ESRGAN upscales of old game graphics: Times of Lore

 Just for fun, after tinkering around with the graphics of Colonel's Bequest for a sloppy HD mod, I decided to give some other games a go as well. Not by making HD mods for them, but just simply upscaling their graphics.

Times of Lore is an old action/RPG designed by Chris Roberts before he made Wing Commander at Origin. You can check my review from here.

Personally, I think these turned out great. The original 16-colour EGA art of Times of Lore is very well drawn and is very clean and even crisp. The art was done by Denis R. Loubet and was originally present in a resolution of 320x200. The resolution of these upscales was scaled by 4. There is a bit more colourful Amiga version of the game as well, but for these images, the DOS version was used. The images come from the opening title and the intro of the game.

And here's the original graphics for comparison. All of the images above were run through ESRGAN, no additional post-processing or alteration was done to them afterwards. The only thing done to them after screen captures were taken was cropping out the elements, such as text or empty spaces, I did not want to run through the upscale. The ESRGAN models I used did a very good job in keeping the art style and lines clear, but they also managed to mix the 16-colours used nicely enough for a more colourful look. Of course, some details got a little mushed, but that's just to be expected.