🍋🐉 Lemons and Dragons

I started playing a little puzzle game from my backlog today. It’s called Stephen’s Sausage Roll, and I didn’t know anything going into it. However, just from my first 30 minutes, I’m not sure my brain is quite ready for this today…

Take a look at this greyscale gradient - a smooth, continuous transition from white to black:

Now, let’s say you have some cheap e-ink display lying around, something like this one. This can display only black or white, and perhaps 2 greys if you want to use its unofficial “4-grey” mode. If you want to display a gradient like this, what do you do? In some way or another you will need to reduce the image to those 4 colors (which is called quantization). Doing that by just rounding each pixel to its nearest available color (i.e. thresholding) will look as bad as you might expect:

Instead, the common approach here would be to dither the gradient: Much better! Although it looks noisier than the original now, we can actually recognize the gradient, and we are still only using 4 colors.

A little reminder to whoever reads this (and myself), how important small acts of kindness are.

Fixing software support for my N64-style controller, so I can play N64 games like Mario intended

Nice joke you got there, would be a shame if I were to steal buy it and rewrite it with ChatGPT…