MORE_SRF.readme

  I was tired of waiting for a GIF to FLI viewer, and not being a programmer
worth a hill of beans, I decided to look at what utilities were at hand.
Luckily, the C=hacking #4 article on FLIs made mention of a utility for the
Amiga called C64GFX.lha which converts Portable PixMap (PPM) graphics files
to Commodore 64 FLI graphics.  I don't have an Amiga, but since the archive
contains ANSI-C source files, i compiled them on my school's UNIX system.
Armed with these utilities, (there are also utilities for converting PPMs to
and from Koalapainter format) and a suite of programs for dealing with GIFs
and PPM files, I was able to create quite a few nice picture files.  Just
load the .srf files and run them.  Here's some more general details:

-- First of all, don't expect too much from this program.  320x200 sized files
   (or there abouts) work best - even complex 256 color files of this size 
   come out nice.  640x400 or 480 files come out ok... The less fine detail in
   those picts, the better.

-- Be aware that converting a GIF or JPEG file to PPM, can result in a very
   large file - keep an eye on disk space if it's a concern.

-- It's usually best to scale the image to 148x192, which is the largest
   usable FLI screen dimensions, unless you want to try to "zoom in" on a
   on a particular area.
 
-- Converting pictures to greyscale may improve the image (check out both
   clown.srf and clown-bw.srf)

-- Lastly, the above comments may or may not apply - ya gotta see the final
   image to be really sure how it came out!

  I highly recommend reading C=Hacking #4 FLI article and the text files in the
64GFX file (ftp to nic.funet.fi in pub/cbm/c64/graphics/converters i believe)
for more info on the FLI picture format and the utilities used therein.  I'd
appreciate some feedback on this... What do you guys think of these pictures?
I had been making some Ipaint files from GIFs, (they're still in the INCOMING/
Graphics directory at this site) but they took quite abit of work to make.  
DOES ANYONE HAVE ANY PLANS TO MAKE A GIF to IPAINT UTILITY???

Send email to me, Robert Server, at:

server@eggo.csee.usf.edu

Enjoy!!