Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn
Subject: Re: More bollocks from Mr. Rawlings
From: epoo1@cs.aukuni.ac.nz (Edouard Malachi     Poor           )
Date: Fri, 10 Apr 1992 06:10:58 GMT
Organization: Computer Science Dept. University of Auckland

In <1992Apr4.133450.5602@cs.utwente.nl> kortink@cs.utwente.nl (John Kortink) writes:

> > [...blah blah translator blah blah money blah blah not worth...]
>
>I beg to differ. ChangeFSI is 'equal' in most respects, and is commercial.
>You have a twisted view of what you can get for free and what is worth
>paying what for. You're the type of person who expects a 6-course meal in a
>McDonalds for #2.

Just out of interest, does anyone know just what the latest version of
ChangeFSI is and what its legal standing is? I've got one from about
a year or more ago that I use a lot of the time... Now I think the
wimp frontend was copyrighted (but it was awful and I threw it away
and just use it from the command line--you know, you drop to the CLI
and go 'djpeg r1_jpg out_ppm' 'changefsi out_ppm null: 67 2:1 -view'
I'm quite happy with CLIs and I'm quite happy with windows but I
really dislike having to swap between them all the time, so I often
do the above. Plus I've got all my favourite *NIX cli tools as arc
ports so its quite nice... Only wish the BASH port would hurry up :-)
but the CLI had Public Domain in it...

Anyway, my question was: What is the latest CLI ChangeFSI version
(as I have seen versions with newer windowing interfaces and older
cli parts...) (what it does would also be of some interest)
And: What is the current copyright situation, ie who has copyright,
who uses it and with what versions does it apply?

BTW youll notice I've hacked various new features into ChangeFSI for
my own use, like -view and handling ppm files etc... One thing I
really liked about ChangeFSI was the fact that you had the source
unlike in translator, and adding new features and/or formats was
very easy... I did think about useing the translator module when I
last did a port of jpeg (must get onto version 3... Its sitting in
my *NIX directory right now) but found it didn't let you use its
24bit dithering engine externally... Damn shame really. What I would
really like is a SWI where you pass it in a sprite and then a line
at a time of 24bit data and it does all the scaling and dithering
for you... All the engine would need is sizeof(line)*3 or 4 and
everything else would be simple... Anyone who could convert data into
24 bit (easy with everything--its what I used to do to HAM pix before
ChangeFSI handled them... Convert each line to 24Bit and pass to the
24bit engine in ChangeFSI. The only problem is it slows things down
a bit when handling 1 bit images--it gets slower then it could be)
could then call a SWI and get sprite output from their converters
(I looked at the jpeg source... It would take me in the order of
5 minutes to hack it in if I had such a SWI... The jpeg source is
_extremely_ nice that way)

It would great for people doing, say, renderers, as they could with
very little effort display the pictures in a dithered 256 colour
sprite for all to see... Updating as it goes even... I'm sure there
are lots of other uses for it as well (ummm, like colour cubes...
you generate the 24 bit values via interpolation and then can get
a nice sprite to display back with a reasonable representaion of
the colour space you want... Much better to use then those nasty
Acorn colour selectors.)

Now Acorn I feel should provide programmers with this sort of SWI
as 1) its their job, and 2) they already have the code (via
ChangeFSI)...

But there is one other person who has written high quality dithering
engines for the Arc... The ever talented John Kortink!

Seriously John, do you think it would be a useful addition? Would it
be hard to do? My guess is not, but then again I don't know whats
involved...

(Note to certain comp.sys.acorn readers... This is a attempt at a
polite request, as opposed to the more usual "When are you going
to put jpeg into translator you lazy bastard? Not that I ever use it
so you wont be getting any money out of me anyway. So there." Sound
familiar? Yes, you know who you are.)

Anyway this has obviously been another rambling post by moi so I'll
wrap it up...

Cheers,
       Edouard.