Before reading this, there is a companion article that was released here. It will help go over the basics of PETSCII and the original PDDT tricks.
Previously, I was experimenting with diagonal artifacts from using full dither blocks. I realized that the 4×4 chunky blocks and other chunky blocks based on 4px wide, could be used for a diagonal dither. In the 8×8 dither blocks examples (see above link) a monochromatic pattern works well, but multi-colour works somewhat but breaks dither pattern. It is the opposite with 4×4 chunky blocks, monochrome pattern are nothing to look at — but the colouring on a diagonal using a gradient palette looks pretty good.
There are a lot of combinations, which I haven’t completely explored yet. One of the great things about working on a the diagonal is that it stops looking like PETSCII a bit. the 8×8 dither blocks sometimes makes the PETSCII look like a C64 high res image, where as the 4×4 has kinship to double wide multi-colour mode (kind of).
I am going to try to make a Chunky Logo or Font with this technique.. anything but Xmas GFX/Music 🙂
Below is an example using the 4×4 chunky as a noise/tv static textured background. Chunky background vs sharper foreground PETSCII, paired with a linear gradient colour fill looks great.
