Posted By
IstvanV
on 2008-07-22
09:53:00
|  Re: plus4emu FLI converter
Chronos: do you mean editing the converted image in Paint Shop Pro, and then converting it again ? For this purpose, you may want to use the "pixel exact" image reading mode of p4fliconv; this means that you should save the image to be (re-)converted with a Plus/4 palette in .GIF format, preferably with a size of 320x200 for simple multicolor mode. You can see that the image was actually read in the pixel exact mode from the fact that it is not scaled to the full window size, and it is also loaded much faster.
While the converter uses the plus4emu palette internally, it does allow for some differences and still recognize the GIF file as having the Plus/4 palette; so, VICE and YAPE screenshots would still work if you use those for some reason. However, it is important that all colors are present in the palette - it should not be "optimized" by removing the unused colors, and non-Plus/4 extra colors should not be added, either - at the correct index (so that color #113 is white etc.), and transparency should be avoided too, as it can also change the ordering of colors.
In this mode, all color correction (brightness, gamma, etc.) settings are ignored, but you can still adjust the "multicolor quality" and "MC chrominance error" parameters to fine-tune the conversion.
The current "slow" version of the compressor that uses Huffman coding is actually included with plus4emu as 'compress.exe' in the top level installation directory, and the compressed PRG formats of p4fliconv also use the same type of compression. You can also find the assembler sources of the decompressor and the FLI viewer in src\util\p4fliconv:
decompress_sfx.s - self-extracting decompressor
decompress.s - for use in demos etc.
p4flidisp.s - viewer for FLI images saved as "raw" PRG files by p4fliconv
All the above files can be compiled with CA65, and can be used freely for any purpose without restrictions. Note that the decompress sources include some compile time flags at the top of the file that can be used to make the code slightly smaller and faster. If you still have one of the older p4fliconv.7z packages, you may find a sample program that loads images from a set of compressed files on a disk.
The list of command line flags for the compressor can be printed with the --help option, but here are a few examples of basic usage:
Compress: compress -8 -start x1015 -fastsfx -nocleanup xeo3.prg xeo3_compressed.prg
Test compressed file: compress -t xeo3_compressed.prg
Extract compressed file: compress -x xeo3_compressed.prg xeo3_uncompressed.prg
The "fast" version is not released yet, as it still needs some experimenting to see if it can be improved.
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