[Coco] M.E.S.S. Printing

[Gene Heskett]

On Saturday 20 December 2003 00:39, KnudsenMJ at aol.com wrote:
>In a message dated 12/18/03 1:46:51 PM Eastern Standard Time,
>
>npwoods at cybercom.net writes:
>> I know nothing about printer graphics formats, but one option
>> available to you is to simply take screenshots while you are
>> running the emulation.  MESS saves these in PNG format.
>
>Is PNG format something peculiar to Linux?  Or can it be displayed
> on a Windows machine?
>I have two PCs, one with Linux and one with Win98.  If I ever get
> MESS, I'd probably run it on the Windows box since it is 3x faster
> and has lots more RAM.
>
>In Windows, the screen save uses BMP format (which is not related to
>Linux/GCC Bitmap format, which is ASCII C "data" statements and
> quite transparent.) --Mike K.

PNG, stands for Portable Network Graphics, was developed for a .GIF 
replacement in order to bypass the patent on the compression used in 
GIF's and which, until the patent owned by unisys ran out last year,
was used pretty heavily by those who didn't want to pay unisys for a 
seat ($25,000 IIRC) at the tabel if they worked on, wrote, or 
published a program capable of generating a GIF output.  They also 
wanted a $0.25 royalty for every GIF generated by *any* of these 
programs.

I have no idea how much income that generated for unisys, I'd hope it 
never got past the settlement they got out of Compuserve at the time.  

OTOH, M$ apparently paid for the seat, and since then they ruled the 
world, GIF was kept alive, much to the disappointment of the rest of 
us.
 
Most of the world thought that any company owning a patent, but not 
telling anyone until its useage had become so ubitiquos(sp) that it 
was an effectively *the* image file standard, had to be the scum of 
the earth.  I was hopeing the courts would treat it like a trademark, 
which if not defended immediately on the discovery of an 
infringement, will generally be grounds for dismissal.

Anyway, PNG was written originally to get around the lemple-zev 
compression patent owned by unisys.  It would up morphing into 
something even more capable in the form of PNM, for Portable Network 
Movies I believe is what that stands for.

Your history lesson for the day, as recalled by Gene :-)

-- 
Cheers, Gene
AMD K6-III at 500mhz 320M
Athlon1600XP at 1400mhz  512M
99.22% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
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by Gene Heskett are:
Copyright 2003 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.