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Commodore 64 Pictures Visible on PC.


February 26, 2000: Today I achieved a goal I have been wanting to accomplish for about three years: I watched a picture that I had scanned on the Commodore appear on my PC.

I had asked some people how to do this a couple of years ago, but the steps they described required going through several different formats, and the effort seemed too much with everything else I have to do.

In late February I posted the question to the Commodore MaiLink list, and received a number of replies within a few hours. Several people suggested using Jim Collette's geoPCX, a program I already had. This program should convert geoPaint files and GEOS albums to the PCX format, which can be read by nearly any PC graphic program in use today.

A fellow club member and I had tested this program when I first downloaded it from Q-Link about eight years ago. We accomplished the file format transfer via the club BBS. To the best of my memory, I sent GEOS files that had been changed to CBM SEQ format with the GEOS program Convert. He then used geoPCX and successfully converted an album of photos.

I had tried geoPCX, but it would not run on the PC, either under Windows or from DOS. After posting my question, I was told that it runs in GEOS. However, I question this. My memory is pretty good, and I am 87% sure it is intended to run on a PC (or at least an old PC from the early 90's before Windows).

I tried converting it to GEOS, with no success. I tried running it from BASIC, again with no luck. So I proceeded to plan B, which was to download several conversion programs from C64 Com (http://www.c64.com). Among the items offered are tools for use in moving between PC and C=, and the program that did the job is CBM2BMP, found at http://www.fairlight.to/tools/pc.html.

After converting geoPaint files to CBM SEQ files, and transferring them to a PC readable disk via Big Blue Reader, I ran this program, and was presented with a simple interface. Shortly after I clicked on LOAD CBM, my picture started to appear. I then clicked on SAVE BMP and voila! it is available for further manipulation.

I found that my usual photo editing program, ArcSoft Photo Studio, did not recognize this bitmap (BMP) format; however, my premier graphic viewer, ACDSee loaded and converted the files to .JPG. Now if we wanted to get carried away, we could use one of the new JPG converters for Commodore to get the file back into a non-GEOS Commodore format!

All of the above took place on my Compaq Presario. A few days later I got a partly-new "homemade" PC from a friend at work (we put the Zip drive and CD-ROM drive from the Compaq into this one). When I started to convert another batch of geoPaint files, I got an unpleasant surprise.

When CBM2BMP converts a file, it displays a view of it, about half the normal size. During conversion, the display was broken up into pieces like one of those computer picture puzzles. The saved file was not scrambled, but the bottom 20% was missing. I tried converting some of the files I had originally done, and had the same problem.

Commodore 64 computer and Commodore 1084S video monitor

Since I had set up my Compaq with an old monitor I had around, I went back and tried the program on it...and everything worked fine. The new one has the same operating system and virtually the same software, but there is something about it that CBM2BMP does not like. Email to the author has gone unanswered so far.

Looking for an alternative, I downloaded Congo, a highly touted program that allows a lot of manipulation of graphics, and converts both ways. With little documentation, it took a while to figure out how to use it, but once I did, it converted the files but not cleanly. Around the edges of each image or text object, there is what looks like a shimmering effect (in fact it's just a few extra grey pixels). Email to the author brought the suggestion to save as BMP files instead of JPG. I did this; then saved the BMP as JPG in a photo editing program, and got a clean conversion. This program also successfully converted color Koala files and a color geoPaint file.

(by Dick E.)