Inside Petsciishop

TruSkii3000

TruSkii3000 is the image conversion engine inside Petsciishop. It is where the project concentrates its image-science work: PETSCII character behavior, perceptual color matching, luminance structure, saliency, screen-wide refinement, and a WASM-first search pipeline that can push Standard, ECM, and MCM outputs much harder than a simple nearest-match converter.

What It Is

The job of TruSkii3000 is to take a source image and find the strongest legal C64 screen the machine can actually display. That means dealing with a fixed 40x25 character grid, real VIC-II mode rules, a 16-color palette, shared global colors, and constant tradeoffs between shape, contrast, texture, and color identity.

Over time, it has turned into a focused attempt to make the best PETSCII image converter we can build. The engine combines C64-specific knowledge with modern perceptual color work and a lot of measured search, then keeps the hot path in WASM so the deeper scoring and refinement passes stay practical in the browser.

Modes Standard, ECM, and MCM are all first-class conversion targets.

Engine Shape WASM-first hot path, JS host layer for UI, workers, progress, and export.

Focus Image fidelity within real C64 constraints, measured by timing and quality metrics.