Box Art Scans for ST Hard Disk Games

[English Invader]

I've always been amazed at this.  How is the ST able to produce these images?  As far as I know, there were no scanners made for the system and I don't know of any other way that it could produce photographic pictures.

 

Will someone please enlighten me?  I've been wondering about this for years.

[ParanoidLittleMan]

Of course scans were not done with scanners for Atari ST. + most of scans were done after 2000 .

Here is how I do it, and I guess that I'm who made most of conversions.

1. DL-ing scan. for instance from atarimania, mobygames ...  It's usually JPG format in 16 M colors.

2. Need to cut out from it part what want to display on Atari. I use res. 320x273 mostly. So, cutting most interesting part, then resize it to 320x273. Of course taking care about proper aspect ratio.

3. Convert it to format usable with Atari ST, STE . And that will be not 16 colors format, but those high-color formats developed by Douglas Little, Cyg . They can show much more colors at once, especially on STE, which has larger palette, so even gradations can look very good.  I use mostly Cyg's HighSTcolor17, which can show thousands color nuances on Atari STE. all 512 colors at once on ST. File size (HST) is 69888 bytes for 320x273 .

Douglas Little-s Photochrome can display even more nuances in special dual palette mode, but it goes with longer files.

4. Show it on ST, STE: it needs special, fast code (ASM of course), which can change palette on-fly, syncronized with video generation. Timing is crucial, so it checks for CPU clock, for instance, and it's little different for NTSC (USA) and PAL (EU) systems .

 

In one line can display max 50-80 colors - no time for more, but next line can have totally different colors.  It needed lot of experimenting to find best settings.

[Guest]

Hello! 

I think how it must work is in a similar way to the various discovered/invented modes for the Commodore 64, which allowed these magnificent images...

 

Far more colour that was ever expected of the machine.

 

Um. Saying that, I have no reference to what you mean? 

 

Could someone post a couple of example images for me ? I'd love to see some.

In what way are these images being used? I am confused by title of your post, English Invader.

 

Ps are you EI over on Lemon64?

 

 

[English Invader]

4 hours ago, ∞ Vince ∞ said:

In what way are these images being used? I am confused by title of your post, English Invader.

 

Ps are you EI over on Lemon64?

 

Yes, I am.  Glad to hear you're on the mend!

 

I'm guessing that you don't run Atari ST hard disk adaptions from this site:

https://atari.8bitchip.info/fromhd2.php

 

Each game has a scanned image of the commercial box art that appears as the game loads up as demonstrated here:

 

[Guest]

5 minutes ago, English Invader said:

 

Yes, I am.  Glad to hear you're on the mend!

 

I'm guessing that you don't run Atari ST hard disk adaptions from this site:

https://atari.8bitchip.info/fromhd2.php

 

Each game has a scanned image of the commercial box art that appears as the game loads up as demonstrated here:

>Video<

Oh right, Ok. Cheers! Good to see you ?

[Guest]

Lot of love for Boulder Dash over here on AA. ? I

[English Invader]

2 minutes ago, ∞ Vince ∞ said:

Lot of love for Boulder Dash over here on AA. ? I

Personally, I prefer Skulldiggery to Boulder Dash.  The levels you see at the beginning are deceptively easy; the game gets a lot harder after level 4 onwards.

 

This is one of the few ST exclusives and one of my desert island games for the system.

[Guest]

14 minutes ago, English Invader said:

Personally, I prefer Skulldiggery to Boulder Dash. 

Cool.

14 minutes ago, English Invader said:

This is one of the few ST exclusives and one of my desert island games for the system.

Nice! I did my Desert Island Disks. I've got 10 all time favourite games for various systems. Boulder Dash isn't in the top 20 but it probably breaks the top 50.