

Ron's Week'n'ADAM 

September 9, 1997

by Ron Mitchell


Nice to see pictures of ADAMCON 09 distributed with the latest 463 
ADAM (September '97). Jerry Vrancks (gvrancks@crown.net) is obvi-
ously making use of his new technology.

Speaking of which.... I have a set of ADAMCON photo's myself to put 
out for general offer. These photos' are available in digital format
for a couple of days from the following Internet address:

        http://www.filmworks.com

Go to the "Photomail" download area, quote customer order number 
08706686 and roll number 22386053 You'll also need to download
Photoworks v2.1 which is available for free. I'm not at all sure 
how long the file will be available for download from there. The 
initial notice said they would be retained until September 17, but
now that I've downloaded them, the period of retention might be 
shortened.  Difficult to tell from the instructions on the Seattle
Filmworks site.  If you find that you can't get them from there, let 
me know, and I'll E-mail you the pictures and the Photoworks software
 you need to display them on your IBM. Needless to say, you need at
least a 486/33 with 4 meg of RAM to do this. The results, in my 
humble estimation were just a little under exposed,  but that's not 
Seattle Filmworks' problem. It's more like my problem. One of these 
days I'll get the flash settings right on this old camera of mine. 
However, the Photoworks software allows you to play a little, 
adjusting the brightness and contrast, along with a range of photo 
values that I know nothing about. Once duly 'enhanced' the product 
was passable enough.  I suppose you readers are going to tell me that
that there's nothing new in any of this. 

The concept of downloading personal photos to disk is a bit of a 
novelty in these parts. We've been able to get slides and prints put 
on CDROM for some time, and Mom even has a Kodak player. But they're
expensive... about $1.99 Canadian per image. Seattle Filmworks has 
opened a branch plant in Richmond BC, just outside of Vancouver and 
is building a rapidly expanding Canadian market.  Their service is 
reasonably priced - $17.70 Canadian for a roll of 20 and that 
includes the photos on disk option plus a replacement roll of  film.
From here I mail the roll to be processed, and they notify me via  
E-mail when it's ready for download from their Internet site. Neat
stuff.

Now I have my ADAMcon photos on disk, and I can play with them as I
want... even to the point of putting nasty captions under Zonker's 
(lkl4511@mindspring.com) photo... ie, "Would you buy a used car from
this man?" (Just kidding Zonk.)

All of which led to another project.

Both Rich Drushel (drushel@apk.net) and Marcel deKogel  (m.dekogel
@student.utwente.nl) have produced programs that will convert
IBM bitmap files to Powerpaint format. Last week I downloaded
Marcel's from his home page (http://www.komkon.org/~dekogel/adam
em.html) along with another copy of the ADAM emuulator. It's been 
a while since my last visit to Marcel's site. He's been hard at
work in the interim, having added a  host of new utilities for the
emulator as well as the PowerPaint conversion programs.
BMP2PP.EXE is an easy program to use. It will take a bitmap file on
your IBM and convert it to PowerPaint format. It's menu driven and 
uses the Windows 'look and feel'. 

Unfortunately at this stage, I've not been able to get it to work.
Maybe someone can check me up on my procedures which were as follows:
1) Conversion of my ADAMCON 9 photo's.  (or one of them as a test).
The CD registered version of Photoworks (available from Seattle
Filmworks at a charge of $14.95 US) will save it's output in .BMP 
format (and just about every other format), so it's a relatively easy
matter to save my photos as .BMP. 
2) Loading the resulting .BMP file into BMP2PP.EXE. No problem. The
picture shows up and looks just like the original. There are a couple
of options for conversion to the PowerPaint format, including a couple
of black and white options. Just for the heck of it, using the menu 
instructions, I converted the same picture 4 times, using both color 
formats and both black and white formats, all of which showed up and 
were visible on the screen in Powerpaint format. The black and white 
versions weren't bad, but the color versions looked a little wierd. 
No matter - onwafrd
3) Saving to disk in the IBM environment. No problem.... routine
stuff. So I now have 4 files which I should be able to transfer to 
the ADAM environment, right? Each one of these files is reported as 
being 80k in length. That sounds about right for a complete work-
space in Powerpaint. 
4) Converting each of the 4 files to its ADAM equivalent using Chris
Braymen's (70057.2035@compuserve.com) ADAMDOS program resulted in 4 
ADAM formatted disk Powerpaint files (80k binaries) which I then 
attempted to load into PowerPaint. It refused to read a single one.
I have absolutely no idea what the result would have looked like, 
maybe good, maybe bad, but I mean to find out.  Stay tuned.


-Ron

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