AI image generation is all the rage, and you could be forgiven for thinking with all this talk of AI PCs, NPUs and Nvidia H100s that it's only ultra-modern hardware that's up to the task.
Turns out, however, that even the elderly Commodore 64 can get in on the action, thanks to some algorithm wrangling and a good dose of old-fashioned ingenuity.
Hackaday user Nick Bild has put together a project detailing how the now 42-year-old machine was made to perform a task traditionally thought of as very hardware intensive, through the adaptation of a probabilistic PCA algorithm, which was then used to produce 8x8 retro game sprites.
An initial model was built using modified Python code, before being trained on around 100 sprites created with the use of a custom spreadsheet on a modern PC.
The parameter values produced were then plugged into a script using simplified logic to run the generative and randomised parts of the algorithm, which, thanks to that simplification, could then be converted into BASIC code to run on the Commodore 64.