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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