Pushing the Boundaries of C64 Graphics with Nuflix

Summary

Pushing the Boundaries of C64 Graphics with NUFLIX While working on my C64 game projects I started thinking about creating nice full-screen images for the title screens and other transitions. For me it’s a big part of the fun when developing for these old machines to create something that goes beyond the state of the art in some way. When it comes to still images, the best format to date is NUFLI. This format allows the creation of images with the full 320×200 resolution while cramming a lot more colours into small areas than one would think possible. It achieves this by cleverly exploiting various undocumented behaviours of the VIC-II. NUFLI is the result of decades of trial and error, integrating several tricks into a single package. I cannot praise highly enough the genius that went into creating it. However, after picking it apart, I realised that there are some ways I could improve it, despite the fact that it’s over 15 years old! I couldn’t resist the temptation to attack the problem, and a few months later my efforts bore fruit: a system called NUFLI eXtended, aka NUFLIX (thanks to Sebaloz for being the first to suggest this name). NUFLIX images can be created using the tool I built, NUFLIX Studio. Here’s a video showing the workflow: VIDEO In the rest of this article I’ll explain how NUFLI works, how NUFLIX improves upon it, and wrap up with some ideas for the future. NUFLI NUFLI stands for New Underlayed (sic) Flexible Line Interpretation. If this sounds like a random word soup to you, don’t worry, you’re not alone. In a nutshell, this means that a NUFLI image is a combination of two elements: a bitmap with more colour than the hardware would normally allow a layer of hardware sprites that cover the whole screen and also has more colour than what you would usually expect Hires Bitmap with FLI Out of the box, the C64 offers a selection of text and bitmap modes with various colour configurations. Fundamentally they are all quite similar to each other: both ki...