
From: Marcel de Kogel <m.dekogel@student.utwente.nl>

Subject: Re: RonsWeek'n'ADAM November 16, 1997

At 00:57 17-11-97 -0800, you wrote:
>....Now... on the question of Powerpaint conversions, here's my
problem. Put quite simply, I'm having trouble understanding 
what's out there.  Quite dumb am I. Follow do I not. I've just 
sent Marcel de Kogel a message asking about the output files 
produced by BMP2PP.EXE. The program exists in both Windows
95 and DOS versions, and does indeed appear to produce an output
file from an input file. The latter is a bitmap, and the former 
appears to be a Powerpaint formatted file. When I transfer the 
output file to an ADAM disk however, and try to load it into 
Powerpaint, there is no joy in Mudville.  Now along with BMP2PP.
EXE and PP2BMP.EXE there are a series of files whose job it is 
to perform the conversion of disk images, ADAM to IBM and
presumably vice-versa. It is not clear to me at this stage
whether the output from BMP2PP.EXE needs to be processed by one 
or more of these disk image converters. If anyone can shed 
some light on that, please do.


Marcel writes:

Here's how the Powerpaint utilities were tested:
1) A disk image was created from a standard 160K ADAM disk
containing the Powerpaint programme:
           dcopy a: ppaint.dsk /t:40 /s:8 /h:1
2) A bitmap was converted to Powerpaint format. Let's use a
240x160 bitmap called "kerstmis.bmp":
           pp2bmp kerstmis.bmp
3) The resulting .pp file was put on the disk image - beware 
you use the correct file type:
           wrdisk ppaint.dsk kerstmis.pp,kerstmis -type 2
4) The disk image was put back on the original floppy:
           dcopy ppaint.dsk a: /t:40 /s:8 /h:1
5) Put the floppy in your ADAM, reset the computer and load the
picture called "kerstmis" (or whatever you called it)  Of course 
there are other ways to transfer files from the PC to the ADAM,
these should work perfectly fine as well  

As for the disk image converters: These are only needed when you
use non-standard ADAM floppies, like e.g. 720KB ones. If you do,
you'll need to convert the DCOPY output to something ADAMEm and 
the related utilities can read, and then convert the image back 
before using DCOPY again to put it back on an ADAM floppy. If 
you use regular 160K floppies (or indeed if you don't even use 
DCOPY), you'll never have to worry about converting anything.

BTW, I've had mixed results with printing pictures, esp. colour
ones, created this way. The utilities are optimised for display-
ing, not for printing.

- Marcel

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