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.