[viler]

Oh I certainly won't say that it was easy, mind you. The artwork was just done over a long, long period of time. As mentioned elsewhere in the comments, my 8088 MPH blog post from 2015 already shows an early version of one of the images (and a couple are even older). :)

Our toolset for this demo did include an image converter (CGAArt), which can in fact use several version of the CIELAB formulas for its metric, among others. That's by reenigne from our team, who has commented here so I'll let him elaborate on it if he wishes. Personally when I do this sort of artwork, I prefer to tailor it by hand to the target video mode; as you noted, certain parts were indeed converted programmatically, but a lot of that was down to time constraints prior to the party release. In the final version, I plan to rework/redo those.

[jart]

That's amazing. I would love to see a blog post for instance talking more about the math that went into taming the unique visual blending properties of the IBM PC! Because the way you all hacked shade blocks is just as impressive as all the hacks you put into things like the crt and ram. Most importantly, the shade blocks are readily available for creative applications today thanks to unicode.