Loading screen (and conversion from Spectrum)

[merman]

So, I am working on an Amstrad project, modifying an existing release.

Some advice on two topics:

1. What would be the easiest way to convert & display a Spectrum bitmap?

2. How difficult would it be to "add" such a screen as a loading image before an existing game?

[GUNHED]

Please draw the screen from scratch for the CPC. Conversions from Spectrum were a painful experience ever since.

To use a loading screen...


10 MODE 0
20 LOAD"SCREEN.SCR"
30 WHILE INKEY$="":WEND
40 RUN"GAME"

In line 10 you can set the colors using the INK command if you want.

[Axelay]

So, I am working on an Amstrad project, modifying an existing release.

Some advice on two topics:

1. What would be the easiest way to convert & display a Spectrum bitmap?

2. How difficult would it be to "add" such a screen as a loading image before an existing game?

ConvImgCPC by demoniak is what I use for converting images to CPC screens.

As for adding it to an existing loader, I think that depends a lot on the loader used by the game.

[merman]

@Axelay - is there a way to directly load a Spectrum scree with that utility?

[andycadley]

A spectrum screen is fairly easy to decode as it's just a bitmap (albeit in thirds for weird hardware reasons) and then the attributes. Converting and rendering it is messy if it's not monochrome though (and most loading screens won't be) because your going to have to try and map attributes onto colours and in mode 1 you obviously don't have enough of them. 

You can try just assigning the real colours onto increasing brightness (since Speccy colours are effectively arranged in that order) but it'll be a many to one mapping, so e.g. blue on black is all going to map to a single colour.

Other solutions are reducing the colours down to just four on the Speccy side then processing it with advanced knowledge of that. Or just importing the raw bitmap and recolouring manually.

[TotO]

Now, displaying the attributes on the CPC is more tricky but doable!

[Axelay]

@Axelay - is there a way to directly load a Spectrum scree with that utility?

That utility converts images, so if you can get a 'clean' or uncompressed bmp or png of the loading screen, format it to 320x200 pixels (will be 80x200 in the utility, it references bytes), then you can convert it to a CPC loading screen with that tool.  Save it as .scr format.

Because it will need to reduce to 4 colours and will match colours on brightness (I think), you may need to use a paint tool before hand to remove any colours of similar brightness used together in the same character to avoid a loss of detail, depending on the original screen.