Spectrum 512

Note for French readers: The French manual of Spectrum 512 was scanned and is available at www.microstalgia.fr.st

                        README FILE FOR SPECTRUM 512

                          NOTE FOR HARD DISK OWNERS

        Hi there!  The only thing we have to report in this release
        is a bit of a problem with early versions of the Supra hard
        disk formatting software.  If you used a Supra formatting
        program prior to version 2.61, due to vagaries in their
        format program, your disk I/O will probably not work with
        SPECTRUM 512.  Solution: Contact Supra, get their latest
        formatter, backup your hard disk, and reformat.

        Or: Run Spectrum 512 from a floppy.

                      DIGITIZED IMAGES FOR SPECTRUM 512
                      (or... more good things to come)

          It's nice to be able to use 512 colors in a painting
        program.  But when it comes to color digitizing it's not only
        nice -- if you want to achieve that real 3-D quality in your
        picture, it's a must.  The painter does not have to
        meticulously copy every color of a real-life object.  In
        fact, he/she can use completely unnatural colors to create
        vivid super-real images (even more intense then real-life!).
        A digitizer, however, is just a machine; it has no artist's
        instinct.  The only way for it to produce a good picture is
        to copy the original colors as closely as possible.  If you
        have only 16 colors to cover the whole 8x8x8-bit (16 million
        hue) color space, this is almost impossible to achieve.
        Typically, you'll get the main colors of the original image,
        but the subtle (harmonic) shades that create the impression
        of depth, roundness of objects, etc., will be lost.

        At this moment (9/8/87) TRIO Engineering is working in
        coordination with Digital Vision on a program that will make
        it possible to produce 512-color images with the ComputerEyes
        video digitizer.  The program will use dithering (color
        mixing) to increase the effective number of colors to about
        25,000 (wheres the current Amiga HAM mode conversion only
        creates about 3,500 colors).  It will display the image
        captured with the video camera or VCR, allow it to be
        adjusted for proper brightness, contrast and color balance
        and then saved on disk in SPECTRUM 512 format.  It will also
        preprocess raw video data to achieve overall picture quality
        comparable to that of hand-drawn Spectrum pictures.  Picture
        files produced by this program could then be loaded into
        Spectrum itself for editing, composition, etc., enriching the
        world of Spectrum with real-life images.

        Antic Software and TRIO Engineering also intend to work with
        other digitizer manufacturers for the Atari ST to interface
        their hardware with SPECTRUM 512.  As new technologies become
        available, we will make sure that, if possible, they will be
        compatible with our format.

        For now, stay tuned to SIG*Atari on CompuServe for more
        information about this.  And if you want a massive library of
        incredibly realistic photo-digitized Spectrum pictures that
        we've had especially digitized on the Amiga, check out
        Download Library 12 (DL12) in that same Atari forum (type GO
        ATARI16 on CompuServe).  There are dozens of 3,500-color
        Spectrum pics there that we've been digitizing with Digiview
        on the Amiga.

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