* This is not talking about the "Zoomed Preview" feature or the "Full Screen Preview" feature *


Let me explain!

The BBC Image Converter would be a whole friendlier to me if the two image areas in the main application window could be doubled or trebled in dimensions, as a user preference.

If there was an option to have the 'Source Image' and 'Preview Image' regions at twice or thrice their size. Many desktop/laptop screens are 1600x1200 or 1920x1200 or thereabouts in resolution, so as it stands the Source Image and Preview Image regions are squintingly small on-screen.

It would make a good tool even better!

And of course I realise that the knock-on change would mean that the View->Zoomed Preview... feature would be even larger again for those who choose to have the main window image regions big by default.

Hi garfield,

In the next version the user will be able to change the scale of the images to their heart's content. The zoomed preview will in effect become redundant, although the full screen preview will still be available.

Kind regards,

Francis

Great Francis!

Can you give a rough guess when, please?

As soon as I know I'll let you know.

Kind regards,

Francis.

Yes... I'd like to see 'bigger' images too please.... Also, it would be cool if the output screen could be cropped, so that you had the option of saving a portion of the screen, maybe the top half or quarter ?

Also maybe (I'm being VERY picky here) a rubber band box to select a portion of the souce image to convert would be cool.... ( yes I can pre-crop in my favoritite package beforehand), and also if the Output Image could be moved around... up/down or whatever... as small images end up in the middle of the screen....

I think its really cool.... My friend also commented that this was an amazing piece of software and was very very impressed with the dither options..... (and also commented that its a shame that no C64 tools come even close to this)- How easy would it be to convert to a C64 16 Colour Pallet and save out as a PC BMP for further manipulation ? - So we could possibly do cross-dev's.....

Cheers, Colin

Cropping of screens is already implemented in the current developmental version as is saving of resolutions smaller than the standard screen sizes.

Rubber banding isn't on my list of things to do and presently is beyond the scope of what I want to do with Image2BBC.

I have been toying with the idea of including options for C64 and Spectrum screens (and other retro formats), but I would need to research into the technical details of how the screens are stored, palette information, etc.. It is something that I would like to see implemented, but it's not not high on my list of things to do at the moment.

I'm glad that your friend liked the dither options as I put a lot of work into that. Just wait until you see the next generation of Image2BBC dithering in action!

Kind regards,

Francis

D'oh! When you mentioned a rubber band box I thought that you were talking about something else. I've just got so much on the go just now I seem to be in an almost permanent state of tiredness.

Yes, it will be possible to crop images in this manner, but it will probably be in the release after the next one.

Kind regards,

Francis

Thanks.... Looks good..

There are loads of funky file formats for the c64 (lots of new ones that use hardware tricks and are way way over my head, I only understand the native ones) - But I recon if your program could just spit out a BMP downsized to a user selectable size and dithered pallet (maybe 4 colours, 8 and 16 or custom maybe by importing a .csv of the pallet in RGB Values ?) , then that would be a really really good head start for all sorts of cros devs.....the output could then be processed in other tools....

Things get complicated with C64 screens, for hires eg... 320 x 200 Its basically a B+W image, BUT each 8x8 section can have a different colour for the foreground (1000 characters and it used 1K for this colour data)....

Now, once you go up to Multicolour, you have only 160x200, but each 8x8 (well 4x8 due to using 2 bits per pixel) , can have a pallet of 4 colours.... 00, 01, 10 , 11 - and 2k is allocated for the colours....

FLI's and stuff.... I don't know... But I presume that the images are pretty big, as they are kind of dithered every other frame, and the image (2 pixels per pixel) is also shifted by 1 pixel, to improve the horizonal res... Yes... complicated..... They also use overlayed multiplexed sprites, to give more colours and stuff..... So.... you could really loose sleep !!!

I also guess, a lot of just reducing colours and resizing could be done in lots of other pc based tools like Gimp or whatever.... but like my mate says... you seem to have a really good handle on the dither algo's.....

Hence why I suggest just spittting out a very nicely processed BMP image.... and let the 'other platform' guys worry about it

Keep up the good work....

Kind Regards, Colin