CompuServe Messages

Sorry Lepido, most of the datatypes you mention do not work right. While writing datatypes support for my program, I checked serveral datatypes. Most of the turned out to be seriously buggy. Others are working fine. But because of limitations in the datatypes standard, running datatypes on some files are rather frustating. The quality is VERY low. For instance, you can't read 24 bit with datatypes. Using the routines Commodore shows in it examples, you can't read HAM8 on ECS machines as the datatype library automaticly converts to image to something your machine can understand. On an ECS Amiga this means HAM mode. Some programs directly access the datatype buffer in order to avoid this problem. But I have no idea how legal this is. There are several reasons why this can't be legal. However, it's currently the only way to get good results (ever used MultiView to show a 24 Bit image on an ECS machine? Yuk!). Regarding your list: PNG: Very well done. So far, I couldn't find any bug and the datatype performs well with interlaced files. PCX: the versions I did test very seriously buggy and a crash is very likely as the software overwrites memory. MacPaint: I only heard bad things about this datatype… GIF: I never tried ZGif yet, but the other more widely spreaded GIF datatype doesn't work right on interlaced GIFs. Colors are wrong. PostScipt? Sorry, this datatype is far from PostScript. You can call it an EPS datatype (with one eye closed). JFIF? See comments above regarding 24 bit… BMP: I haven't tested this one yet. But reading the documentation, this rather sounds limited. Don't get me wrong, the general idea of datatypes is great. However, the current system lacks quality.