Random Images ================== ~ A Xmas Sampler ~ Arranged in December 2009 by CiH / All images retain the copyrights of their respective owners. Ok, whatsitallaboutthen? -------------------------- This is a small sampler of a much bigger collection of picture files coming to an Atari near you in the not so distant future. In the long period between diskmag issues, I've devoted some of the available time to collecting and converting many random pictures that took my fancy, to a format viewable on the good old ST or STe. You might guess that some inspiration was taken from the Pouet 'Random Images' thread, along with a small part of my source material. (In fact, less than I hoped from that source, with Pouet, there generally is a high crap to bandwidth ratio as we all know, the picture thread is no exception!) Otherwise I have gathered interesting pictures from a variety of sources, specifically themed searches on the interweb, press and media stuff which took my fancy, even suitable pictures from my own photo collection, old screen grabs etc. All of this has been done, little by little, over a period of several months. The next step was to take these diverse images, convert them to an easily accessible format on the Atari ST series, scale down to a suitable size to view on the small screen. I ended up with a lot of targa pictures, which co-operated happily with Photochrome and the Apex Media targa viewer. Both of these proggies are included with this sampler for ease of use. So I've gathered many hundreds of images, the last count, some time ago, put it somewhere near 500 images, there are certainly more now, and more will be added before a full and final release. But whyyy?! ------------- There are various reasons. Firstly there hasn't been a lot of new highcolour material in recent years. The old stuff appears to have been re- used to death. I guess this was some early effort to be eco-conscious before anyone even breathed one word about global warming, but aren't you all fed up with the same picture of that damned parrot! (tactfully put, CiH, well done!) Secondly, I'm researching new and exciting ways to add content to my new SatanDisk and UltraSatan storage devices, which I sort of hinted at earlier this year. Thirdly, once I started, the whole thing just sort of snowballed, like a pebble gathering snow, so I've gone as far as arranging themed folders on what will be the finished article. Oh, did I mention I'm doing something similar with animated .GIF files as well? This could run to a CD-ROM styled effort by the time I've finished. Another thing, merry Xmas! Tools used. ------------ There were a variety of common and garden implements used to bring these pictures to you. On the Mac, the built-in picture displayer 'Preview' allowed me to sort out preliminary image quality issues. Then 'Gimp' took over to allow me to trim and scale and prune to get it to fit. I've mainly used Hatari, which allows a more or less working display of enhanced palette images now to view the end result. For final testing the pictures have made their way onto my UltraSatan/Satandisk equipped STe. I've generally assumed the STe to be the most suitable 'base hardware' for this collection. the Doug Little picture viewers could fake 4096 colours on the STFM, I have not tested these pictures yet in this mode, but I intend to do this before any final release. Of course, the STe can make the leap to a nicely faked 32768 colours, which is where the image quality starts to get interesting. Other Atari hardware of the MC68k persuasion can join in too, so the TT and Falcon are not excluded by any means. All the images in this pre-release have been carefully selected for their strict compliance with a 320 x 200 resolution, and will display fully on a standard ST/STe. Quite a few other images in the full collection come in different resolutions, quite often 320 x 240, or even 320 x 480, which is taken care of by a different picture viewer, namely the targa viewer written by Ray of tSCc. At the moment, I am working in loose collaboration with Ray, and hope to obtain an improved picture viewer in due course. This would preferably be able to offer a better viewing experience than the current flickery hack for those larger images. So here's a little reminder for him! If there is anyone else out there, who can offer a previously unreleased slick .TGA picture viewer, especially one that can do overscan or cope with non-standard sizes without flickering your eyeballs to death, then feel free to get in touch! Oh, if anyone has got an animated GIF player that can offer half-decent speeds on a stock ST -SNIP!- (That's quite enough from you! / Undignified begging prevention editor.) The future look and feel. --------------------------- The final release is going to be a lot bigger than this taster version. I'm still debating whether to roll it in together with the animated GIF's. Either way. getting this lot online will be more than a little bit fun. There should be a wider choice of picture viewers, (Cmon Ray!) and the readme file will be expanded to include a folder by folder commentary and hints and tips. Final words. ------------- Enjoy this.. Merry Crimble.. Eat nutritious food.. Read Low Res Mag.. My apparent inactivity for 2009 is an illusion.. Well mostly not, I have been an idle sod with an ever-growing list of unfinished projects, but here's a small lifesign hiding something much bigger, which does exist! Another thing I need to do soon is to resolve the working hard drive conundrum on my CT60 and bring that back to life. I have got a plan, sort of, for my unreleased Alive 15 material for next year, I guess Cyclone could still surprise everyone and release the damn issue, but on the other hand, it does no harm to prepare a back-up plan. Damn, this started as a sensible readme file, but is rapidly degenerating into an end of year newsletter, personal issues disclosure column, sorry! Ok, that will most definitely do, see you all again next year. CiH, December 2009.