How to alphabetize ACC in menu and image editing SW recommendation?

[6BQ5]

My excursion to the 8-bit world was short lived. I'm back to playing with my STe.

 

I am looking for recommendations on two pieces of software. Can anyone here help?

 

First, I am little OCD. Everything ought to be neat and lined up. My STe is no exception. Seeing the Accessories under the Fuji menu out of alphabetical order is driving me bonkers! How do I sort the accessories so they are in order?

 

Second, what is a good - nay, great! - image editing program for the STe? I would like something that can injest modern day JPG files and leverage the 512/4096 color display capabilities of the ST and STe.

 

Thanks!!

[+DarkLord]

AUTO folder programs run in the order that they are copied into the AUTO folder.

 

Literally, first in, first out.

 

You could try something along those lines with the ACC's, even renaming them,

to put them in alphabetical order - although I'm not sure about what determines

how the ACC displays its name in the list.

 

Still, it won't hurt to try - if nothing works, set them back to their original names.

 

Good luck.

[Zogging Hell]

Dirsort might help with that, kind of autosort, but for any directory.

 

For the second question, the problem you'll find with the ST and jpg's is that you probably will have difficulty working with true colour large images on the ST itself. Given the 4mb memory limit you will find you will run out of memory pretty quickly as soon as the ST tries to decompress the image with most conversion programs, plus it will be painfully slow. Unless you have a Falcon, TT or clone, I would leave the image editing to the PC, unless your jpgs are small and colour limited.

Edited February 10, 2019 by Zogging Hell

[ParanoidLittleMan]

I don't see any reason to have many ACCessories active at once. Instead sorting them should take care to use only what is needed at time. Lot of it just will slowdown computer and eat RAM, + may cause problems when running some SW.

Considering modern day JPG-s on some ST(E) - forget it. Even if you can open and edit something of it (smaller sizes, of course) it will be in very low res for today standards - 320x200 px, and with only 16 colors.

Actually, the real problem is how to convert some 16 M color pic to 16 colors of Atari ST(E) . Usually dithering is used to simulate somehow color gradients. And that looks pretty ugly on modern high res monitors - blockiness.

I did some conversions with WIndows SW Paintshop Pro (pre Adobe version) - to 16 color BMP 320x200, and then converted it to Degas PI1 format. It needs some experimenting with color reduction function to get so-so good result.

I don't think that 34 years old ST should do same things as some modern computer. We should use it with it's limitations in mind. Still, lot of it is possible to do, and it can work fast with specific tasks.

[6BQ5]

I tried reshuffling my ACC files last night with the utilities mentioned above. The utilities moved the files around but they still wouldn't load in the order I shuffled them. For example, my ACC files may have been D-A-C-B. The result was A-D-B-C. Shuffling again resulted in another pseudo-random order that came close but not quite. I'll try again tonight.

 

I only have four accessories. DeskPic, ProCalc, STeno, and Control Panel.

 

JPG editor - I think I will give up on that for now. ParanoidLittleMan, you are right. Reducing the color set from 16M to 16 or 4 is nearly impossible. Yes, I added dithering and I had to use grayscale to get an acceptable picture. For DeskPic I have an image of my wife at 320x200x16 grayscale and an image of my kids at 640x200x4. The effect is interesting but if that's all I can get then I'll leave it alone. Too bad I can't get 512 or 4096 colors to display easily with DeskPic.

[Zogging Hell]

Hhhm if Dirsort is not directly effecting the order of the menu, then it is probably not relating to the actual loading order from disk but something else GEM is doing. If that is the case then I think you might have to grin and bear it. What order are they loading in? Perhaps it relates to the length of the file/ program name..