Commodore 64 AI Image Generator

15.05.24

Mehr infos hier auf Github!

AI image generators are very popular these days, and the results are used in all sorts of creative projects. This made me wonder what it would have been like if image generators had existed during the early personal computer revolution in the 1980s. What would they have been like, and what would the images have been used for?

Today’s algorithms, like Stable Diffusion, require a huge amount of computational resources that simply cannot be made to work (in any reasonable way) on machines of the era. But with some work, a simpler generative algorithm could be used to produce images. So I decided to adapt a probabilistic PCA algorithm to run on a Commodore 64, with the goal of producing 8×8 retro game sprites that could have been used to inspire a game design.

I started by building a model using a modified version of the Python code found in this tutorial. I made about 100 retro-inspired sprites (represented as binary strings) with the help of a spreadsheet I made. This data was used to train the model on a modern computer with modified scripts from the tutorial.

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