Had another play with this new simple process for enhancing low-res pixelated layouts... the idea is that one day, as part of the layout editor, it will be a easy to use built-in tool, with some tweakable settings...
This time was Super Hyper Viper at a whopping 16x upscale for an 8K layout, here's some before/after, using the simple fixed process (upscale, rebalance color, unsharp mask):
Before:
After:
Before:
After:
Before:
After:
Before:
After:
It's not all there yet by any means though:
Before (notice the text is actually much more legible):
After: (text is an unreadable mess)
I believe in future multimodal LLMs would be able to guess the correct text based on knowledge of the game though the MAME internal classic layouts, and fonts used on these machines, and then redo the text as fonts with layer effects... probably a long way off yet, purely due to these not being particularly in-demand generative AI skills, but it does seem feasible... will be a handy stopgap for those machines where no high res images are available, and no highres redraw has been done