I’m trying to cycle my sleep schedule since I start work in less than a week, so to kill time until Nanostray finally shows up in the mail I had to come up with something tedious and time consuming to keep me up. For whatever reason, I decided I would duplicate, pixel-for-pixel, the Pictochat interface in Photoshop.

This wasn’t an entirely new concept, when I first got my DS, I “ripped” all of the character sets (aside from the Japanese alphabets) to try and create a Pictochat Truetype font. This basically involved staring at the DS screen REALLY close and counting pixels. While that worked just fine with individual characters, I needed to get perfect spacing and dimensions of every icon and box that make up the Pictochat interface for my new project. I finally discovered that my webcam had the ability to focus just millimeters from the screen, and I set about taking screenshots of the different components that I would need to recreate. Then I started with a blank document, drew out a grid for myself at the DS’s screen resolution, and started plugging pieces in…pixel by pixel. Five hours later, I had manually transferred nearly 100,000 pixels for my entirely pointless art project. I don’t know if you’ve ever worked with pixel art for extended periods of time, but it’s a lot of fun because your eyes quit working and your brain tries to escape.

I had to guess on the colors, and they’re just a little off, but other than that, this is a pixel-perfect recreation of an empty Pictochat room.

Enjoy, I guess.