The Sinclair QL Forum

Been playing around with various QL art programs on a BBQL: Leonardo, Peintre, ARTice. The first two didn't work too well and were a bit slow so I stuck with ARTice. Imported a black & white TIFF file (QLTIFF_bas) and then colorized it in ARTice (with the limited mode 4 colors). Came out ok...the dithering really got the skin pinks and shoe browns (esp when the image is small). Sadly no blue and Asterix's hair is supposed to be yellowish (looks better in larger image):
the screen file is here...to be used in mode 4 (assuming mdv2_ but replace as needed): lbytes mdv2_asterix2co2_scr,131072

I like it

Nice!

So I posted the pic on the "Sinclair QL For Everyone" Facebook page and noticed that in Chrome, it messed with the picture and gave me this (it's a little blurry since I magnified it x2). In an older version of Firefox it stayed grainy.
So it basically got rid of the dithering and colored in the rest...kind of neat. It saved as a jpeg.

Oh, and then there is this...I was editing the picture and saved it in ARTice and found two identical names on the MDV image. It accessed the first one and to get to the second one I had to rename the first one but then everything worked fine. Is this a bug in the QLAY emulator or in QDOS itself (I use the US version of JS -- JSU). Note that the MDV is full.

I've been having a look around the BMP-to-QL conversion programs with the hope of being able to draw QL screens in GIMP, but I'm not getting anywhere fast. So far, I've had the closest to success with BMP2SCR2.

The files test4.bmp and test8.bmp in this package have been drawn with GIMP. Both have been dropped down to standard QL colours (i.e. FFs and 00s only for the red, green and blue channels), and I've made sure that test8.bmp has all its pixels double-width by scaling it to 256x256 then back to 512x256 with no interpolation.

The outputs, test4_scr and test8_scr are the result of running both of these through BMP2SCR2, which can handle Mode 4 and Mode 8 images. They're both readable in QemuLator (in that I can call them up with the standard LBYTES), but they're all speckly - there are white pixels all over the place in test4_scr, and pixels of various marauding colours on test8_scr.

Have a look at these - am I doing something wrong or is this just a quirk of how BMP2SCR2 works, given that the original BMP2SCR was all geared up for Mode 32?

What I really want is an exact replica on the QL screen of what I see in the original BMP files, given that I have made certain that only QL colours have been used and all the Mode 8 pixels are in the right place.

Dilwyn also wrote this nifty PCX conversion tool (convpcx.zip) that I've gotten to work. Btw, having a good Windows graphics editor that can deal with all those formats can be valuable. I used WildBit Viewer since I needed to change some of a TIFF file's attributes, which Windows Paint couldn't do.

Edit: I looked at the pics, seems to be some noise in there, but the actual BMP file's colors seem clean. No idea what's going on.

HI,

If you can convert BMP to PNG image format, then you could use Marcel's Sprite Convert software, that converts PNG files to QL compatiable Sprite format: https://www.kilgus.net/smsqe/sprite-converter/

I'm certainly not just stuck with BMP - that's an image format I'd barely ever use, and since about 2000 or so I've only ever needed it for making Spectrum screens with the other BMP2SCR.

I'll give both of these a shot - finally, it looks like there might be a use for PCX! I always remember that as being a format that Microsoft Paint offered (along with the equally seemingly-useless DIB) that offered no advantages over BMP. Good things may come to those who wait for 21 years...

TMD2003 wrote:I've been having a look around the BMP-to-QL conversion programs with the hope of being able to draw QL screens in GIMP, but I'm not getting anywhere fast. So far, I've had the closest to success with BMP2SCR2.

There's also a program by Dilwyn Jones simply called BMP that can convert 24 bit BMPs direct to QL modes and also can convert between QL modes.
This tool runs only on SMSQ/E platforms (emulators/Q68 etc.) but should avoid the white stars in the resulting _scr files.

BSJR

TMD2003 wrote:I'm certainly not just stuck with BMP - that's an image format I'd barely ever use, and since about 2000 or so I've only ever needed it for making Spectrum screens with the other BMP2SCR.

I'll give both of these a shot - finally, it looks like there might be a use for PCX! I always remember that as being a format that Microsoft Paint offered (along with the equally seemingly-useless DIB) that offered no advantages over BMP. Good things may come to those who wait for 21 years...

Do bear in mind that my Convert-PCX program only really converts black and white images though.