“Are You Ready?”
Because despite being so obvious, apparently nobody has thought to do it properly, so I’ve
created a simple Commodore 64 boot screen wallpaper in a plethora of screen sizes:
I have not just taken a screenshot and then resized it to each dimension; to keep the chunky pixels
perfectly square and even, and avoid aliasing I have instead doubled, tripled, quadrupled
&c. the size of the dark blue screen area and filled the border space in to fit
the screen size. This way, the C64’s pixels stay perfect and crisp regardless of your resolution. As multiples of
the 320×200 screen vary in how they fit into various resolutions some wallpapers are provided in two or three
different versions that use different sized pixels.
Secondly every wallpaper is also offered in two different palettes:
The Timmermann palette (left) is based on very complex mathematic analysis of the real C64 hardware as
documented in “All you ever wanted to know about the
colors of the Commodore 64”. This gives an accurate representation of the colours of a C64 as they would be
seen on a 1980’s TV. The VICE palette (right) is from the
VICE emulator and strikes a balance of accuracy and
brightness for modern screens.
Many of the sizes are also offered in Windows XP, Windows 7 and Mac types, which are different as follows:
- “WinXP” types
-
The image is centred based on a 30px Task Bar being at the bottom of the
screen. This means that the light blue space at the top of the screen and above the Task Bar is even. This
also applies to Windows Vista
- “Win7” types
-
The image is centred based on a 40px Task Bar being at the bottom of the
screen.
- Mac types
-
The image is bumped down 22 pixels from the top to account for the global menu bar.
Any suggestions you have for additions to the package are welcome. (Should I do avatars?)
“C64” and “Commodore 64” are the property of Commodore, whoever owns them these days.