Cross-Platform at Last
Aug. 29th, 2023 08:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerIn poking away once more at the old computer I actually used “back in the day” for some time of late, I did get around to thinking of another small program for the Color Computer I’d once tried out and made a copy of off an old diskette. Even at that point, there’d been something about it I hadn’t quite understood. Now, though, I took another look, and this time I seemed to crack a secret of sorts. I then sort of sat on my thoughts through my recent vacation to save them for a post.
Among the miscellany of programs from a “software of the month” company, “back in the day” I once found a utility that proclaimed it could display MacPaint files, if just a sample at a time scrolling around on the lower-resolution Color Computer screen. It had come with a few files to view. Years later (and quite a while after my family had shifted from the Color Computer to the Macintosh, if by that point with the “1-bit” images of MacPaint fading into the past), when I had some ability to put files on Color Computer disk images and run them in emulators, I tried to sort out just how the samples differed from ordinary MacPaint files in the thought of viewing more than just those samples. This, of course, wasn’t the only or the best way I now had to open old MacPaint files, but that’s never stopped me before when it comes to trying out old computers.
My first efforts didn’t work, though, and I put the program behind me for some time. Having used a hex editor to examine and adjust “printer commands” in just the past few months might have nudged me towards trying again. One of the first things I did find was that the sample files could be converted with a modern tool for viewing vast numbers of antique image formats. Then, at last, I had the impression the sample files might not have been encoded for online transfer with BinHex, but with MacBinary. It so happened I have a modern “dithering” program that can create MacBinary files suitable for importing into Macintosh emulators, and when I tried them out they worked with the Color Computer program as well. As for other MacPaint files, I found a MacBinary encoding program and wound up nodding in slight satisfaction.
After having worked with the “cross-platform” format of RLE for a while, it was instructive in a certain way to see how a system-specific graphics file allowing for bigger images (big enough you pretty much had to print them out to see all of them at once back then) had become viewable on other computers. (I did get to the point of sorting out a “MacPaint viewer” for the TRS-80 Model 4 with optional high-resolution board, now pretty much a standard feature of emulators.) RLE, anyway, had at least somewhat preceded MacPaint.
Among the miscellany of programs from a “software of the month” company, “back in the day” I once found a utility that proclaimed it could display MacPaint files, if just a sample at a time scrolling around on the lower-resolution Color Computer screen. It had come with a few files to view. Years later (and quite a while after my family had shifted from the Color Computer to the Macintosh, if by that point with the “1-bit” images of MacPaint fading into the past), when I had some ability to put files on Color Computer disk images and run them in emulators, I tried to sort out just how the samples differed from ordinary MacPaint files in the thought of viewing more than just those samples. This, of course, wasn’t the only or the best way I now had to open old MacPaint files, but that’s never stopped me before when it comes to trying out old computers.
My first efforts didn’t work, though, and I put the program behind me for some time. Having used a hex editor to examine and adjust “printer commands” in just the past few months might have nudged me towards trying again. One of the first things I did find was that the sample files could be converted with a modern tool for viewing vast numbers of antique image formats. Then, at last, I had the impression the sample files might not have been encoded for online transfer with BinHex, but with MacBinary. It so happened I have a modern “dithering” program that can create MacBinary files suitable for importing into Macintosh emulators, and when I tried them out they worked with the Color Computer program as well. As for other MacPaint files, I found a MacBinary encoding program and wound up nodding in slight satisfaction.
After having worked with the “cross-platform” format of RLE for a while, it was instructive in a certain way to see how a system-specific graphics file allowing for bigger images (big enough you pretty much had to print them out to see all of them at once back then) had become viewable on other computers. (I did get to the point of sorting out a “MacPaint viewer” for the TRS-80 Model 4 with optional high-resolution board, now pretty much a standard feature of emulators.) RLE, anyway, had at least somewhat preceded MacPaint.