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I want to share something extremely cool that some incredibly smart people and I have been working on for the past few weeks: extracting lost color palettes for PlayStation graphics from a blurry, noisy FMVpic.twitter.com/U8iDFkAEWt
Tomba! apparently had a rough development cycle, and a LOT of content was cut before release. this includes four overhead town areas, for which the "overlay" graphics (e.g. building interiors and various structures) still exist, but no actual backgrounds or color palettespic.twitter.com/v6LapoKHp9
until now, the only clue we had as to how the graphics were supposed to look was this unused FMV, which pans over seemingly complete versions of the four areas (these must have been cut VERY late in development!)https://youtu.be/hChwi5_YWaw
this was all we had of these areas for YEARS, until one of the aforementioned incredibly smart people, @vervalkon, decided to write a program that compares averaged frames from the video with the unused graphics and "guesses" a palette automatically. the results are... impressivepic.twitter.com/CI7GhH5yFI
AND, since all of the overlay graphics in an area share a single 256-color palette, this means that even graphics which don't appear in the video (such as the building interiors) get a mostly-complete palette as well!
I have been refining the process over the past few days, and have figured out a way to almost completely remove the "sparkling" effect from the extracted video frames, resulting in even more accurate colors. I have two areas done and will be working on the remaining two this week
we have also found TONS of other unused content, including graphics, models, and even NPC dialogue, some of which relates to the unused areas! all of this will be added to The Cutting Room Floor over the coming weeks and months, so stay tuned!
I've finally finished cleaning up all of the unused video frames! here are the four town areas in all their non-sparkly glory!pic.twitter.com/Qy1iv5IuTC
let's meet some residents of the Village of Civilization! we originally thought their palettes were lost forever when the backgrounds were removed, but it turns out they were hiding in the final Iron Castle data, which is kind of intriguing for a few reasons...pic.twitter.com/GVa41FPKEk
ripping these sprites revealed that the ones seen in the unused video were actually earlier versions, and they were cleaned up a bit before the towns were scrapped. I included the earlier versions of a couple of NPCs in the previous tweet, can you guess which is which?
sadly, there are a handful of NPCs whose graphics don't seem to exist on the disc anymore, such as this red-haired girl near the entrance to Iron Town. I'm sorry I couldn't save you, but I'll always have your palette to remember you by :(pic.twitter.com/KcOM2gNile
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