Ankha by Ankha

A full 320x180 24fps 16 colors animation for Atari STE

Original animation by Z0ne, used with authorization
https://www.zone-archive.com/
Video conversion and player code by Fenarinarsa
Music by Sandy Marton ("Camel by Camel")

Minimum setup: Fast hard drive, Atari STE with 1MB of RAM

Released October 31, 2024
Code released under GPLv3
Source code available at https://www.fenarinarsa.com/?p=3424

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Why?
After converting Bad Apple, I wanted to try converting a video to 16 colors animation. Since the Bad Apple player worked in 16 greyshades, a minimal amount of additional code was needed to support palette changes during playback.

Why furry porn?
I don't care that it's porn, I just loved this animation when I discovered it back in 2021. Like Bad Apple, it has an excellent video & audio sync and since it's originally Flash with a lot of flat color areas, it was the best candidate for the 16 colors conversion.

Why releasing it 3 years after the original video?
Converting the first part of the video was pretty easy to do. I just had to find the best palettes and automatically convert it with some batch scripts.
The second half of the video was an amazing amount of work because all automatic conversions failed to give a good result with 16 colors and I wanted to avoid dithering the main characters, while the background needed pattern dithering. So a lot of it was manual area conversion, and I stopped working on it for more than 2 years out of boredom.
Recently I started to work on it again, because only ~150 pics were left to be converted and I didn't want to lose all the work made until then. So I took some time to finish and polish it. There's still issues, but it's released at last!

What software did you use to convert it?
Mainly Photoshop with batch scripts, except for the very last sequence, for which I used a modified version of the Ditherton and a Python script to support animation. The reason I didn't use that for the whole video is that those tools didn't exist in 2021!
But the real first hard thing was to chose the 16 colors palette. It was not always straightforward. For example, Ankha needs at least 4 shades of blue for her feet, costume and skin, while most automatic converters only kept 1 or 2 shades. Also, her yellow skin do not convert exactly into RGB444 space, so she's a tiny little bit more greenish than in the original video... but you need to compare with the original video to see it. Some banding effects are still present on the male character's penis, but I didn't really find a satisfying way of fixing it.

Is there really optimizations?
Yes, for example the background of the first part mostly uses only 2 bitplanes, and the second part's background uses only 5 colors. Palettes are arranged in a way that shades use the least possible CPU/blitter refreshs.
Also, the "loading" animation takes so little data to load and play that I could remove the original "buffering" text intro and directly play the video instead.
I also had to reduce audio quality from 50kHz to 25kHz since the video bitrate is higher than on Bad Apple, and I had to read bigger data chunks from disk to reduce the TOS overhead. But player-wise, it's 99% the same code than for Bad Apple, so the same optimizations apply when converting the video.

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