Re: Apple II Images

[spec@vax2.concordia.ca (Mitchell Spector)]

In article Doug Browning (vgt507@freenet.mb.ca) writes...

>][GIF has trouble displaying non apple gifs.

    What are "Apple GIFs"? GIF is not a platform specific format, but
a portable image format that holds an arbitrary resolution and palette
depth, but limited to 256 colors (8-bit). Perhaps you might mean GIF
images created on an Apple II?

>Colors and dimentions are often wrong.

    Of course they are, and there is little or no way around it because
it is a hardware limitation. The two graphic formats you have available
are Hi-Res and Double-Hi-Res, with odd resolutions like 240x192 and
560x192. If you want to do color, your working with a fixed palette,
color bleeding and pixel placement restrictions. That brings you down
to an awful 140x192 with either 6 or 16 (again, fixed) colors.

    Basically your going to get a _very_ fuzzy and distorted image in
the end. If you stand several feet back from the screen and squint a
bit, you get a vage idea of what the GIF image is. You may get some
semi-acceptable results with B&W line-art or very simple color cartoon
drawings I suppose. The bottom line is, other than the Apple IIgs, the
Apple II is not really suitable for viewing graphics from other machines
(or at least those sold in the last 12 years or so).

Mitchell Spector
spec@vax2.concordia.ca