2D bloom

I was wondering if there were any good tutorials about bloom but in 2D?
Or possibly if someone had some old code for this...
I can't seem to find anything to help me get going on the forum, most of the effects are for Blitz3D anyways.

Cheers!

What is 2d bloom?

This is tricky with Bmax as there is no shader support or texture buffers.
This might help.
This is a good article on Bloom.
If you don't need dynamic blooming then I would suggest having the 'bloom' aspects of an object saved separately and added using Lightblend.
Hope it helps.

I think bloom is WAY overrated, it only happens naturally where very bright light sources shine behind objects and some of the light radiance scatters in the air particles creating a glow at the edges of objects, but it is way overrused and not very realistically so, in my opinion.

... whereas Alien invasions, inter-planetary travel, hell-demons walking the earth and small yellow 'cheese' being chased by ghosts are every day events :-)

You're comparing chalk and cheese. Bloom is usually used to create more realism in realism-striving graphic styles, not to complement fantasy styles.

Really? Don't people use it on spaceships or lasers or aliens?

Bloom is used to ape a realistic phenomenon caused by imperfections in camera lenses, but it's most often used in non-realistic games. Much like lens flares are a realistic phenomenon but it was mostly non-realistic games which used them because they're an over the top effect which doesn't really look that good with realistic scenes.

Wikipedia's description of the Bloom effect lists a handful of examples, including Ico and Legend of Zelda, so clearly it's not used exclusively in "realism-striving graphics styles". In fact, I think those two games pretty much epitomize the phrase "fantasy styles". Tron 2.0 was the game which made it popular apparently. Again, not big on realism.