Hello! I put together a sketch that converts images (still or a video feed) into the NES palette, and it seems to work quite well if a little slow. I was just wondering if any of you know of any tricks of speeding up my code so it runs more efficiently? Obviously there's a lot of calculations going on currently: I'm sampling the colour of every nth pixel and drawing the closest colour from the NES palette to a rect(). Obviously the less frequently I sample, the faster the sketch runs - but that in turn means the rect() are drawn larger and thus the appearance of a much lower resolution. Also - I might be missing an error/doing something idiotic without realising but in my sketch but the frameRate seems to decrease gradually the longer the sketch runs. Any ideas?

Here's the code:
(The color palette can be got from http://www.thealmightyguru.com/Games/Hacking/Wiki/index.php?title=NES_Palette#Decimal )

1. //HendersonSix 2011
2. //Nes Colour Palette Test with Video Input
   
3. 
   
4. import processing.video.*;
5. String[] palette;  //string array to load the palette.txt file
6. PVector[] colors = new PVector[256];  //256 colors in the palette file
7. float d;  //variable to store the distance between the NES color and the sampled color
8. Capture video;
9. int res=6;  //sets the increment value in the for loops
10. float mindist = 256;  //set minimum dist to maximum
11. color nes;  //the color eventually drawn to the screen
12. void setup(){
13.   size(480, 360);
14.   video = new Capture(this, width, height);
15.   palette = loadStrings("NesPalette.txt");  //text file with RGB values
16.     //divide each line from the .txt file into R, G, and B values
17.   for(int i=0; i<palette.length; i++){
18.     String[] cols = split(palette[i], ',');
19.     if(cols.length == 3){
20.       colors[i] = new PVector(int(cols[0]), int(cols[1]), int(cols[2]));
21.     }
22.   }
23.   noStroke();
24. }
25. void draw(){
26.   if(video.available()){
27.     video.read();
28.     //loop through the video input
29.     for(int x=0; x<video.width; x+=res){
30.       for(int y=0; y<video.height; y+=res){
31.         color currColor = video.get(x, y);
32.         //isolate the R, G, and B channels
33.         int rval = (currColor >> 16) & 0xFF;
34.         int gval = (currColor >> 8) & 0xFF;
35.         int bval = currColor & 0xFF;
36.         //store them in a pvector
37.         PVector curr = new PVector(rval, gval, bval);
38.         mindist = 256;  //reset minimum distance variable to maximum
39.         //get the distance between the current sampled color and the nes color palette using the brute force method
40.         for(int i=0; i<palette.length; i++){
41.           d = colors[i].dist(curr);
42.           if(d < mindist){
43.             mindist = d;  //if there is a new lowest distance, set mindist accordingly
44.             nes = color(colors[i].x, colors[i].y, colors[i].z);
45.             fill(nes);  //fill rect with the color from the nes palette
46.             rect(x, y, res, res);
47.           }
48.         }
49.       }
50.     }
51.   }
52. }
53. void keyPressed(){
54.   if(key==32){
55.     save(frameCount+".jpg");
56.     println("saved! "+frameCount);
57.   }
58. }