Anyone have a fave loading picture?

For me the one that sticks in my mind was the Nightshade loading picture, although I know there must be loads more kicking about.

And while not strictly speaking a loading pic, who can forget the old Melvyn Wright's "music machine" scrolling on its Mode 7 glory!

yeah Nightshade scr was cool

i liked Thrust, Ravenskull

and Codename droid....obviously

Definitely Ravenskull - here it is in full glory ....

I've been thinking that I always thought the BBC Micro loading screen for Barbarian was a bit disappointing when compared to the fabulous artwork with Maria Whittaker and Michael Van Wijk (Wolf).

I thought I'd have a bash with Francis' tool. I'm not sure if it was just me, but I found this one pretty hard to convert to looking remotely easy on the eye on the beeb. I ended up using MODE 1 with the Floyd-Steinberg (Fan Modified) Dither Method:



It looked OK in the tool (above), but looked horrid when I loaded it into BeebEm.

My second attempt looks better:



Dunno. Possibly an improvement on the original?



I'm sure someone with more gfx skills could probably do better ...

Sam.

You've used dithering with the art picture and not the photo. Thats the opposite of what usually works. When I've tried converting loading screens I usually only want dithering on a part of the picture or none at all. I often change the colours in a loading screen before bringing it into Image Converter.

err .. ? Not following. Both my loading screens were created from the picture/photo and I used a dithering method with both, though possibly not the Floyd-Steinberg (Fan Modified) method on the second one - I can't remember. Not sure what you mean by that's the opposite of what works?


OK, but there's no option for doing that in the Image Converter, is there?


I haven't put a loading screen image into the Image Converter? The source image was always the photo cropped from the original advert ...

I'm not sure I'm following you - could you expand?

Sam.

I think the first Barbarian picture came out the best. I thought that was the original image.

I find PSP3 useful for low resolution images. It has an annoying problem in that it can't access any drives other than the one its installed in. I might try PSP4.

Here is a 2 colour Spectrum loading screen converted to 320x256 using XNView with Hanning resampling. I then used PSP3 to decrease the colour depth to 2 with the nearest colour method. Then Image converter put the BBC yellow in. I don't think I could do any better. The original picture had many dotty parts.

Converted image

Spectrum original

No, I used a scan from one of the original advert pages. The first picture I posted above is what it looked like in the preview option the Image Converter. I agree it looked the best, but unfortunately it didn't appear to look as good when I loaded it into BeebEm ... I probably did something silly at some point - I've mentioned it to Francis over at RS.


PaintShop Pro?


Granted, I didn't resize it before I put it in the image converter ... if I get some time, I'll try resizing it with GIMP first.

Sam.

I presume its possible to convert an image to the BBC palette with some standard graphics programs. I'm not sure if I needed to use Paint Shop Pro now. Modern programs don't usually work the same with low res. images so it has its uses.

After some pointers from Francis, here's go #3. Definitely an improvement on the official one, if I do say so myself ...

Sam.

I would prefer the Image Converter to save to GIF since BMP doesn't have a 2 colour format. Version 87a probably works with many programs whereas newer versions will have trouble. I don't think BMP saves to less than 256. Its not allowed on this forum either.

I've redone my conversion to 320x240 to keep the aspect ration and found a better method.