I discovered a program called AI Gigapixel which attempts to increase the resolution of any graphic by using AI Technology. It tries to guess what the image would look like if it were scaled to a larger size. It has a database of over 1 million images that it uses as a reference for its upscaling.

As soon as I heard about this technology, I instantly thought about what it could do for retro video games. And so I downloaded a trial of it and ran through at least 100 screenshots of retro games to see how they would look. Below are the ones that I thought were worth sharing.

I noticed a few things when it comes to rendering classic games with this software. Most of the time, the character sprites look terrible when upscaled. Backgrounds however, especially pre-rendered backdrops like the ones seen in Final Fantasy games on the PlayStation, look amazing. Textures also upscale incredibly well which is great because that means you could take all of the textures of an older 3D game and "remaster" all of those textures and what you would get is a game that looks far more modern. Usually it's the textures that don't age well in these old games and that's primarily due to the system's limitations and having such low res textures in order to fit all of the textures on a game with limited storage space. When these old games are emulated, they look great in HD except the textures, and this is especially true for N64 games. If this topic generates enough interest, maybe I'll remaster some N64 games since there are some N64 emulators that support high resolution textures.

If anyone has any ideas for games that they'd like to see me run through this software, respond to this thread. More specifically, respond with a screenshot that you'd like me to render and I'll respond with a before and after image.

All of these images can be clicked for a bigger view. It's important to zoom in on these to see the full detail of the before and after.


Nintendo NES


Super Nintendo


Sega Genesis


Game Boy Advance


Miscellaneous Systems




Minecraft Pantings


Some Minecraft Block Textures

I only have 1 day left with this trial so if anyone has anything they want me to run through the program, let me know today

Davideo7 : I would like to see images of some games rendered such as:



Description Console

Grandia PSX


Threads of Fate PSX


Mega man legends N64/PSX
 

Dragonball Hyper dimension SNES :

Link the faces of evil CDI


Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver PSX


Chrono Cross PSX


Donkey Kong Country Snes


Turtles in Time IV SNES




And for the fun maybe:

Shen Mue DC


Sword of the Berserk: Guts' Rage DC

Is it too late to suggest The Shrine with the 7 Figurines from Mystic Ark?

TouchMaster97 : Provide me a screenshot and I might be able to get to it in time.

Snesstyle : Rendering them now. I'll probably post a comparison graphic in a few days

Snesstyle : I hope this works. Probably best to view them on a computer. Enjoy

I was able to View the pictures. Some games had a very nice HD texture like soul reaver, and dbz hyper dimension and some others. On others they could only fix the seen pixelisation but otherwise look nearly the same.
But using it for the modernization of some games would be a nice idea only it will take sometime i gues cause a game has a lot of textures and other pictures.

The Images are best viewed with the fullscreen option with F11 on firefox.

Davideo7 : i looked at the images but i don't see any difference at all.

hellno163 : It's best to view them on a computer since you have to view them at a larger scale. If you're viewing them on a phone, you'll want to zoom in.

Davideo7 : Wow!
It's hard enough to make a pixel version of any game, and that software tries to scale it up?! Also: this looks sooo good! Incredible what AI can do! 

I'd suggest the classic Super Tux
It's a platformer like Mario for pc and is (I believe ) still in development! 

Some of these are really amazing! It would be awesome to have a few games here on vizzed that are up-scaled. Is it quite tedious to upscale a whole game?

Light Knight : To actually upscale a game like this through emulation is impossible...unless the emulator supported it. There's an NES emulator that lets you import graphics with 4x higher resolution. There's Mupen64Plus that supports high resolution textures. There's a few other emulators which can be found here: http://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Texture_Packs

Mupen64Plus is the only one of those emulators supported by the Vizzed RGR Plugin. If any of them ever gain support by RetroArch (which is the primary HTML5 emulator that Vizzed uses), then we can utilize it.


Phillipp : Topaz AI Gigapixel is the software I used.