Paul de Leeuw wrote:
Is there a reason why we stay with targa? Surely it would be better to move to a more modern lossless true colour format such as PNG. This gives us compression and is viewable by a much larger range of applications. I have gone this way with ManpWIN.
Jonathan already answered this, so this is an elaboration. After being a (very minor) member of the PNG team, I was embarressed to discover that the memory requirements for PNG (at least using Libpng) made it impossible to add PNG to my own program, the DOS fractint. Once I added the ability to save Xfractint files to PNG in a quick hack. It took about an hour (not worrying about saving the data in the PNG). I spent weeks with the DOS fractint and got it to compile (barely) but there wan't enough free memory to actually save to PNG. The one method that would have worked would have been to write a separate program to write the PNG. This wouldn't have been too hard but would have been a horribly crude solution. This may help you see where Jonathan and I are coming from, and why are priorities are a bit different than yours. If your Windows port is faithful enough to the DOS version, we could retire the DOS version, then we could do all kinds of things we have wanted to do for years. This is why our top priority is to port the existing program as copmpletely as possible before adding new features. Of course the other reason is that it is just good practice when porting a program between environments to add zero features so regression testing is possible. Tim