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2. Introduction

2.1 General Information

CPC2x is an extensible converter of CPC screensaves to formats that are common on today's computers. As of version 2.0, CPC2x contains code that allows it to be compiled into two programs, CPC2GIF and CPC2TIFF. In this version screensaves must be regular sized graphics (160x200, 320x200 or 640x200), saved as either a raw dump of screen memory or as a Multiface II file. A program called packager is included to generate a pseudo-Multiface II file which contains mode and colour information, should you not have a Multiface.

The latest distribution is available at http://www.guild.net/~stroucki/soft/cpc2x.zip.

2.2 Compatibility Information

General

Compilation is easy; the source conforms to strict ANSI C, and has been tested on IRIX, SunOS, Solaris, Linux, MSDOG and, with limitations, CP/M. Binaries are provided for systems which do not have readily available quality free compilers, such as CP/M and MSDOG. The program does not use a great amount of resources, and time complexity is linear.

CP/M Detail

The compiler used to compile the CP/M version of CPC2TIFF was the freely available Aztec-C compiler. I don't know if it was a problem with the "low" amount of memory available, or the libraries, but some data would not be written to large output files (read: TIFF) somewhere in the middle of the conversion. GIF files were created without a problem.

I don't really recommend anybody to convert their images using a 4 MHz box, but I thought of it as a challenge to make the program as portable as possible.

The command line for compilation was c -O -V -DGIF cpc2x.c for the regular version and c -O -V -DGIF -DLOMEM cpc2x.c for the low memory version. Replace -DGIF with -DTIFF to get TIFF output. The low memory versions need unistd.h for unlink(). Aztec-C does not include unistd.h, so unixio.c was copied to unistd.h. The low memory version uses 16k of virtual memory, where it does the first layout conversion.

2.3 Conversion speed

On an Amstrad CPC 464, the regular memory versions took around one minute from prompt to prompt to convert an image. An 80286 takes about 5 seconds, while workstations and comparable computers complete the job immeasurably fast.


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