I still remember using and playing games on the Commodore 64, but I never thought I'd see the day when the old-school PC was running generative AI to generate creative retro sprites. Check it out:
Nick Bild is a developer and hobbyist who documented his journey of building a generative AI tool for the Commodore 64, that can be used to create 8 x 8 sprites that are displayed at the 64 x 64 resolution. The idea behind this is to use AI to help inspire game design concepts, but we're talking about the Commodore 64 here, so we're not going to get some AI-powered Crysis on the C64.
Training the generative AI model was done on a traditional PC, so while the AI model itself runs on the Commodore 64, you'll need a modern PC to get it up and running. It will take 20 minutes or so to run just 90 iterations for the final 64 x 64 image, so it's not going to blow NVIDIA's current-gen Hopper H100 AI GPU out of the water, or put AI companies out of business. Impressive for the Commodore 64, nonetheless.
explained in the YouTube description: "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?"
