Good paint program for Atari 800XL

[+MrFish]

2 hours ago, Cafeman said:

I have been perusing this thread to get some ideas for a future project or two.  I downloaded RAMBRANDT and played with it in Altirra a little, enough to know I'm not going to be making good art myself.   What is the best way to convert or digitize an existing BMP or PNG or JPG into an Atari ANTIC graphics format, if such a thing even exists?  I've seen the old COMPUTEREYES program/camera in some articles for example but it doesn't look like what I'm looking for.  So basically I want to do digitized picture conversion  (and possibly manipulation) and use it in an A8 / 5200 game as Antic D, or E, or a GTIA mode if need be. 

It depends on what type of final product you're interested in or capable of accommodating (in terms of memory). Basic conversions (for any bitmapped mode) are fairly straightforward using programs like Gimp or Photoshop. Rastaconverter can turn out some pretty amazing conversions with a little bit of experimentation and patience (in spite of being generally automatic, you have to wait while it does all the calculations for the conversion). Graph2Font is more of an artist's tool, but there's a fair amount of good conversion work that can be done using it too, without ever touching a single pixel. Graph2Font has a lot of flexibility too, and can be used just to see what some DLI's might do for a bitmap that's been converted using Gimp or Photoshop.

 

[Irgendwer]

7 hours ago, Cafeman said:

What is the best way to convert or digitize an existing BMP or PNG or JPG into an Atari ANTIC graphics format, if such a thing even exists? 

Atari Graphics Studio 3.5.4

[E474]

Is there an archive of 8-bit images anywhere? I'm looking for some mode E (192*160, 4 colour, 2 bits/colour) images to use as backgrounds for a project. 

[tebe]

http://g2f.atari8.info/graph2font_v4.0.2.8_full.7z

 

example\mic

example\pic

Edited April 24, 2021 by tebe

[E474]

Thanks!

 

     That's > 80 pictures, which is a great start.

 

     Does anyone know of any other art collections available/downloadable?

[zzip]

On 4/15/2021 at 10:30 AM, Cafeman said:

I have been perusing this thread to get some ideas for a future project or two.  I downloaded RAMBRANDT and played with it in Altirra a little, enough to know I'm not going to be making good art myself.   What is the best way to convert or digitize an existing BMP or PNG or JPG into an Atari ANTIC graphics format, if such a thing even exists?  I've seen the old COMPUTEREYES program/camera in some articles for example but it doesn't look like what I'm looking for.  So basically I want to do digitized picture conversion  (and possibly manipulation) and use it in an A8 / 5200 game as Antic D, or E, or a GTIA mode if need be. 

I first use gimp to reduce the resolution and number of colors in an image, and try a few different options until I get something that looks good.   But I also take into account the pixel aspect on Atari.    So I would do something like this to make a picture resemble Atari's 160x192 mode:   

1) Crop the original image so it's roughly 4:3

2) scale to 160x192

3) scale again to 320x192  (this will have double-wide pixels, and should be straightforward for an Atari converter to process without botching the aspect)