Here are some RLE High Res viewers for CP/M systems..

https://techtinkering.com/articles/image-viewers-on-cpm/

Have fun! :)

Jo22 wrote on 2021-05-17, 23:03:

https://planetcalc.com/8626/

Ahh, those nostalgic low-rez B/W days......

Picture 2 has a strong Tatsunoko feel but I'm not too familiar with their works.

Picture 3 has a strong Haruhiko Mikimoto (Macross) style (see Lynn Minmay of picture 6); I'm not saying she's Lynn Minmay but same character by different key animators can look quite different, though.

Picture 9 and 20 are certainly Captain Harlock by Leiji Matsumoto (eyepatch on right eye, scar on left face), but there are just way too many titles in the franchise so I can't pinpoint the exact one it came from.

Picture 13 should be Vampire Hunter D.

Sci-fi and fantasy were big in 80's to early 90's anime and was relatively easier for Western audiences to digest back then as cultural gaps were much smaller in these genre.

I have been picking at my RLE collection recently. In the last few weeks I have:

• Cleaned up the line noise at the end of some of my downloaded RLEs and put them in a zip to share.
• Written a new DOS program to display them. (Quickly ... not like the older programs.)
• Added RLE graphics support directly into mTCP Telnet.
• Wrote another program to convert JPGs to RLE so that I can make new ones.

It has been a fun deep dive. Details are at http://brutman.com/RLE/RLE_Graphics.html if anybody is curious about the format or wants to download the other RLEs.

-Mike

Thank you! That was an excellent read, and a wonderful journey. I am glad to see a "new" DOS program which supports the format. Thanks for writing that up.

+1

dormcat wrote on 2021-07-30, 11:21:

Sci-fi and fantasy were big in 80's to early 90's anime and was relatively easier for Western audiences to digest back then as cultural gaps were much smaller in these genre.

Picture 10 (Pic 1 here) is Kei from Dirty Pair/DP (err, "Lovely Angels", of course 😄)

I've posted another small set that were in the Walnut Creek CPM CD-ROM. Nothing extraordinary, but it does make the archive more complete.

I'm looking for others too if you know of any lurking anywhere.

mbbrutman wrote on 2022-08-31, 03:45:

I've posted another small set that were in the Walnut Creek CPM CD-ROM. Nothing extraordinary, but it does make the archive more complete.

I'm looking for others too if you know of any lurking anywhere.

Thank you very much!

Um, by the way.. For the Super mode.. There are also CGA supsersets with 640x400 resolutions, like Olivetti / Toshiba T3100.
Sure, they aren't available on normal CGA cards, but maybe useful for drawing existing picures as square pixels.
VGA and MCGA also both support 640x480 in monochrome mode.

All these odd monochrome modes could be used on certain Amiga bridgeboards , for example.
Or other late 80s/early 90s emulators, like PC Ditto.

Edit: AT-Speed had 640x400 mode support, too.

"[..] AT-Speed also emulates the Olivetti graphics card used on the AT&T 6000.
This card has a resolution of 640 by 400 pixels, exactly the same as the ST's monochrome display.
Most major PC applications, including Windows, GEM and WordPerfect, support the Olivetti card. "
Source: https://www.atarimagazines.com/startv5n7/at_speed.html

PS: You can also force Composite mode in CGA Hires. Ripsaw8080 explained it many aeons ago.
Perhaps not really useful, but this gives some nice '80s vibes and artifact effects. 😉

"Super" mode was trivial to implement and runs on any CGA card.

If you really wanted to do this correctly, for just a few more bytes you can encode the horizonal resolution, vertical resolution, and then an aspect ratio or DPI for each dimension. That would give the client enough information about what screen mode to use to render the image, and if "doubling up" on pixels is required to avoid too much distortion.

No, I'm not really going to go there ... RLE mostly fine the way it is. There are enough real graphics formats out there already.

I see. Thanks for the conversation and I hope the bit of information was useful somehow.
It's always fun to talk with each other enthusiastically about a common hobby. 🙂

What we need to do is start working on recreating the Compuserve experience. Basically a Telnet BBS with graphics support, but the graphics are inlined with the text on the client.

I can't do that with the current mTCP Telnet client. But if I redesigned the screen output to use 640x200 graphics mode it would allow text and graphics to be mixed, italics, underlining, and all sorts of custom fun things.

mbbrutman wrote on 2022-08-28, 16:45:

[*]Wrote another program to convert JPGs to RLE so that I can make new ones.

The old Windows logos (up to 3.11) where stored in RLE format.
However, due to the compression method of JPEG file format, I prefer to convert comic style .GIF and .PNG pictures.
RLE is good in compressing long chunks with same colour.

The Windows RLE format is not the same as the Compuserve RLE format. "RLE" is term that describes a particular type of compression but it is used in many places, which is why I'm careful to use the term "Compuserve RLE."