Re: Help needed with HyperStudio

[mikew50@aol.com (MikeW50)]

In message <872296145.170403@pasteur.dialix.com.au>,
df@adelaide.dialix.com.au (David Francis) said:

>Can anyone advise me on how to solve this problem?
 
>...I had visions of scanning 
>all the old black and white photos in my family album and making a stack 
>for my family tree.
 
>Trouble is b & w photos only look half way reasonable if they're scanned
>in 320 mode, not in 640, and all the HyperStudio sample stuff is in 640.
 
>Okay I'm sure I can find suitable coloured graphics in 320 for the HS
>cards - but when I try to insert my scanned photos, whether as clip art
or
>'added graphics' the two seem to be incompatible. Either the background
>goes to b & w 320 mode, or the photo turns into a multicoloured blob.
 
>There must be a way to get over this problem because I found a Star Trek
>stack on the net which has b & w photos of the main Enterprise bridge
>characters superimposed on a coloured background.

Actually, there are some tricks, but fundamentally your Apple IIGS doesn't
want to display any more than 16 colors on a single scan line in 320 mode.
I'm not sure what you saw, but here are the possible ways to mix gray
scale pictures with colored background pictures:

1. Don't use a full 16 shades of gray. (Some are too close to distingush
easily on most monitors anyway.) Let's say you settle on 12 shades of
gray; this leaves you with 4 additional colors. You can pick any 4 colors
you want, and carefully create color art using those 4 colors and gray.

2. Mix the scan lines. While 320 mode graphics must use a particular 16
color color palette on each line, there are actually 16 different color
palettes available--and you can assign each scan line to any available
color. So, for example, you could leave palette 0 alone, and use the
standard 16 colors for most of your stack. Set palette 1 to gray scales,
and set the scan lines where your picture appears to use palette 1. This
gives "full" color above and below a gray-scale palette with relatively
little effort.

Also, note that you can mix #1 and #2 to give a little color around the
left and right edge of a gray-scale picture.

3. You can use 3200 color dispay. This does some very tricky stuff to
switch between the 16 available palettes AS THE SCREEN IS DRAWN to trick
the Apple IIGS into drawing more colors than are really there. The problem
is it pretty much uses all of the processor time to paint the picture, and
as soon as you click a button or take any other action, the screen will
flicker back to a very ugly looking 16 colors. The added advantage to this
is that you can actually display your photograps in color, though.

4. Do some custom programming and use a Second Sight card to display 256
colors at a time. This would be pretty tricky, and as far as I know, no
one has done it for you, so you'd have to write custom code. This is
technically the best option, but it costs money for the card, and you'd
have to do some pretty intricate programming to make it work.

Mike Westerfield