Xbox engineer fixes user's tiny, 15-year-old 360 gamerpic

An Xbox engineer fixed a user's tiny, 15-year-old Xbox 360 gamerpic so it now displays properly on modern devices.

Earlier this week, video producer and editor Gabriel Roland tweeted a picture of their 360 gamerpic as it appears now on modern consoles: tiny.

This Pac-Man gamerpic, bought for 80 Microsoft Points in 2006, shrinks with each new console generation as resolutions increase.

Most Xbox users updated their gamerpic years ago. Not Roland, though.

"With each passing generation, Xbox tries to shame my Pac-Man ghost avatar by shrinking it ever smaller and smaller," Roland said.

"I will not yield. I bought this gamerpic for 80 Xbox Points in 2006, and I'll be fucked if it won't remain the best dollar I've ever spent until the seas boil over."

With each passing generation, Xbox tries to shame my Pac-Man ghost avatar by shrinking it ever smaller and smaller. I will not yield. I bought this gamerpic for 80 Xbox Points in 2006, and I'll be fucked if it won't remain the best dollar I've ever spent until the seas boil over pic.twitter.com/Ji5ttoUVjh

Xbox engineering lead Eden Marie took notice, and vowed to do something to help out Roland's ageing gamerpic.

"Listen, I can't promise anything, but I'm going to make it my personal mission to fix this," Marie said.

Marie began her quest by buying the Pac-Man avatar, which is still on sale, although now priced $2.38.

Step one: I ACTUALLY BOUGHT THE GAMERPIC PACK. It was $2.38 and not a dollar so I already have gone above and beyond, give me my bonus already pic.twitter.com/Yo1v51YlJT

First of all, this is going to be a multi-step journey and I can't promise there'll be steady progress. But if I were to ask you how many ways we display gamerpics on the console and your answer wasn't something like "all of them," then you'd be off the mark.

Marie later discovered 360 gamerpics can never get bigger than 72 x 72 pixels, which explains its tiny look. She also discovered if you upload a PNG with transparency as a custom gamerpic, the Dashboard and Guide will respect that transparency in most places. Some of the built in gamerpics have transparency built in, too.

Something changed a while ago and some plumbing got broken as a result. So this page at least was an easy fix. Sorry, Tiny Fez, you're the first casualty of this thread!

Needed a square gamerpic to test with, remembering that time I bought Far Cry 2 at full price just so I could unlock this one pic.twitter.com/PyW4vXwnSC

So, Marie treated the 360 gamerpic as a square within a larger gamerpic circle, with the rest transparent.

Let's talk about making these look better now. A long time ago someone decided that no matter how big a gamerpic we wanted to display, the 360 gamerpic would never get bigger than 72 x 72 pixels. The rest of the background is filled in with a blown up, faded version of itself. pic.twitter.com/MBPJvurlPC

So fun fact: Did you know that if you upload a PNG with transparency as a custom gamerpic, the Dashboard and Guide will respect that transparency in most places? Some of the built in gamerpics have transparency built in. Maybe we can take advantage of that here. pic.twitter.com/DMKQAxUTLW

Revisiting Tiny Fez (rip, thanks @TetroniMike), this actually doesn't look bad (I added the pink circle as a reference). It would've looked better using nearest neighbor interpolation, but that's a puzzle for another day, UWP XAML seems intent on not making that easy. pic.twitter.com/RWKbvg2vOx

The below is the end result:

It's a lot of fun, and sometimes, you even learn something new, like... apparently 360 gamerpics supported transparency all along?

SURPRISE

Anyway, what do you think, @noukon? Feel better about that dollar? pic.twitter.com/zxQx7SmHJw

Roland replied - and sounded delighted: "I have never and will never feel better about a dollar in my entire life."

Then:

It really helps that your bug report tweet made me laugh

It's a cool result for this gamerpic, of course, but, tweeting, Marie said a change can be made to how all 360 gamerpics show up on console, not just certain ones. This is an update that will need to roll out with other console updates, but it sounds like it's coming.

Hopefully my tiny Master Chief head will soon look good enough to see again!

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