I thought I'd reply to Del Williams through EUG for the benefit of anyone else who may be interested. I don't know much about the image processing stuff previously mentioned in EUG #36 but I have Imagemaster, which is quite good.

It came with a Scanner from Castle Technology, but it can be bought separately from most Acorn sources for about twenty five pounds. It can handle .gif, .pcx, .bmp, clear, MTV, pbm, .jpg, tiff and, of course, Acorn's own Sprite file formats.

I've not really got the hang of all it does yet. However, if it means anything, it can "alter the colour balance gamma and images can be filtered or tinted as well". You may still need ChangeFSI for some things though.

Also included in the Imagemaster package is a Tracing program to convert Sprites to Drawfiles and "D2Font" - which converts Drawfiles into Outline Fonts.

Onto other things. Some while ago now, I mentioned how I once joined a vehicle owners' club, which liked new members to send in a photo of themselves and family if appropriate. I went on to say that it was a pity that, for EUG readers, this is not quite so easy.

Well, one way or another, with some bits of technical jiggery-pokery, I have been able to produce some of the afore mentioned mug shots. They will be present on this disk with a simple viewing program. Basically, they are Mode 0 screens, loaded with *LOAD ... 3000. (The ... being the name of each particular image. In my case: me sat on Filey Beach, the family (wife Tina and two kids: David (age 6) and Mark (14 months)) sat in armchair and an image I found on disk somewhere of the countryside.

If anyone else fancies appearing in EUG in such a manner, send me a good clear photo: colour or black and white. Prints seem to work best, although I can convert transparencies. Note if sending me transparencies they must be well exposed. If they're underexposed by much, the resulting Mode 0 screen is too dark. Note also that the finished product will be black and white. Perhaps Gus might like to have a full opening screen of himself to start the ball rolling. [I think not - Gus] Or two screens. A nice smiley opening screen and a grimacing one for the "Why Don't You Send It In?!" editorial rant. Tee hee.

Note if anyone is interested, I would like to set one or two rules:

1. If you want your photo back, include a return stamped, addressed envelope.
2. Allow two to three weeks turnaround. Don't expect your photo back by return of post!
3. If a photo is in any way valuable, do not send me it. Obviously I will take the utmost care but I don't want to accidentally damage anything and be told it's irreplaceable. Things do get damaged in the post occasionally as well.
4. If anybody already has a photo scanned on disk, I can convert these as well. So long as it's in one of the image formats mentioned at the beginning of this letter. I can handle all Acorn disk formats (ADFS, DFS, etc) on either 5.25" or 3.5" disk (3.5" preferred!) and the usual Atari and IBM formats on 3.5" only. Note that rules 1, 2 and 3 apply equally to disks.
5. Continuing on from 4. If I damage a disk, I will replace it but if the contents are irreplaceable, make sure you've got a backup copy you post it!

That's about all for now. Happy viewing!

John Crane, EUG #37

John Crane