NEOLoad by Jason "Joefish" Railton Version: 1.3 Dated: 30 March 2016 Purpose. -------- A utility to load Atari-ST Neochrome (.NEO) format low-resolution 16-colour images, display and save as Windows Bitmap image files (.BMP). Also to load Windows Bitmap (.BMP) image files and save as Neochrome (.NEO) format files. The image should have been prepared as a 320x200 pixel image with approximately 16 colours. This software does not apply any scaling, re-colouring, shading or dithering to the image during conversion. License. -------- Software is free to use for any purpose. No use is warranted or guaranteed. Permission given for free use of code and algorithms. The author would prefer if credit is displayed in any derivative works of this software. Instructions. ------------- 1. NEO -> BMP Conversion. ------------------------- Transfer a Neochrome format 320x200 16-colour image file to your PC. Click [Load .NEO] and select the file. The image should appear in the top panel. The 16-colour palette should be displayed in the bar to the right. Click [Save .BMP] and enter a file name. The image will be saved as a Windows bitmap file. 2. BMP -> NEO Conversion. ------------------------- Prepare your image by cropping it to 320 x 200 pixels and reducing it to 16 colours. Save it as a Windows bitmap (.BMP) file. Note that NEOLoad will not perform any scaling, re-colouring, shading or dithering to the image during conversion. It is up to you to prepare a suitable image in an appropriate paint package. Click [Load .BMP] and select your image file. The image should appear in the lower window and the palette extracted and shown in the bar to the right. A warning will be displayed if the image contains too many colours for conversion. You may proceed, but the image is likely to be corrupted (see [Preview]). HELP - I loaded a 16-colour image, but the palette hasn't extracted all 16 colours. What happened? | Although the bitmap may only have had 16 colours, those | colours were still 24-bit colour descriptions. These | were cut down to the 9-bit colours used by the Atari ST | (down from a possible 16.8 million colours to just 512). | It's possible then that two or more of the image's 16 | colours got converted into the same colour in the | smaller Atari ST palette, so they got combined. | You may re-try the process by converting your image into | one with slightly more than 16 colours. For example, if | the palette only shows 12 colours, you might find a 20 | or even 24-colour image can be converted. | Or you may try increasing the saturation and contrast | of your image to make the colours more distinct. Click [Swap Palette] if you want to change the order of colours in the palette before saving. This displays the palette as a column of buttons with colour 0 at the top and 15 at the bottom. Click one colour button then another to swap them over. You should see the change in the palette bar beside the lower image. Click [Preview] to see how the image will look converted to Neochrome. A conversion will appear in the top image. (You could also simply save the Neochrome image, and re-load it into the top image). Because the Atari ST palette is simpler than that of the PC, you may notice some changes in colouration. Click [Save .NEO] to save the image as a Neochrome file. Click [Exit] to exit the program. Source Code. ------------ The program was created with Borland C++ Builder 4. Source code to build the project is included.