#102 Support for MG format (VIC-20 native)
It would be nice to see the VIC-20 native MG format being supported by RECOIL.
You find documentation here: https://dateipfa.de/.Public/denial/minigrafik/manual.zip (see Appendix D)
For the VICE team, I once supplied a small tool to render MG files into a PPM file, the source also contains the binary contents of the header and footer data: https://dateipfa.de/.Public/denial/tools/mg_render.zip (see the corresponding discussion here: https://sleepingelephant.com/ipw-web/bulletin/bb/viewtopic.php?t=9837). "image.c", "image.h" and "matrix.h" are licenced with CC0, and "mg_render.c" is licenced with CC-BY-SA.
MINIPAINT is a native editor for this format (see https://www.sleepingelephant.com/ipw-web/bulletin/bb/viewtopic.php?t=3752).
Here's a disc image with some example pictures (see the "IMAGES" section): https://dateipfa.de/.Public/denial/minigrafik/minigrafik.zip
Thank you for an excellent request! I implemented it.
I'm only confused about how this format is called. Is MINIGRAFIK the name of the format and MINIPAINT the name of its editor?
We need to assign some filename extension. While this format has a large header and footer, RECOIL generally recognizes formats by filename extensions. How about *.MG ?
MINIGRAFIK is a BASIC extension for the VIC-20 that implements graphics commands and also defines the storage file format. MINIPAINT is the native reference editor for these files (so to say, the flagship application of MINIGRAFIK).
Appendix D of the manual explicitly refers to the format as "MG picture file", with MG as shortcut. *.MG is fine as filename extension.
Done. You can test it at https://recoil.sourceforge.net/web.html