Miklós,
I have already mentioned this in passing in one of my earlier postings here in the thread, to repeat: your picture converts would improve a lot if you'd take the
pixel aspect ratio into account.
On a PAL VIC-20, hires pixels are
not square. They are 1.67 times longer in width than they're tall. Correspondingly, multi-colour pixels are 3.33x wide as tall. In fractions with small integers, 5/3 and 10/3. For NTSC, the numbers are slightly different: 1.50 to 1 for hires and 3.00 to 1 for multi-colour.
On a PAL C64, hires pixels are
nearly square, 0.9 (width) to 1 (height) is more accurate (1.8 to 1 for multi-colour). On an NTSC C64, hires pixels are vertically elongated. Here, the numbers are 0.75 (width) to 1 (height) for hires and 1.50 (width) to 1 (height) for multi-colour.
As long as you - sorry -
toy around with 1:1 pixel converts from C64 -> VIC-20, this inevitably leads to flattened results, which just look bad.
That also means, 'source' material from another computer is a rather inconvenient start point. Rescaling to correct for the different pixel aspect either loses detail in one direction (when pixel columns/rows are left out) or gives a coarse result in the other direction (when pixel rows/columns are duplicated). Much better is starting out from a much higher resolution original on the PC.
This is what I've been doing with my MG batch suite for all the years now. I use PGM IMPORT and PGM IMPORT MONO to import greyscale and lineart pictures. In Irfanview, I first select a suitable part of the picture with an image aspect ratio of ~1.389 to 1. (1.389 ~= (160/192) x (5/3) - the first factor comes from the pixel resolution of MINIGRAFIK, the second factor is aforementioned pixel aspect ratio). The cropped intermediate result then has the same width/height over the whole picture as it later appears on the VIC. I then resample this cropped part of the source image - and this is important! - with "Preserve aspect ratio (...)" ticked
off, to either 80x192 pixels (for PGM IMPORT) or 160x192 pixels (for PGM IMPORT MONO) and save them as
*.pgm files. These then go straight into the MG tools and result in a picture file in MG format.
Here's one of the example converts I did this way (the picture is contained in the
*.d64 of the
MG batch suite). You also took that one as example for your slideshows:
And here is the original,
uncropped photo I started with:
You see it can be done right. There's no good reason to have 'fat' faces or other flattened scenes on the VIC-20.
Greetings,
Michael
