Commodore Remix

I thought I'd spend my Sunday evening imaging more photos for the Commodore 64. I hope you all like all 15 of them.


Now, does anybody have a utility to compile those into a slideshow and SID player, complete with psychedelic light show border?




I used the fabulous Project One, and bitmapping for such a limited system is certainly an experience. Nudge the brightness up and the VIC image turns green. And it's almost always there. Thank heaven for the other things I can fiddle with, such as hue.


The pictures are Koala format and the disk comes complete with viewer. Action Replay users are advised to turbo the disk loads.



Though I feel there's something missing, something to boost that Commodore power to the max. And that can only be to load these babies up in Koala and print them out on a proper Commodore MPS-803 black and white printer, complete with worn ribbon.

Brilliant. Especially with the magic taken to hyperspace when viewing through your original cathode-ray television at your bedside, as nature so obviously intended.

What was the process? Are you doing these on a PC? or scanning them directly into a C64?

I can do both actually.

Project One's for the PC, handling Commodore bitmap formats specifically. It exports any image you feed in, ready for your retro machine once it's copied to disk.


And I've enjoyed taking shots around town today, knowing I'm probably the only guy using his modern digital camera just to feed his breadbin. I visited the park, churches, Dawson's music shop, riverside and abandoned school as I snapped away. Just a couple of pictures aren't mine, such as the clock tower from town square, so I packed a lot in. There's also a handful of random stuff I pulled from the web on the final disk.



Reading's got some lovely stuff in it and I'm clearly getting the hang of putting the realism across. Though the demon green was still so bad that some pics I just rendered monochrome.
(However, when I actually wanted green to match the original colours, the software suddenly had a yen for lots of blue or purple.)



I would have liked a shot or two of the Abbey ruins and some other bits and pieces but there we go. And considering the Commie only had a 16 colour, 8-bit palette at thumbnail resolution, I'm exceedingly pleased with my haul. And I'm sure the golden weather helped them as well.



Though I'm not quite done yet. There's still the monochrome hi-res scanner for the Commie to dust off, so be sure to drift by for that sometime.

TV Edition

My telly doesn't like the high contrast. Funny how they look more real on the VGA, whatever the system, even with this tailored set. But various pics from each set can seem more realistic, especially when viewing the slideshow across the room. I prefer the churchyard on the other set for example.

So here's the gentler collection, with the telly controls matching these if all looks good:

I think most people will still use Vice on the PC, so I'll keep the other set up. Especially as other photos look fine with either computer screen or television gamma. Odd as it sounds, Commodore photo graphics probably aren't best suited for television.

...Which reminds me, wasn't I meant to be leaving the Commie way way behind with the Playstation?

...And as I know you must be sick of me by now, here's the Commodore scanner stuff to close.

You lose the colour with Handyscan but gain a 640x400 resolution canvas. And scans did resemble proper newspaper pictures, as they were when this was young.

Pretty slick for a machine whose programmers could still pull a trick to mimic the 16 bits then out.




So what do you all think, are these good or what? I'd love to post this to ourselves 25 years ago.



To see a bit more, run that disk image after booting Handyfox: http://www.dustybin.org.uk/Handyscan.zip

There's plenty more on there and I quite forgot how mad I went when I bought it.

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And for my own info, the Eye icon is to scan, zoom percentage is how much of the canvas to fill, though not necessarily with higher resolution (I use 150-200% and the scanner's own res' slider's nicely set at 200 (which gives me a bigger zoom with more detail but not too zoomed)). And for a nice photo not too bobbly, the TEXT-PHOTO slider seems good at second notch from the right.

Also, when hitting the Save icon, also then click the big pixel. Clicking the little one inside the box just saves the screen rather than the canvas, which usually irritates me.


(Plus I forgot to print out one or two photos on the dot matrix, just to scan in. But hey-ho.)
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Again, I'm really amazed I could squeeze so much from such a tiny fruit - 16 colour graphics and a 320x200 resolution user area. Especially when I can just take an ordinary camera for the task.

But it took a while figuring how to get good monochrome images again. Though I thoroughly enjoyed another pointless trip to the past, even when I was swearing. But isn't that what good home micros were all about?





Bloody good going for machines only designed for niftier sons of Space Invaders.

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The last big outing. And just as exciting this time: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=8187

Also added: viewtopic.php?f=23&t=9984


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And finally....




This guy tried the video digitiser and had no luck. Something I could maybe try for, even though my Dazzle still capture can do a far more efficient job, impure an option as that is.






Don't have to wait four seconds hoping everything won't move either, like the Commie's camera was 1880s rather than 1980s.

http://www.mycommodore64.com/2013/06/19 ... digitizer/