Windows does many good things with color graphics, but with limitations. Standard Windows only supported 16 colors. Video drivers were/are needed to support more colors in order to get realistic color representations. C-ME /SAVER uses only 256 colors which does a very good job. At least 65k colors will be needed for an excellent real-life representation. But special video cards are required. There may be a dithering effect when converting the 16M or 65K scanned colors to 256 colors.
When Windows runs out of colors in its pallete of 256 colors, it "dithers" colors it can't reproduce. These colors appear as a combination of dots and/or lines on the screen. Also, since there is only one pallete, trying to show more than one photo may result in color distortions in the already displayed graphics.
II. PRODUCING SCREEN SAVER GRAPHICS.
STEP 1 -- Scanning Photos.
Scan as many photos as you can at one time using whatever graphics software you have (CorelDraw, Photoshop, etc). Use at least 65K colors when scanning. At this point you can crop and save each scanned photo individually as a BMP file. Be sure to use the following format:
CMEPICx. BMP ( x = 1 to 5)
You will need to crop at this point solely in order to be able to work with the individual photos. A file with 16M colors will take about 1M of memory and the above graphics programs have difficulty working with this size when there is only a total of 4M RAM.
If you are sent less than 5 photos, re-use existing photos to save 5 BMP files (for example, if sent 3 photos you would generate duplicates of the first 2 pictures to make 5 photos in all).
STEP 2. -- Croping / Scaling Photos
The C-ME / SAVER program is the screen saver program sent to your customer. It requires that the picture dimension be divisible by 8. That is, if you crop a photo to 400 x 200 everything is OK since both dimensions are divisible by 8. A graphic of 320 x 210 would cause an uneven border to be displayed on the screen. Your graphics program will allow you to crop and/or scale your graphics and tell you the new size.
You can also scale up/down (change the dimensions of the entire photo as compared to cutting out a section.) for better effect. In order to produce an acceptable graphics for C-ME /PC you will be doing a combination of both croping and scaling.
File sizes can easily get out of hand. At 256 colors, a 640 x 480 picture will take 307,200 bytes. And 5 such pictures will consume over 1.5MB of disk space. You would then need to distribute your "package" on 2 disks or in compressed mode.
You do not need to generate full screen graphics. Photographs do not lend themselves to screen layout unless they are in landscape layout (width is greater than depth). When scaling a graphic up or down you may get color distortions due to the graphics program doing its best to recreate colors.
This step will allow you to demonstrate your artistic graphics skills to produce customer pleasing screen savers.
STEP3 -- FILE PROTECTION
When satified with the results of Step 2 above, you need to "protect" these files for acceptance by the screen saver program. To do this, simply execute the CMEMOD.EXE program. Run this program each time you produce a new or revised CMEPICx.BMP file.
STEP4 -- CHECK-OUT SCREEN SAVER
At this point you have produced 5 BMP files with the names like CMEPIC1.BMP (see above) and executed the CMEMOD.EXE file "protector" program. Now run the screen saver CMESAVER.EXE. Setup a short "wait" time like 20 seconds. Review the screen saver and make any adjustments to the BMP files.
You may want to change the order in which the individual files are displayed by simply renumbering the file name -- the 4th and 2nd files are interchanged by changing CMEPIC2 to CMEPIC4 and CMEPIC4 to CME2 (save one file to a "dummy" name to prevent it from being wiped out by the copy/rename fucntion). YOU'RE ALL DONE!!
STEP5 -- DELIVER YOUR SCREEN SAVER
You need the following files on your distribution disk:
