[Coco] vef spec was Re: CoCo3 graphic file formats

[Willard Goosey]

On Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 10:34:15PM -0400, John Strong wrote:
> Thanks.

No problem.  I'd typed all that up a couple of years ago, when Boisy
asked about the VEF format.  
> 
> VEF was one of the "etc" I was interested in.

Well, it's one of the popular CoCo 3 formats.  It's probably THE OS-9
image format.
> 
> Know were to get a few VEF files for testing?

Oh, that's a tough one....  Probably the biggest collection is on
ftp.maltedmedia.com, in the old princeton/os9 archive.  Those will be
CUTS encoded, you'll need to poke around a little in the princeton
files for your favorite flavor of CUTS decoder (DECB, OS-9, generic C
source).

I believe there are some VEFs lurking in the NitrOS-9 CVS tree.  

Give me a day or so to move files across various machines, and I'll
put the vefs I have on my homepage at http://www.sdc.org/~goosey/
> 
> > I got a rare one for you! .hr0 .hr1 .hr2 .hr3
> Surprisingly I remember seeing this one in Rainbow:)

AFAIK it's the only way to save a hi-res screen without resorting to
assembly.  Not a popular format, but I have seen it used in a
commercial video game.  I hacked it into the BASIC Sample Program
"Color Doodle", and used that enough that I eventually wrote a little
OS-9 program to convert hr* files into VEFs.

And I found another obscure graphics format for you:  Micro
Illustrator (an OS-9 LI graphics program) files are straight PMODE 3,1
screen dumps.  To turn them into BASIC .bin files, just wrap the
header and footer onto them:

display 00 18 00 0e 00 > binheader
display ff 00 00 ad fb > binfooter
merge binheader illustratorfile binfooter > file.p31

(view likes it when you stick the .p31 extention onto it, then it
knows the file is PMODE3,1)

Willard
-- 
Willard Goosey  goosey at sdc.org
Socorro, New Mexico, USA
I search my heart and find Cimmeria, land of Darkness and the Night.
  -- R.E. Howard