[Coco] CoCo pictures to JPEG

[Roger Taylor]

At 08:41 PM 4/12/2008, you wrote:

>Do it!  And I like Torsten's idea of using PNG.  Maybe have a radio
>button to select between the two.  But actually, none of these images
>are going to be large enough to really warrant the extra compression of
>JPG.  Now that GIF's patents have expired, that might be a good option
>as well.  In addition to showing up in modern web browsers, GIF files
>will display on all kinds of older computers that weird people like us
>might also have in our stables, such as MM/1s, Amigas, archaic Macs,
>etc.  Might I also humbly suggest the .PIX format of the DS-69
>Digisector, and the Rascan's .IMG formats.
>
>Depending on what libraries or utilities you are using to do your file
>format conversions, it might also not be too hard to have it accept
>separate red, green, and blue digitizer files and output a high-color
>image from them.  That might warrant JPG.  I wrote a couple simple
>programs in C to do that in OS-9.  They took DS-69 PIX, or VEF images
>and converted them to 16-bit Targa (TGA) files, which could then be
>viewed in SVGA or converted to .IFF or .GIF files.


The main goal is to give a way to preserve CoCo pictures that might 
be dying away on old floppy disks.  There's still work on the user's 
part since disks might have to be copied into the PC and the picture 
files extracted to your file system.

I'd start out by supporting the most popular CoCo picture 
format.  The decoder would be called between the normal upload & post 
routines.  I'm not sure if the graphics library for PHP will output 
GIF but if it will I'll add that as an option along with PNG.

The idea is to have the Gallery automatically rescale the pictures to 
a larger size with correct aspect ratio.  Other formats can be added over time.

Being the author of Projector-3, I'd eventually support all known 
CoCo picture formats.