Zarth Milika MSX1 Pixel Art Rewrite

This is Milika, the super famous supporting character (lol) from Zarth (1984 / 1985 ©ENIX). I think the pixel art turned out quite nicely. It should be displayable on actual MSX1 hardware.

Here is the original MSX1 version. It was quite beautiful among the MSX1 CGs of that time, but since the Milika from other PC versions was famous for being stunning, it's a bit disappointing when compared. Considering the handicaps of having no tools, limited capacity, and no know-how, it put up a good fight.

I don't know the platform, but here is the original. The line art is beautiful and the tiling is amazing. The background has a mysterious color ratio of 13:2:1 for white, red, and yellow. Well, maybe that's just a pattern.

Representing line art and solid intermediate colors on the MSX1 is quite difficult. This time, I worked hard on it manually in Photoshop. I will summarize the manual details in a separate article, and after verbalizing that know-how, I will incorporate it into converters and Photoshop tools.

Since it's tough to do line art with just the background, I placed dots assuming the use of sprites this time. Ensuring consistency for this was quite difficult, so I thought about making a tool to check if it fits within the total of 32 sprites (4 horizontal). I will make it.

I realized right away that the eyes and mouth couldn't be expressed cleanly without using sprites, but I ended up consuming a lot of sprites for the part where the hair on the left extends vertically. MSX1 is very bad at handling areas with many color changes in a narrow, vertically long space. It seems better to establish a strategy of actively modifying the original image before starting the pixel art work, such as by redrawing such parts slightly diagonally.

Now, I said I would write an article detailing the manual work, but before that, I think I will post about MSX1 skin tone expression. The skin tone of Milika this time was painted while considering quite a lot of things.