v0.2.4 — smooth palette fades

Smooth palette fades

Smooth transitions now also covers the front-end DAC fades — the intro, the TITUS / PREHISTORIK-2 title (including the logo's color reveal), the mode-select entry, THE END, the game-over scene, and the menu-map/carte exit fades. All of them now ramp continuously at your display's refresh rate instead of the original's stepped VGA fade.

The tricky part: the original fade only updates a given color roughly once every 8 frames (a held-then-jump staircase), so a naive frame-to-frame smoothing pass still looked banded — smoothing the jump itself didn't remove the ~100ms hold in between. Fixed with a small continuous filter that chases the fade's target color instead of interpolating between two fixed points; it doesn't care how the original staircase happens to be paced, and it still converges to the exact original color once a fade settles.

With Smooth transitions off, every fade reproduces the exact original discrete sequence, byte-for-byte — this is purely a presentation option.

▶ Download & play (Windows)

pre2native-v0.2.4-win64.zip — unzip pre2native.exe + _internal/ into your legal GOG Prehistorik 2 folder (next to SPRITES.SQZ) and run it. No Python needed. See HOW_TO_PLAY.txt.

Prefer to run from source? The README has a beginner-complete walkthrough (virtual env + pip install numpy pygame + python scripts/play_native.py) — no .EXE required to play.