MAMEWorld Forums - News - Re: Haze: The Colour of your Nemesis?

Don't just look at the overall brightness level (which depends on the monitor and the viewing/filming conditions), look at the contrast between bright and dark colors. In that Nemesis video, you can see how strong the contrast is between the lit and shadowed sides of the mountains. On the other hand, if you look at a video from a Twinbee PCB (I linked to one on Haze's blog) you can see the contrast between the light and shadows on the water should not be excessively strong; the score digits and the Konami logo in attract mode should be distinctly brighter than the water highlights and not blend in with them.

In the old gamma-hacked MAME palette the contrast on the Nemesis mountains was too low and the contrast on the Twinbee water was too high, and there wasn't any adjustment you could make that would improve one without making the other worse.

If you really want to increase the default brightness in MAMEUIFX you can use the following code:

Code:

double white = 255.0 / (m_palette_lookup[30] - black);
for (int i = 0; i < 32; i++)
{
    int col = (m_palette_lookup[i] - black) * white + 0.5;
    m_palette_lookup[i] = MIN(col, 255);
}

However, this code irrecoverably compresses the colors (level 30 and level 31 become the same) so I recommend using the slider controls instead if you really think the colors are too dark (it doesn't look nearly as dark when you're actually playing rather than comparing side-by-side with the old MAME colors)