Command & Conquer intro and how it is encoded for playback on a 1989 Atari STe, in beautiful 16 colors.

I see the blips and the bloops but I do not understand what is going on.

There is a "codebook" of tiles out of which the actual image is composed. They're all 8x8 pixels and you can see the codebook in the lower part of the image. 32 tiles get overwritten in every frame, the encoder chooses which. Those are highlighted in yellow for a short time.

Few things surpass the feeling of seeing such an iconic intro being displayed with a 16-color palette giving it their all, offering pure 16-bit art. Excellent work

Hey, looks fantastic, I wonder about other older platforms, this should be possible on Amiga? How about 8-bit computers, NES, Commodore, Speccy? Care to share source code?

I'm using a little bit of an Atari ST peculiarity, the efficient 8-pixel block width. Except for a little performance hit, I see no reason why this couldn't be ported to Amiga. Source code for the game and all the little tools is on GitHub.

Insane, awesome work

Amazing

how many total sprites are used to get this entire effect? I imagine they have a pretty big atlas, but used tricks like reusing the same sprites for multiple segments but with different palettes? they must have had a tool that compared similarity to reduce total sprite count

I usually use a codebook of 2048 tiles (in the vid it's fewer to keep 9:16 aspect). They're not really sprites, just small templates that can be copied into video memory efficiently. Selection is based on utility: by how much does the overall error sink if I include this tile?

The STE is limited to tiles?

No, not in the console sense, but tiles are still a good idea. 8px wide tiles work especially well with the ST, where the CPU can’t afford to do any read-modify-write operations on pixels.

I have no idea what this is supposed to show me.

what do you mean even the intro is there

Was this VQA? or Indeo?

STV :) The original was in VQA and it is transcoded into a format tailored for a 16bit computer. 16 colors, 8x8 tiles, no CPU-intensive compression schemes.

Would this eventually end up as either Smacker or Bink?