Hi, I am looking for a shader that makes a game look 16-bit (like Quake and Elder scrolls arena). Does anyone know of one?
Thanks
Not sure what you mean. Do you mean screen resolution (blocky graphics) or do you mean color depth (relatively few colors)?
With Elder Scrolls Arena: plausibly both.
To make something like that, I’d go in a direction like Doom. I’d have a block with planes, each plane having a low-bit texture. This however, wouldn’t be the most efficient way.
We are going to need many more details. Are you starting with image textures that are right but are getting interpolated in an undesirably smoothed way? Are you using Cycles? Are you using procedural textures?
There are solutions, but it will take more clues. If you have screenshots of the desired/current effects then that can help guide us onto the target.
-rking
@Solarlune & Saturo: Yes, both. A sort of blocky graphic style. Textured planes will not work with 3D environments because the edges will still be smooth. The effect I am looking for is like all those old 16bit dos games.
@rking: I’m not using cycles… I am using the game engine GLSL render system…
Screenshot of what I’m looking for:
I can help you.
I have 2 GLSL filters that might be what you are looking for.
enable with buttons 2 and 3
1st enables downsampling filter that will make the blocky pixels, the second one is a slow filter but will make colors 8bit + dithered.
@ martinsh: I didn’t expect to see that. Pretty cool – and somehow ironic to use it for low-resoluted Graphics as it lowers the Framerate slightly.
Funnily, setting the Blur Value to (2.0,2.0) makes it look like hi-res Bloom on a low-res Screen – very ironic, and somehow fascinating. 
edit & ONTOPIC:
Now with Blender 2.6 and the integrated Blenderplayer, you can set it’s Bit Depth to 16 Bit or even 8 Bit (lowest) and set the Screen Resolution to something like 320*240.
I have just tried it and it was a freakingly irritating and scary Moment when my Blender produced such Graphics. ô~ô
edit:
To see the Bit Difference, you must play fullscreen.
Odd. Only ‘2’ works for me (just a slight change, right?).
I also made a pixellation filter awhile back. It worked pretty well.
@ SolarLune:
I was puzzled as well until looking closer at the .blend: The Keys are 2 and 3, actually.
Yeah, I tried pressing 3. It gave me an error. Using Blender 2.61, I think.
by chance, in the resolution of blender there are precise combinations to follow?
Height / width / bit
?
in my PC sometimes it works perfectly, and sometimes you do not see anything by changing a bit the value
Thank you martinsh, great shader 
This is an old thread, but I really wish Martinsh’s dropbox files still worked, I would love to see this in action, and I need it for my game. Anyone happen to have the .blend stowed in the deepest depths of their computer by some miraculous turn of events?
this is something i found after a long search that seems to work, at least for me.