C64: Blade Runner - Rachael and Deckard - Commodore BASIC Blue PETSCII

What if the movie Blade Runner was made for running on a Commodore 64, each frame made up only of the standard character set, and in only the BASIC blue colours? It might look something like this.
Transformative work of:
"Blade Runner" © Warner Media 1982
Incorporating "Blush Response" © Vangelis 1982
THANK ME: www.buymeacoff...
PATREON: / hakonsoreide
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ART: fineartamerica...
#BladeRunner #C64 #PETSCII

[@douggale5962]

They did a beautiful job setting up the brightness and contrast of the input.

[@hakonsoreide]

It certainly is a very artfully made film.

[@CaptainNow2]

This is breathtaking!! I would genuinely love to watch the whole movie like this!! :D

[@hakonsoreide]

Thanks. While certainly possible, there may be quite a few scenes that would just be a blurry mess with not enough large detail or contrast for your eyes to latch on to using this method, but I might give it a go, and I'll certainly do other scenes from it.

[@CaptainNow2]

@@hakonsoreide "I'd buy that for a dollar" :D

[@FaustoM7432]

Dude, you did a great job. If I had seen it, back in the days, when I was boy and i had my old 8 bit, my jaws would have dropped to the floor !

[@hakonsoreide]

Thanks, dude. Me too. I would have been absolutely gobsmacked by something like this in the 80's. Nice that current technology allows us to do stuff that was missing back then, and even now drop the occasional jaw

[@TintorDalibor]

This is awesome. Tricks your mind into seeing actual movie video from memory to an unbelievable level.

[@hakonsoreide]

Thanks. Actually, it's an optical illusion using your brain's pattern recognition, not so much your memory, but, yes, once there is just a little bit of motion, the detail resolution goes up exponentially in a moving picture compared to a still, which is also why you don't want too much resolution in a moving image as it gives your brain information overload and doesn't allow it to construct patterns in the way it's used to. That's why 4K is more tiring to watch than this. My favourite example of your brain's visual interpolation is Holden blowing smoke in my Petscii Blade Runner Kowalski interview clip.

[@TheGuruMeditation]

I don't have words for this other than it is one of the most incredible things my eyes have ever seen. Mind blown

[@hakonsoreide]

Thanks. Lovely to hear you enjoyed it.

[@Apollo_Mint]

That is an art form! I got goosebumps watching that and at the same time I was constantly wondering on what logical ground the character set was utilised to form the images. Conscious and subconscious collision!

[@hakonsoreide]

Thanks. The character set itself was chosen for my own nostalgic preference, as well as for its suitability for something like this as many of the graphic characters break up the grid. The characters used for each frame are then simply the ones that try to match the shape and shade within a single character position.

[@piggypiggypig1746]

My favorite scene from the film. Really amazing job!

[@hakonsoreide]

Thanks. For me too, this is also my favourite, and one of the ones that really stuck with me the first time I saw the film. The visual, verbal and musical language of the storytelling is just so amazing in the pivotal scenes of this film it makes it a truly great work of art, with as much artistic merit as anything on display in the Louvre.

[@MMSZoli]

Nice! Unbelievable, that Harrison Ford's face is still recognisable at this resolution :-D

[@hakonsoreide]

Thanks. Yes, it's part of the magic of moving images that our brain interprets the combination of them, and with text-based images like this, the difference between them actually creates detail that is too small to see in just a still. If you look at it a bit smaller, further away, or even squint your eyes until your vision gets a tiny bit blurry, you might actually perceive the image as sharper, with more detail, and closer to the original.

[@geheniau]

yes NICE, only the audio would sound....different

[@hakonsoreide]

Thanks. To put it mildly, yes, it would sound somewhat different.

[@TJ-sj6yy]

MORE! Would Pay!

[@hakonsoreide]

Thanks. Well, I have done two more from Blade Runner if you haven't seen them yet: kzbin.info/www/bejne/Y6vUi3mVib9nsKM and kzbin.info/www/bejne/fXnTXmeHf95jZ9E - to cover what are possibly my three favourite scenes, but I may do more one day. It's not all of the film that lends itself equally well to the Petscii treatment. Many scenes are dark and lacking in contrast, but I have actually thought about doing the entire film some day.

[@radioactivehobo2849]

I had a C64 as a kid, but never anything even close to this in it. Amazing!

[@hakonsoreide]

Thanks. Well, you couldn't really do this on a stock C64 back in the day. With an expensive memory expansion, you could get a video like this, but the sound would be different.

[@amirtavakol8256]

C64 a love forever!!!!! A world for creativity!!!! Bravo👏👏👏👍👍👍👍

[@hakonsoreide]

Thanks. Yes, I love the C64 aesthetic, the graphics, the colour palette, the character set, the playability of the games. It will live forever as the most iconic and paradigm-shifting computer of all time.

[@geehaf]

I just love this. More! Or at least a video on how you did this magical wizardry!

[@hakonsoreide]

Thanks. There will be more. And I will also make a video about how I did it.

[@dr.ignacioglez.9677]

I LOVE C64 😎👍

[@hakonsoreide]

Thanks for watching and commenting. The C64 rules.

[@moonfan2493]

Fantastic - thank you for doing this, just brilliant!

[@hakonsoreide]

Thanks. I'm glad you liked it. I'll do more as people do seem to enjoy these.

[@benread]

Well this is great - very impressed!

[@hakonsoreide]

Thanks. It's nice to hear you enjoyed watching it. I think I need to do more of these as people do seem to like them.

[@Noone-of-your-Business]

Wow! With every PETSCII character being 1 byte and the screen having 1,000 (40x25) characters, that's 1kB per frame. And with the framerate looking like _at least_ 15fps, this has to be 1MB of raw data or more. That's an impressive compression job.

[@hakonsoreide]

Thanks. It's 24fps, and it would have been an impressive compression job - except it is actually made on a PC. It's the visual look that is all C64, but of course technically possible to do on the genuine hardware with RAM expansion units, and the method I use also allows me to create the raw data that a C64 could use to create the same images. What would have been far harder to achieve, in fact, would have been the sound quality... Unfortunately, it's not within my technical skill to do anything like this on original hardware, so for me it is a modern-day art project, nostalgic, and paying homage to the functional part of 80's 8-bit on-screen aesthetics.

[@UlugNaar]

So beautiful!

[@hakonsoreide]

Thanks. I love that Commodore BASIC blue look.

[@arthurjordison5392]

Amazing! Well done sir.

[@hakonsoreide]

Thanks. Nice to hear you enjoyed watching it.

[@DroutKoszorou]

You've done a man's job, sir!

[@hakonsoreide]

Thanks, I guess, if that's how you say "well done" in Hungary.

[@DroutKoszorou]

@@hakonsoreide kzbin.info/www/bejne/bmTXk6J6o9V4bbs

[@hakonsoreide]

Ah... I've only seen the film twice, and I didn't recognise that line. Thanks.

[@nz9636]

def want to watch the whole film like this

[@hakonsoreide]

Thanks. Some scenes will be a lot more challenging to be anything but a muddied mess with this limited resolution, but I might give it a go some day.

[@djokenzi]

WOW!

[@hakonsoreide]

Thanks. Seeing as this is such a popular video within just a few minutes of posting it, I will make more.

[@Pau_Pau9]

Amazing!!

[@hakonsoreide]

Thanks for watching and for your nice comment. It is nice to hear that you liked it.

[@snorman1911]

Imagine a C64 game with cut scenes like this!

[@hakonsoreide]

That would be something else. There's not enough room for too many seconds with 64K, though. I guess a disk game might have loaded it in before loading the next part of the game. I am guessing with clever compression, one might get several seconds' worth of video.

[@leonardochiruzzi7642]

​@@hakonsoreide With a 16M byte REA cartridge there would be the game and a few scenes ... it would probably work

[@hakonsoreide]

@@leonardochiruzzi7642 Sure, with 16Mb expansion, you could probably have included quite a bit of something like this.

[@patriksretrotech]

Totally awesome!

[@hakonsoreide]

Thanks. I am glad to hear you enjoyed it.

[@TheRetroEngine]

This is so cool - would love to know how it was encoded 🙌

[@hakonsoreide]

Thanks. It's entirely made on a PC, though. I'll make a video about how I did it some day, and I will also include some information on how the method actually allows you to export data that can be used to create PETSCII images on a C64. I tested that on a still a few years back, so I am sure I can figure out how to do it again

[@codecraft2004]

@@hakonsoreide yes, would like to see how this is done too

[@ullbasunen2732]

@@codecraft2004 me too!! gorgeous!!

[@thealienontheinternet]

@@hakonsoreide I’m begging you on my knees, when you make the video on how to make this masterpieces, please make it as an “ELI5” sort of video. I’m really into this kind of stuff but I don’t have nearly enough knowledge to do it myself 🙏🏼😭

[@JustWasted3HoursHere]

@@hakonsoreide Since the 64 doesn't have enough horsepower to do much compression in real time (maybe some simple RLE) it would probably have to be just stored pages of text paged into screen memory, but with a large enough RAM expansion it could be done. As for sound quality, I think you might find this example pretty darn impressive done on a real Commodore 64: (48khz) kzbin.info/www/bejne/i4qkl5KXrM1ojqM Here's another one: kzbin.info/www/bejne/mXzafZ6EpN6Gf5Y

[@Serious_Drinking]

Impressive! Especially how lifelike the whole animation is. How big is the file? Does it run on a stock C64 or is some additional hardware like a REU used?

[@hakonsoreide]

Ah, yes. I will have to disappoint you, as indeed I have had to do with other commentators in the past: it's the aesthetics of the Commodore 64 BASIC colours I was after, but not the accomplishment of making something that could be run on original hardware or an emulation, so the video is made entirely on a PC, using image mosaic software to create the individual frames. That is not to say it cannot be done on the real thing, certainly with real or emulated REU fitted, but that's not my area of expertise. The technique I used can actually be useful in generating the needed character codes for such a project, but I will have to leave that to someone else more skilled. I detail my method in this video: kzbin.info/www/bejne/rqKVpo13p7eXftE

[@Serious_Drinking]

@@hakonsoreide Not at all a disappointment! I love the the idea, the realisation and the result.

[@8bitgamerC64]

Today i saw something you wouldn't believe.

[@josepzin]

Maravilloso.

[@hakonsoreide]

Muchas gracias

[@robwebnoid5763]

Even in blue petscii, Rachel is still magnificent... as a replicant, that is.

[@hakonsoreide]

Does being a replicant affect someone's magnificence? Anyway, I think Petscii is magnificent as it's the perfect character set for text art videos, the graphic characters breaking up the otherwise distracting grid that is so prominent in other text-based videos.

[@robwebnoid5763]

​@@hakonsoreide ... Absolutely! :) But we can thank Leonard for inventing the Petscii graphics, as this character set has become unique & iconic over the decades. However, I would like to see these scenes in non-Petscii also, as you were saying. Maybe even in just dots . & dashes - . I would have to try one of those text/video asci generator programs such as the ones by Nuclear Nova Software, or one of those freeware/opensource programs. etc.

[@hakonsoreide]

@@robwebnoid5763 Once you have a set of stills from a film, the number of ways you can process them creatively are literally endless. Any Photoshop filter effect, Topaz effects, image mosaics using any kind of image library, printing the frames out and colouring them with crayons, sharpies, pencils and recsanning, etc, etc etc. The only limitation is your imagination, as I say in my Zoia videos.

[@robwebnoid5763]

​@@hakonsoreide ​ ... Ok thanks. I've done some ascii art in past decades, just don't recall what I used. Ah, that reminds me, I still have a dotmatrix printout of a headshot/bust of my younger self from some time in the mid 1970's taken at a mall where one of the hallway vendors had a camera which then output to a computer then to impact printer, I think. Hard to say if that was before or after the PET came out. It's right here framed on the wall behind me, a 45 year old reminder of computer ascii art & feed paper (of which I still have a few blank piles of). It's not in Petscii though. I didn't really get into computers until the C-64 (and TRS-80's) in the early 1980's, of which I still have all my C-64 stuff. Little did I know that head ascii printout would lead to my C-64 & also into IBM PC's. Oh, I see you are into electronic music in your yt profile. Any particular artist favorites? Mine are JM Jarre, Jonn Serrie, Tomita (RIP), Mars Lasar, any type of C64/amiga/pc tracker music, among many others. And Vangelis ... appropriate here for Blade Runner. I've also been recently listening to Shingo Nakamura & The Grand Sound channels here. I was into synth stuff 30 years ago, but never really got into music making. Have been trying to get into DAW's & recording (for the past f*king 15 years), but real life is in the way right now. All I have right now is a MIDI controller-only keyboard, PC's, VSTi's & C-64's (of which the C-64 system is not setup). Again though, real life is in the way, hard to do in hobbyist stuff, heh. I'm gonna have to take a look at your Zoia vids though. Oh & I see you're also into typewriters. I still have a few, may need to get rid of some of them. I don't want to bin them to the recycler though, that would be a waste (trash pun?).

[@briankumanchik2474]

Please!

[@hakonsoreide]

I'll keep making my videos, anyway, and then perhaps others will be inspired to do it on actual hardware.

[@Wrangler-fp4ei]

How were you doing it? A converted of some kind? I know back in 1980s they used cameras to video record people and save it on floppy disk.

[@hakonsoreide]

The main part of the process is done with an image mosaic software on a PC. I do unfortunately not know how to do something like this on the original or emulated vintage hardware. I detail my method in this video: kzbin.info/www/bejne/rqKVpo13p7eXftE

[@eoghankidney]

i'd love to see how it would handle colour

[@hakonsoreide]

Text art videos don't really look nice in colour, the image gets a lot busier and more muddied. I tried it, and I also tried other colour combinations, but decided BASIC blue looks best.

[@johnsmith1953x]

*Is the sound also from the C64?* Its soo clear.

[@hakonsoreide]

While I have heard amazing sounds using emulated or vintage hardware and the latest SID chip tricks, this is simply the audio from the film; a homage to the visual aesthetic of the C64 and one of the most iconic films ever rather than an example of what an 8-bit computer can do, though someone with the right expertise could actually make something similar in an authentic way.

[@johnsmith1953x]

@@hakonsoreide Agreed. I never thought of using the 16-bit frequency oscillators to modulate to create digital sound. I've always used 54296 (volume register) with 4-bit nibbles, but you always get that fuzz in the background. Do you think there is enough power in the 6510 to play 16-bit audio streamed from the 1541? Maybe have the 1541 onboard 6510 perform parallel calcs before giving it to SID? I dunno, just typing. Would be awesome to see this happen.

[@blsemetan7232]

A full length movie on the 64 was impossible in the 80's, not so much now.

[@hakonsoreide]

While this of course is not made to run on an actual or emulated C64, it's technically a frame-by-frame re-rendering done on a PC, you could do something similar with a RAM-expanded C64.

[@rev.davemoorman3883]

Just a ball-park estimate - on a real C64, with full screen for each frame and no sound, your would get a whopping 2 seconds - 60 K - if you are lucky. Probably less. Now, a 255 byte screen would last 4 times longer. Maybe. I played with moving pictures in the 2000s on a real, stock C64. Fun stuff to try. The beauty of the C64 is that anything was possible - or at least model-able.

[@hakonsoreide]

Actually, it can look rather good with a reduced frame rate. This is 24, but it would still look decent in 15 or 12. If you go for 12, you could do about 5 seconds. Unless you can use some clever compression to squeeze in more, or streaming the data from a tape. I think one of the great things of the 8-bit era is that the precise limitations and the comprehensive workings of the computer was information available to everyone right away, and it wasn't hard to get the full overview of them. Once you know the precise limits of something, it is easier to focus on ways to get around them.

[@agpxnet]

Of course, you have to apply some compression to data, not storing the frame in raw format.

[@brucekempf4648]

This is so cool! Is there a way to download and run on my C64?

[@hakonsoreide]

Thanks. This clip is made entirely as a video file, as an artistic expression paying homage to the aesthetics of the Commodore 64, but not as playable on actual hardware, though with memory expansion units and some clever compression, I am sure somebody who knows better how it works should be able to achieve similar results, though with mono sound of lower sample rate. I explain my workflow for this kind of video here: kzbin.info/www/bejne/rqKVpo13p7eXftE

[@callecassel3726]

Great work! You say you made it entirely on a PC but is it run in an emulator like VICE? Or did you just add the loading screen for fun? If it is actually a program that could be run on a C64, would you consider sharing it?

[@hakonsoreide]

No, it's a video made entirely on a PC. The loading screen is just for fun and the aesthetics of it, as is the rest of it, of course. You wouldn't get many seconds of it on an actual C64 or an emulator, though of course it should be possible to at least create the moving images on the genuine article.

[@paullee107]

This is great- do you have the PRG or files so I can load on my C=??

[@hakonsoreide]

Thanks. Not quite C= compatible in its current form, though; I am an artist, not a computer programmer, so for me it's all about the nostalgia of the aesthetics, but I have less of an interest in doing it on real or emulated vintage hardware.

[@hakonsoreide]

A tutorial on how I created this effect is now up on: kzbin.info/www/bejne/rqKVpo13p7eXftE

[@richardhedderly]

So each character is allocated a relative brightness value and same area from the source material is scanned to see what value that would be, thus the animation replicates this? If it’s done on a PC, which language / app did you use?

[@hakonsoreide]

That is pretty much how it works, yes. I am sure there might be more efficient methods, but I export individual frames from the film and batch process them in a piece of photo mosaic software, after cropping each cut for a tighter view and adjusting brightness and contrast for best detail rendition - the manual processing is most of the work, really. Once I send it to batch mosaicking, it's just a matter of finding something else to do while the computer works. I'll make a little video about it one of these days.

[@richardhedderly]

@@hakonsoreide Another would be custom character set with different size dots.

[@hakonsoreide]

@@richardhedderly Exactly. I use the same method also for a typewriter art look kzbin.info/www/bejne/oWOteqKneMp-rs0

[@briankumanchik2474]

Can we get a .d64 or .crt of this? :)

[@hakonsoreide]

Not from me, unfortunately. It’s a visual effect, created on a PC. In principle, this should be possible to do on a RAM expanded C64, of course, but I don’t know how to do that. I love the aesthetics of it, but I am an artist, not a programmer, so I’ll leave it to others to figure out how to do this on the real hardware. Hopefully, these videos will inspire someone who knows how.

[@briankumanchik2474]

@@hakonsoreide Thanks!

[@mario19885]

Hey, you want to play a Blade Runner game on C64? Well how about watch the movie on there instead!! You’re welcome, 1985!

[@hakonsoreide]

Movies in Petscii is just what the 80's were missing. At least I am occasionally doing my it to improve the 80's retrospective.

[@redrumloa]

Why no 16MB REU image to playback on a real C64?

[@hakonsoreide]

I hadn't even heard about REU until I posted this video, but I'll look into that at some point.

[@AndreSilva-de2cd]

What about the sound? Is it made only for this video?

[@hakonsoreide]

That's just the original sound from the film.

[@iandavidson99]

What size could this be compressed down to in a .zip? Under 20kb ?

[@hakonsoreide]

I think it's roughly 1500 frames, each with 1000 characters, so just compressing those as pure text data in isolation, that would be a 1 to 75 compression ratio. I think that's a bit too ambitious.

[@iandavidson99]

@@hakonsoreide I hadn't done any of the maths when I asked the question, I was just theorising :-) However, having now done so, winzip.com state on average 73% for .txt, so 1000 x 1500 x 0.27 makes it about 405kb ?

[@hakonsoreide]

I guess that is plausible. Because of many repeated characters, it should compress rather well. I can't try, of course, since I don't have it stored as character codes, just as the H.264 movie file you see here on KZbin.

[@iandavidson99]

@@hakonsoreide Thanks for the feedback and great work - love it!

[@hakonsoreide]

@@iandavidson99 Thanks. Nice to hear you enjoyed it. I'm doing another one right now, actually: The Gollum vs Sméagol schizoid scene from Two Towers.

[@fmartine2]

Meglio di Blue Ray

[@hakonsoreide]

Thanks. Yes, I think it's better than the Blu-Ray too. I prefer DVD's to Blu-Rays too as on many television screens, full HD actually looks unnaturally sharp.

[@MeineVideokasetten]

Nice fake.

[@hakonsoreide]

Thanks.