is too bright and saturated (Original, Mine, Ahoy's)

[8/🍔] A very unfortunate side effect of the image being photographed, is that Haeger's very delicate dither work was very likely affected by blur. Pictured are some of his work, unblurred and blurred.

[9/🍔] This means that this is the only time I have to break from the "pixel-by-pixel" method, and apply some creative liberties. From there I used a program called Shaderglass to do a real-time blur on the preview, allowing me to judge dithered tones much better

[10/🍔] After finishing this piece, I had some conclusions to make. Perhaps it is impossible to make a completely accurate recreation of this art. The amount of distortion that were created has erased all of the delicate dither and color work by Haeger. [...]

[11/🍔] But you can sure as hell make one delicious recreation. If you want a lossless version of the burger, you can find it here: drive.google.com/drive/folders/…

Thank you for reading my thread about a hamburger. and Thank you Jack Haeger for making me look at one for 1 week straight.