Subj : Re: Saving Screens
To   : J.B. Wood
From : ArcadeAge
Date : Thu Dec 27 2018 08:31 am

On Thursday, December 27, 2018 at 12:49:54 PM UTC+1, J.B. Wood wrote:
> Hello, all, and I trust everyone had a joyeux noel.  My C-64, two Vic 
> 1541 drives and 1701 monitor still operate just like they did when new 
> 35 years ago.  (I'm surprised that the 1541 spindle motor drive belts 
> haven't disintegrated after all that time!).  I hauled out my copy of 
> John Henry Software's "Christmas Carols" because of the nice hires 
> screens displayed (accompanying SID music just has an organ sound) . 
> Does anyone know of an easy way to capture those screens and store them 
> in a Koala or other CBM recognized format?  Thanks for your time and 
> comment.  Sincerely,
> 
> PS - I'm also surprised that after 35 years my 5.25" floppies are still 
> readable.
> -- 
> J. B. Wood	            e-mail: arl_[...]@hotmail.com

This sure was harder than I had thought it would be!

I tried both, saving from Action Catridge Plus's menu, and from VICE's 
"Snapshot->Save media file..." option, but each time I tried, the bitmap came 
out garbled. It _is_ located at $2000, this I check "by hand", but somehow the 
automated image savers 
fail.

What I ultimately did was: Save the VICE media file in BMP format, then open it 
in Gimp (with gimp-cbmplugs installed), and export it in .koa format from 
there.

However, things are still a bit tricky. Let's pick the first song, Angels We 
Have Heard On High, as an example. What we have is a multicolor bitmap image, 
overlayed with single-color (hi-res) sprites (the music notes), and a 
vertically split screen, text 
mode at the bottom.
We cannot export this from Gimp as a Koala file without doing some adaptions: 
First I cropped the image to 320x200, removing the border. Next I placed a 
rectangular selection around the text area, then picked a big brush to 
overpaint the whole area in 
background color (i.e., white). Then I scaled the image down to 160x200 
(interpolation: none!), and back to 320x200 (again, no interpolation). Now the 
image is ready for exporting in .koa-format...and indeed, Koala Painter had no 
trouble opening and 
displaying it.

While doing some research for this issue, I came upon a forum discussion where 
someone mentioned a program named "koala2ppm.c". I was unable to obtain such a 
file or program text. Does anyone reading this know anything about this?
See
http://gimpforum.de/showthread.php?p=132185
(in German)

The packaging to both of John Henry Software's products, Christmas Carols and 
Party Songs, features screenshots that are not from the Commodore 64 version -- 
at least not the one published. The font is different and there's no glitch at 
the edge where 
text borders on graphics. What computer system could these screenshots have 
been taken from?
See
http://www.mycommodore64.com/2013/12/14/xmas-carols-on-your-c64/

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