Empeg Logo Editor Alpha Release

I've got the initial alpha release of my Empeg Logo Editor ready for you folks to bang on it.

Right now it doesn't do any actual editing yet, and I haven't implemented the feature which uploads the images to the empeg yet. But it makes a great logo converter (it saves and loads those .BIN files and accepts import from bitmaps or pastes from the clipboard) and it's got a really neat preview window.

It's not the fastest thing in the world, but it works.

Just before uploading the .zip file I discovered that it's got problems if you maximize the main window, so just don't do that. I'll fix that one on the next release. In the meantime, post your thoughts to this thread or e-mail me directly.

The file can be found right here. Enjoy!

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Tony Fabris

Ok I tried it but it doesn't work. When I run it a box pops up the says "Illegal Function Call"... so I tried moving the DLL to /windows/system no go... I'm on Win98se 686 cpu and 132 meg ram. Any more info you need?

Tom

Reg #2845: Mark 1 #00173, Mark 2 #119

Ick.

You shouldn't need to move the DLL files.

Check for COMMDLG.DLL in your system and system32 directories. If you don't have it, I'm attaching it to this message because that could be the problem. I thought it was included on all windows distributions after 95 but I guess I could be wrong.

Lemme know if that's it.

Heh, this is what alphas are for...

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Tony Fabris

Working fine here! I love it! Good work Tony, the preview window looks sweet. I think the mid grays might be a little to bright compared to the real deal, but i haven't done a head to head comparison yet. I can't wait to be able to edit right there in the window. Saweeeet. Keep truckin'!


|| loren.cox
|| 080000446

Thanks. I had a lot of fun making that preview window.

I am considering the possibility of making the gray/color shades (as well as the cutoff values when color-reducing) a user-editable thing. Everything is already in variables, so perhaps I'll just farm that stuff out to the .ini file. I've got other stuff I want to do, first, though.

___________
Tony Fabris

No it still doesn't work. I have that file in /windows/system and I copied it to /windows/system32 just in case. The program halts with that error "illegal function call"... I looked at the VBRUN300.dll.. is it ok that it is made for Windows 3.00??? And dated 1993?

Reg #2845: Mark 1 #00173, Mark 2 #119

Yeah, VB3 is the only development tool I have at home. You'd be surprised how much you can get done with it. There's nothing wrong with running it on any of the Microsoft platforms, it should work on everything.

Does the Illegal Function Call appear immediately when you run the program? If so, go to my web site and snag "Tony's Download Calculator", it's another VB3 applet but it doesn't try to do anything fancy with graphics or file I/O. If that one runs and LogoEdit doesn't run, then I'll get you a debug version of LogoEdit and see if I can trace the location of the problem. If dlcalc doesn't run, then I have to look more deeply into why your system doesn't like VB3.

___________
Tony Fabris

Other things to check...

- What is your screen size and color depth? It should work with just about anything, but still...
- Where is the .EXE being run from? It it on a local disk drive with a standard path, or is it on a network drive with a UNC path?
- What are the "international" settings for this machine? I've only tested it on US machines and there might be something about the window size calculations that doesn't take some things into account.

___________
Tony Fabris

In reply to:

---

Does the Illegal Function Call appear immediately when you run the program? If so, go to my web site and snag "Tony's Download Calculator", it's another VB3 applet but it doesn't try to do anything fancy with graphics or file I/O. If that one runs and LogoEdit doesn't run, then I'll get you a debug version of LogoEdit and see if I can trace the location of the problem. If dlcalc doesn't run, then I have to look more deeply into why your system doesn't like VB3.

---

I downloaded your calculator and it runs peachy. To answer your questions: the illegal function call appear immediately with an "OK" button... (Note to MS: its not ok.) I'm not doing anything different from the basic win98se install. No special international settings... Screen size 1024x768 32bit true color.... anything else?
Send that debugged version and I'll send you the output.


Tom

Reg #2845: Mark 1 #00173, Mark 2 #119

Send that debugged version and I'll send you the output.

Attached to this post. Unzip it to the same directory as you unzipped the last file set, and run it (it's a different EXE file name).

I cheaped it, the debug stuff is simply message boxes. Report the text of the last one you see. I think it's somewhere in form_load, so I only put messages there.

Thanks for helping with this!

___________
Tony Fabris

It gets as far as "positioning the PreviewWindow" then "illegal function call"... you may be right about the screen size being a factor.... I'll try different resolutions and get back to you. If any work :)

Tom

Reg #2845: Mark 1 #00173, Mark 2 #119

Runs fine here :
Win2k Pro 1280x1024 32bit


Frank van Gestel

I went from 640x480 to 1280x1024 and I always get the same "illegal function" error message.

Tom

Reg #2845: Mark 1 #00173, Mark 2 #119

Works fine on my Win2K system with the dreaded Matrox G400 dual head that gives some programs trouble. Great work Tony, very useful program.

For a future release, it'd be nice to have the ability to set thresholds for the gray values, like if you paste in something, to be able to move a few sliders that determine the cut-off points for what shades in the source image get mapped to intensities 0 through 3. And then there's dithering which opens up a whole other can of worms. But this is a great start!

-Tony
MkII #554

Wow, that's incredibly strange. I'm simply setting the position of a hidden form. Lemme look at the code...

Wow, there's literally nothing there that should screw things up. The Illegal function call happens when the arguments to a function are out-of-range. In this case, I'm just setting the upper left corner of the preview window to touch the right side of the main window. The commands are:

PreviewWindow.Left = LogoEdit.Left + LogoEdit.Width
PreviewWindow.Top = LogoEdit.Top

So there's something screwy with the values it's getting for "Top", "Left", or "Width". It probably has something to do with the screen measurements on your system. VB uses a "twips" system, where there's 15 twips per pixel in "small fonts" mode, and 12 twips per pixel in "large fonts" mode. That probably has something to do with it. There is a new debug version attached to this message which displays that value, lemme know what the value is on your system.

Thanks again for testing this for me.

___________
Tony Fabris

to be able to move a few sliders that determine the cut-off points for what shades in the source image get mapped to intensities 0 through 3.

Yes, this is in my plans. First, I want to implement the downloading and some painting tools, though.

___________
Tony Fabris

IT WORKS !!!

But then, what did I expect .

Well, at LAST I got that logo to work. I am just not much of an artist ...

Thanks Tony, great job.

Cheers,
Hans


Mk2 - Blue - 080000431

The next iteration of my logo editor can be found right here. This one lets you click on a menu item to send the logo to the empeg. As a side benefit, you can also upload custom kernel files, too.

I did something lame, though. I'm not proud of this fact, but in the interest of full disclosure, I have to tell you: I didn't integrate the uploading code into my program. I didn't even move it to a DLL. I just re-compiled the "download.c" source code to have an extra "port" parameter, and my program just shells to it. Yes, I'm lazy. There were also a few issues that would've been tough to work around quickly if I hadn't done it this way.

Painting tools aren't implemented yet, but they're coming soon.

Also, we haven't gotten to the bottom of Liufeng's problem yet, so there are no code changes which relate to that.

___________
Tony Fabris

Thanks, glad you like it!

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Tony Fabris

Ok you're not going to believe me. In fact I wouldn't be suprised if you hired someone to come and kill me for this... but... your Debug2 program works great.... now your going to say I'm lying and just trying to cause trouble.. but the other ones still don't work (same message even for the newest version). Did you change any code in the Debug2... because it says:

Mytwips is 15
Logoedit.left is 1850
Logoedit.width is 8100
Logoedit.top is 5190

Then it runs as intended.

By the way I think some of your colors are a little far from the real thing.. of course if could just be my monitor settings... Especially Amber

Tom

Reg #2845: Mark 1 #00173, Mark 2 #119

Edited by Liufeng on 14/10/00 00:39 AM.

Just had a look...cool.... I checked Photoshop 4's cut and paste and it works fine....

rgds

Bill

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MK II, (Blue but should be Amber) SN: 118

no no, you're going about this wrong Tony. You're supposed to announce your laziness / bugs and drawbacks as features. For example, you can spin it as an advantage, "the upshot is when download.c is upgraded, my editor will remain compatible, in addition to being able to send kernel files..."

Calvin

Thanks, I was wondering about photoshop.

Truth is, I'm just lazy... I work in a software development house, and we've got an entire department devoted to graphics and multimedia. I could have just walked it over to the desk of someone who had photoshop installed, and then tried it. Somehow it seemed easier to get one of you poor saps to try it for me.

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Tony Fabris

Did you change any code in the Debug2

Yes, I commented out the commands that I thought might be the problem: The commands that tried to reposition the preview window before showing it.

As far as I know, I should easily be able to set that window's coordinates before showing it. There shouldn't be the slightest problem with doing it. As you can see, it works on everyone else's computers.

I have to head out for a while tonight. But when I come back, I'll try to figure out a way to get around your bug while still positioning the window properly for everyone else.

By the way I think some of your colors are a little far from the real thing.. of course if could just be my monitor settings... Especially Amber

They were just guesstimates, but they should be fairly close. I only own a Mk1 blue and green, and I only saw the red in an early prototype before they changed it, so I really have no accurate reference points other than screen shots on web sites. In the future, I plan to make those colors adjustable. Once that feature is in place, I can get folks to send me their ideas of what's the most accurate colors for the preview. Then I can plug those in as the first-time-run-defaults while still allowing the users to edit them and save them in the ini file.

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Tony Fabris

Okay, try out the attached Debug3 on your system. In this version, I'm not trying to position the preview window until the first time you try to show it. The position code is in its form_load routine instead of the main window's form_load routine.

Try it out and make sure you can show/hide/re-show the preview window.

If this works, I'll refine it for the next version (and probably add saving/restoring window positions while I'm at it). And I'll curse Microsoft a bit, too, because there's no reason it should've worked on everyone else's system but not on yours. I hate all this FM you have to deal with when you code for Windows.

___________
Tony Fabris

At least you're honest :)

Another feature to think about - and it's simple to implement. In the edit menu, have an option to swap the home and car logos. Also, how about the option to export home and car to BIN separately? Then they could be transferred to the Empeg and output to the display on demand (I think there was source floating around to output a raw image to the display.) Then it not only becomes a startup logo editor, but an editor for any image you want displayed on the screen.

New version is nice. Preview is still quite slow, even on my SMP Win2K box. Probably has to do with it being written in VB. And as mentioned previously, long file names would be nice.

-Tony
MkII #554

Preview is still quite slow, even on my SMP Win2K box.

Interestingly, there are some speed issues that don't seem to be related to processor power or VB, rather they are related to video drivers or OS. The preview is reasonably fast on my Celeron at home, and only slightly slower on my NT box at work which is half the speed. You'd think it would be half as fast but it's not. Jut for the heck of it, if you're running in 24 or 32-bit color, try dropping it to 16-bit color and see if the preview is faster that way.

I have, in the past, written C DLL's to handle images that get displayed on VB3 forms. If this program ends up being used more widely, I might consider porting it to 32-bit (for long file names) and shuffling the time-critical stuff off to a DLL. We'll see how the painting tools go, and if they're too slow in VB I might have no choice.

Swapping the images should be fairly simple, I'll work on the painting tools first though.

Exporting to BIN is an interesting idea, but then I'd need to allow different image sizes as well (since you seem to be looking for a universal editor). I'm not sure that's what this program was designed for, but we'll see how it goes.

___________
Tony Fabris

Perfect! It works with no problems. I could change the size, minimize, zoom, preview, etc. It crashes hard if you try send it to the car and download.exe doesn't exist. :)

Tom

Reg #2845: Mark 1 #00173, Mark 2 #119

It crashes hard if you try send it to the car and download.exe doesn't exist. :)

Upload.exe. I renamed it.

Snag the 0.7 version to get that file, and you should be all set. My next release will incorporate that code change officially.

Now I'm off to write a Quake mod where you get to shoot Microsoft programmers...

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Tony Fabris

Now that sound like a mod half the world would pay SERIOUS cash for ... Hell, you prolly would be able to buy Empeg with the wads of cash you could charge for that one ...

No, thats not sarcasm you hear but the god-honest (yet sad) truth. People who have went to TechEd 2000 in the Netherlands this year probably agree with me. You should have heard the roars of dismay from the crowds every time one of the 'Microsoft Evangelists' made a disparaging remark at the address of Linux and its users.

My god, can you even imagine having 'MicroSoft Evangelist' as job title on your business card ?

Anyways, going to try and get that BMW logo to actually look round .

Tony, thanks again.

Cheers,
Hans


Mk2 - Blue - 080000431

Does anyone know if a logo could be animated?? Perhaps like an animated gif?

Reg #2845: Mark 1 #00173, Mark 2 #119

It 'can' be done yes. After all, the empeg is like any computer, it does what you program it to do (I can see people looking at me right now thinking : 'Where does this guy come from, outer space ?'). Is such animation currently programmed into it (during bootlogo displaying). To the best of my knowledge the answer to that would be no. Perhaps this is something you would want to add to the wishlist forum.

Cheers,
Hans


Mk2 - Blue - 080000431

Liufeng, could you try this one for me? I have re-implemented window positioning, only I'm doing it differently now. I think it'll work on your system, but I want to be sure. It now saves and restores the window positions from the INI file.

___________
Tony Fabris

Yes that version works dandy. I even positioned it off screen slightly and then closed it and it reopened at the same position but a different window size.

Tom

Reg #2845: Mark 1 #00173, Mark 2 #119

it reopened at the same position but a different window size.

Ah, good, glad it's working. The "different window size" is because I only save the window size when you pick a zoom level from the view menu. When you size it by dragging the window edges, it doesn't remember that. I'm implementing the painting tools now, and I might just remove the ability to drag-n-size because of the problems it causes for the painting tools. I haven't decided what my final solution is going to be.

I'm getting ICQ reports from another user who's having trouble getting it to work on his Voodoo Banshee card, is anyone else having trouble?

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Tony Fabris

I tried the begub version, and it worked fine.

I couldn't get the other versions to run on my Rage 128.

TommyE

I tried the begub version, and it worked fine. I couldn't get the other versions to run on my Rage 128.

Ok, cool, thanks. The next release will have some painting tools, and will behave the way the debug version did with respect to window sizing, so it should work OK for you.

I'm reaching a point with the software where I have to make a decision:

Do I just implement just a few rudimentary painting tools, assuming that everyone has a favorite image editor they can use if they need to work in more detail? Or do I try to make it a fully-featured image editor with marquee selections, geometric shape tools, fonts, etc.?

I'm leaning towards the former, because making an image editor is a lot of work. Also, the language it's written in isn't the fastest thing in the world, so any attempts I make at serious image-editing tools would be a pale second to any real image editor, even compared to something as simple as Windows Paint.

As it stands right now, you can paint with your mouse in different brush widths. There is a toolbar to select the brush thickness and colors. And there are keyboard shortcuts so you just press "1" for black, "2" for dark gray, "3" for light gray, and "4" for white. I'll add a few more image commands (probably negative-image and swap home/car, maybe a flood fill), but beyond that there won't be much.

Before I release this, I have to work out a few bugs, and decide how to handle the preview window while painting.

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Tony Fabris

I would say only some basic tools ...

From what I see the only thing I miss is the ability to do minor pixel touchups once you see the logo in the preview and decide 1 or 2 of those pixels do not come out right. As for more complex things there are plenty of editors out already. I am not sure where you should stop, giving nothing more then a pixel editor only or some basic shapes to go with it (very basic shapes that is). I could see the use of having a linedraw tool, a rectangle tool and a circle/elipse tool but anything more then that is just too much.

Cheers,
Hans


Mk2 - Blue - 080000431

Thanks, I was wondering about photoshop.

Truth is, I'm just lazy... I work in a software development house, and we've got an entire department devoted to graphics and multimedia. I could have just walked it over to the desk of someone who had photoshop installed, and then tried it. Somehow it seemed easier to get one of you poor saps to try it for me.



Just another comment from a poor sap.

Photoshop 5/5.5, Painter 6.0 and Paint Shop Pro 7.0 also seem to work fine.

Just for kicks, and because I was bored, I even tried it with Flash 5 and it worked.
Of course, the sizing was off, but at least it worked.




________
Donato
MkII/Blue/40GB/080000565

I'd say the same, only basic tools are needed to make minor tweaks after you bring in the image. That was the problem i had before, seeing how the image would look on the empeg, then tweaking, uploading the image, blah, tweak, up etc... Just basic tools would save tons of time, and all the fancy extras aren't really needed. There's tons of other image editors already out there for that sort of functionality.


|| loren.cox
|| 080000446

Photoshop 5/5.5, Painter 6.0 and Paint Shop Pro 7.0 also seem to work fine.

Thanks. On my home computer, ACDSee copies to the clipboard differently and it doesn't work for me, so I asumed that there would be a handful of graphics apps which had trouble. Now I see that there's nothing to worry about. (Strangely, ACDSee on my work computer is fine.)

Good thing, since I'm using VB's built-in clipboard function to get the job done and it'd be a pain to have do get my hands dirty with the Windows API to take care of it.

___________
Tony Fabris

Subject line says it all. You can snag it right here.

I have done a bunch of under-the-hood stuff to this version. One of the things I did was tweak the cutoff values and gray display levels. I discovered this was necessary after I implemented the painting tools. It seems that if you tell the Windows API to perform a flood fill in 16-bit color, and the 24-bit color you're flooding falls inbetween two of the 16-bit shades, then it does its painting in a strange dither that isn't very compatible with the way my program works. So I tweaked the grays so they wouldn't dither on 16-bit video modes. Although I've only tested this on my home system, so I'd appreciate it if other folks could try it out and tell me if the middle grays look solid when they do flood fills and fat paintbrush strokes.

The readme file contains information about how to use the painting tools. Read it... Learn it... Live it...

Tomorrow, I'm going to make an official web page at my site for this program. Seeing as how it's on its feet now and everything. After I do that, I'll update the links in the logo faq to include it. Others who wish to link to the program will be able to link to that page.

Enjoy!

___________
Tony Fabris

Works okay for me Tony.

Dell Latitude laptop with an ATI Rage Mobility 8mb videocard.

One remark though, when closing the program on my docking station with 19 inch monitor (resolution 1600x1200) and subsequently firing it up again in undocked mode (LCD at 1024x768) I loose stuff. No doubt because it remembers the last positions of the windows and those I lost were out of the 1024x768 area. Perhaps it would be safe to add a check on that or something (maybe remember the positions per resolution). Getting them back is not that hard (just edit logoedit.ini) but others might get a little confused.

Once again ... Thank you Toooooniieeeee!

Cheers,
Hans




Mk2 - Blue - 080000431

Interesting!

The idea of "make sure the windows fall within the screen area" had occurred to me, but I didn't think it was a big deal because most folks run their desktops at the same rez all the time. I hadn't counted on the dock-undock thing. I'll put that on my to-do list. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.

Note: Another work around (without editing the INI file) is to select the window that's offscreen (click on its icon in the task bar), press ALT+Spacebar to open its control menu, press M for move, then use the arrow keys to drag it back onscreen.

This was related to a fun practical joke I used to pull on co-workers back in the 3.1 days. You could drag File Manager and Program Manager, or just about any other program off the screen and have them save their window positions. Then the user would return to their computer and try to run them, and Windows would run them, but they never appeared on the screen. And since 3.1 didn't have a task bar, there was no obvious way of knowing that the program was really running. So they would spend all this time trying to figure out why their software was crashing without an error message. Rebooting didn't fix it becuase the window positions were saved. They'd reboot and fiddle around for hours without knowing what was wrong. Great fun.

___________
Tony Fabris

That is just plain evil .

Cheers,
Hans


Mk2 - Blue - 080000431

This was related to a fun practical joke I used to pull on co-workers back in the 3.1 days...

You used to be able to close the Start button in base Win95. Just click on it, press ESC (leaving the focus on it). Then press Alt+Hyphen to bring up the Start button's system menu.


Roger - not necessarily speaking for empeg

Or having a 'screendump' on the screen, and putting all icons away in a corner.
Look at user try to doubleclick on the screen dump. Great fun too.

TommyE

Wow! It worked! We still use 95 at work and I just tried it. The start key on the keyboard won't bring it back either... that's just nuts. Is there a way to get it back without restarting explorer?

You used to be able to close the Start button in base Win95. Just click on it, press ESC (leaving the focus on it). Then press Alt+Hyphen to bring up the Start button's system menu.

Wow, I think it's feature-complete (knock on wood). There's a bunch of new stuff in this version, look at the release notes in the readme.txt for details.

I also now have an official web page for the program right here, so y'all can link it now. Bang on it and let me know if it's stable enough to link from the FAQ.

Since the preview colors are editable (see COLORS.TXT for instructions), I'd love it some owners of different colored screens would submit their versions of the color values. I could plug them in as defaults.

___________
Tony Fabris

Since no one complained about 0.9, I added one more feature and put up version 1.0. The new feature is a "Delete logos from player" menu item. It can be found right here.

Enjoy!

___________
Tony Fabris

I would't worry about the window problem too much as almost all applications have this problem. It's on I'm trying to solve on our Win2K Terminal Servers as when a user logs in from a web browser or at a lower res than thir first logon, you loose whatever is outside of the new sreen res.

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MK II, (Blue but should be Amber) SN: 118