Best drawing (bitmap) application?

[thorsinclair]

Hi all,

just wondering which is the best bitmap drawing application for the QL which I can use on Q-emulator. It should support the mouse, 8 and 4 colour modes and give acces to the full resolution, 256 x 256 or 512 x 256. Thanks for info

cheers,
T

[tofro]

Hi,
requirements 2, 3, 4, are easy to meet - 1 not so much.
To my knowledge there's no sophisticated QL pixel drawing program for the PE. (Except, maybe, the demo programs that came with QRAM and QPTR - But those are not exactly "sophisticated"). While that doesn't seem to be a large market niche these days, it's probably worth thinking about writing one

Some of the pre-PE drawing programs might support a mouse (most of them somehow did), but if that would work with "today's" mouses I'd be surprised.
The "real good ones" came up together with the upcoming QLs in the first few months of the QL's existance and were, (some examples)
- QDRAW (I think that was PSION sold under Sinclair label)
- GraphiQL (by Jochen Merz)
- ArtICE that came with the ICE mouse is one example of a proprietary mouse system
- CADPAK (I think that was Sandy)
- Eye-Q (That was DP)

Hope this helps,
tofro

Cheers,
Tobias

[QLvsJAGUAR]

Some of the pre-PE drawing programs might support a mouse (most of them somehow did), but if that would work with "today's" mouses I'd be surprised.
The "real good ones" came up together with the upcoming QLs in the first few months of the QL's existance and were, (some examples)
- QDRAW (I think that was PSION sold under Sinclair label)
- GraphiQL (by Jochen Merz)
- ArtICE that came with the ICE mouse is one example of a proprietary mouse system
- CADPAK (I think that was Sandy)
- Eye-Q (That was DP)

The five progs mentioned by Tobias are all 80s ware and were all released in the early years of the QL (1985/1986). To have history correct please note that QDRAW was published by PSION and not by Sinclair. This was due to the fact that Sinclair decided to release an upgraded version of GraphiQL (which was by Talent and not by Jochen Merz) called QL Paint under their silver label. After Sinclair sold its computer business to Amstrad and the QL was axed, Talent re-released QL Paint as GraphiQL+. Jochen Merz wrote Giga-Chrome which was published by Giga-Soft and distributed by Andreas Budde’s ABC Elektronik, Bielefeld/Germany. Sounds like a complicated story. There were many more non PE bitmap drawing (paint) programs for the QL.

There were some mouse driven bitmap drawing (paint) programs which supported the QJUMP pointer environment. To name a few:
- The Painter (1988/1990, IIRC last version was 4.01) by Joachim and Nathan van der Auwera (aka PROGS) from Belgium.
- QDesign (1990, IIRC last version was 4.02) by Jörg Schiemann, distributed by Krummrey, both in Berlin/Germany.

I should better stop here and update the QL Wiki http://www.rwapadventures.com/ql_wiki/ with such information

Cheers, Urs

[RWAP]

PROGS did of course, also release LineDesign which is the only vector drawing program for the QL (it runs under the (now) public domain ProWeSs windowing system - which in turn runs under the pointer environment....

I quite like LineDesign for some things - although the fact that colours are not shown on screen can make it awkward for detailed work!

[thorsinclair]

Thank you for the info! I could not find much info about Giga Chrome. Is there a description somewhere and is it still available?

Explaing a bit the background of all this: I tried to do some graphics work on Photoshop, mainly because I think also with 8 colours and low resolution (or 4 colours and higher resolution) it should be possible to create attractive graphics, sprites, ... whatever. Working with Photoshop I run into 2 problems. First I did not find out in which format I need to save the picture in order that I can open it with Q-emulator. Second, if I create a new picture in photoshop with 256 x 256 pixels it is clearly not a rectangle which would have the same relation between width and height and therefor it is quite impossible to draw sth. because afterwards whenever I should be able to save it in the right format - loading it into Q-emulator would stretch it ..... so my next idea was to look around for a painting application which I can run directly on Q-emulator ... despite the fact that I would prefer to work on Photoshop. Sounds all a bit like making easy things difficult ... some ideas?

cheers
T

[dilwyn]

Thank you for the info! I could not find much info about Giga Chrome. Is there a description somewhere and is it still available?

Explaing a bit the background of all this: I tried to do some graphics work on Photoshop, mainly because I think also with 8 colours and low resolution (or 4 colours and higher resolution) it should be possible to create attractive graphics, sprites, ... whatever. Working with Photoshop I run into 2 problems. First I did not find out in which format I need to save the picture in order that I can open it with Q-emulator. Second, if I create a new picture in photoshop with 256 x 256 pixels it is clearly not a rectangle which would have the same relation between width and height and therefor it is quite impossible to draw sth. because afterwards whenever I should be able to save it in the right format - loading it into Q-emulator would stretch it ..... so my next idea was to look around for a painting application which I can run directly on Q-emulator ... despite the fact that I would prefer to work on Photoshop. Sounds all a bit like making easy things difficult ... some ideas?

cheers
T

Althoughit has an entry in the QL Wiki, the page about it has no information, just an invitation to anyone with info about it to edit the page.

The likeliest sources of information as it is no longer available is either someone who remembers using it, an old magazine review, or even and old QL World advert - I seem to remember an advert about it showing a pot of paint drawn in the program.

I looked for magazine articles in the QL World and Quanta magazine indexes which found the following references:
Giga-Chrome news: QL World October 86 page 5
Giga-Chrome review: QL World December 86 page 33
In Quanta, nothing specific listed, apart from the following vague entry:
QL Graphics Programs Reviewed Volume 6 Issue 5 page 26

Unfortunately, although I thought I had a complete set of both magazines, I can't find those issues, probably "lost" in the attic - I will come back to you if I manage to find them.

One source of informaton regarding good quality dithering of graphics converted from one format to another is Jan Polenicek's QL Dithvide - see http://omega.webnode.com/news/ql-dithvide-article-2/

Probably the easiest ways to convert graphics from other systems are:
1. Save as JPEG and use Photon on QL to view them. It has no SAVE command so you will have to write a small piece of code to pause it while it views the JPG then do a screen grab of some type to capture the converted image from screen.

2. Have a look at Pberto Porro's Photo-QL software (graphics page on my website http://www.dilwyn.me.uk/graphics/index.html). I think (not sure) it only runs on GD2 systems.

3. PQIV program - probably only runs on QPC or Q40.

4. If graphics files can be saved as BMP files, use my BMP program to convert them to QL screens. It does do some colour dithering, but nowhere as good as DITHVIDE for example. BMP can run on mode 4 systems as long as you have WMAN 2 (ptr environment v2 or later).

5. There are several graphics viewers and converters on my graphics page - I'd suggest looking at Wolfgang Lenerz's BMP CONVERT software, which provides extensions to basic to let you load the BMP files in your own programs.

The aspect ratio of pictures is always a problem. Different QL screen modes have different ratios, some 4:3, others 2:1. Have a look at G-Ratio on Bob Spelten's website http://members.upc.nl/b.spelten/ql/utils.html

I'm sure several of the older QL graphics programs have been mentioned before, here are some names which may prove worth looking into. Like Giga-Chrome, not available now but you might find occasional copies for sale on eBay or Sell-My-Retro

Psion QDraw
Medic Art program
Image Processor - despite the name, it could be used as a promitive graphics program, with things like zoom pixel editing for example. Available on my website Graphics page as above. Only works in 512x256 mode 4 and 8. Very old-fashioned with horrible clunky non-pointer driven (I can say that, I wrote it) but might be worth a try until you find something better.

Not sure if any of the above info is helpful but good luck searching. A new decent editing program is something we need.

Dilwyn Jones

[thorsinclair]

Thank you for the detailed info!

[QLvsJAGUAR]

Hi folks,

this (long) weekend is the QL meeting in Vienna, Austria. This year I couldn’t make it for several reasons. As I have an hour for QLing right now, I’m going to post this and some other postings on ql-users and qlforum. For those attending the meeting I wish you all a great time. Here in Switzerland it’s raining for two days now (heavy rain, floodings). As a kind of a virtual meeting here’s one of the videos of the 2010 show:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4Q7IUMKvRM

Last Wednesday late afternoon I was digging out the floppy disks of “The Painter”, “LineDesign” and “QDesign” and copied the files to my preservation QXL.WIN.

Based on this thread I’ve made some pictures and uploaded them to my web picture gallery.

Here you’ll find some pictures of the “The Painter”, “LineDesign” (see last 3 pics in gallery):
https://skydrive.live.com/?cid=C250D874 ... CE5A%21353

Here’s a picture of QDesign (see bottom left in last pic of gallery):
https://skydrive.live.com/?cid=C250D874 ... E5A%212295

Cheers, Urs