thefox wrote:I think he was talking about your "photo converter". And I second his request.
UncleSporky wrote:Anyway I was initially talking about your photo-converting program
Oh, sorry about that. The thing is that it isn't a program! I follow that "algorithm" manually, using Photoshop. =)
Here's an example though, using that image from the Wikipedia article that talks about palettes:
This didn't work out so well IMO. All the green is gone.
UncleSporky wrote:Hm, none of the programs I commonly use other than Photoshop can do PCX.
Yeah, not many programs work with PCX anymore. This was mainly for me though, and I found GIMP to be the perfect tool to edit the levels, so the fact that it supported the format was enough for me.
Speaking for myself, TGA seems like a good choice, as it can do color-mapped images with RLE compression
tepples wrote:Windows BMP also supports RLE compression in 4-bit and 8-bit modes.
Initially I was gonna use BMP, but found some complications (don't remember which), so I switched to PCX. But out of curiosity, I saved the same level map image using the 3 formats (PCX, BMP and TGA), and PCX seriously outperformed the other two. So it's not only simpler to code, but it also compresses better.
The reason for this is that the RLE implementations of the other 2 formats encode the lengths of uncompressable runs too (and there are many of those in the tiny NES tiles), which causes expansion of the uncompressable data. PCX however uses the higher codes (192 and up) to indicate compressed runs, and since the images never have that many colors, uncompressable data does not expand, because they use codes < 192.
EDIT: I may have screwed up with that image, as some areas appear to have 5 colors. Whatever, it doesn't look good anyway.