The excellent XnView program claims it can read Oric Hires screens. See:
http://www.xnview.com/en/formats.html#o
I tried to load a simple Oric Hires file, renamed .HIR, with or without tape header, and it failed with an "unknown format" error message.
Did someone ever manage to use this?
What exact format should it be?
EDIT: ok, there are 2 possibilities:
- loading a .HIR format (no header I suppose), didn't manage to use it but it seems I had 4 useless bytes at the end, which is probably the problem
- loading a .TAP format, which runs fine with coloured pictures, but not with monochrom pictures (they seem to be shifted by 4 bytes, ie 24 pixels).
EDIT2: now that's very strange, despite the fact that the memory addresses are correct in the TAP header, I just noticed ALL my monochrom files have 4 useless bytes at the end. That's what seems to be puzzling XnView. And here, I suspect I am to blame with my PCHires tool!
Conclusion: it's all my fault, I will take a look at PCHires!
XnView
There was a bug in PC Hires indeed.
I will soon post a new version, that should be fine, and that includes now a correct option to make hires screens that can be cloaded in a program with ROM V1.0 (but this option will prevent the screen from loading in XnView).
About Xnview, I got the latest version, and loading Oric screens that have the right format works fine. I seem to recall there's an option to check if you want to display ALL the loading formats; if you don't you'll only see the most frequent ones.
Now it would be cool if XnView could take advantage of the TAP headers, knowing the exact size of the picture. This would prevent corruption from files that have "dirty" bytes at the end (this happends frequently in tape transfers to TAP files), of would allow to load HIRES files that are not exactly 240*200.
But it might be complicated!
I will soon post a new version, that should be fine, and that includes now a correct option to make hires screens that can be cloaded in a program with ROM V1.0 (but this option will prevent the screen from loading in XnView).
About Xnview, I got the latest version, and loading Oric screens that have the right format works fine. I seem to recall there's an option to check if you want to display ALL the loading formats; if you don't you'll only see the most frequent ones.
Now it would be cool if XnView could take advantage of the TAP headers, knowing the exact size of the picture. This would prevent corruption from files that have "dirty" bytes at the end (this happends frequently in tape transfers to TAP files), of would allow to load HIRES files that are not exactly 240*200.
But it might be complicated!
Re: XnView
I've just installed XnView 2.32 Extended and it doesn't recognize HIR/HRS/TAP. Can you confirm this?