Introduction

ConGo is a graphics viewer and converter for many Commodore 64 graphics formats. Over the years, it has really grown up and now got so many functions that kind of a "how-to" seems necessary.

1 Main screen

When you first start ConGo, you'll see the browser. The main screen is separated into four areas as shown in the picture:

(1) the directory window where you select the path. ConGo also sees D64, D71 and D81 files as directories so they are shown here as well-

(2) the content of the currently selected path (from 1)

(3) the content of the currently selected file (from 2), be it a picture or an archive or ...

(4) the batch job collector - you can fill this area with drag'n drop from (2) or by clicking the button. If you are ready for batch processing, click the little save button .

You can change where these windows are positioned and if they are visible by using these two buttons from the first large toolbar . BTW - you can also move the toolbars around if you like.

1.1 Switching the preview mode

ConGo always tries to determine the contents of a file - it will show an image preview if you select an image file. But sometimes you might want to see the hex contents of an image to analyze it or you want to decompile a program instead of seeing it's hex listing. In this case, the little preview mode bar  is your friend . The button that is pressed signals the type of content ConGo suspects (from left: image, decompile/detokenize, hex, archive, text, sound, html). You can switch to hex or text preview in this example. ConGo won't enable all buttons for every file because - for example - even though you might want to "hear" a picture file as a sound, ConGo won't be able to "play" it because it does not know how to. A note on decompiling/detokenizing: ConGo looks for BASIC lines and if it finds them, it will detokenize, otherwise it will simply try to decompile. And a note on text: open the little arrow menu to change to another text format (like Vizawrite, Mastertext, Petscii etc.)

1.2 Changing the preview's look

ConGo allows you to scale the image preview by pressing the "big" zoom bar. If you change it's position, the current scale will be shown on the bottom most info bar. If you right-click it, it will jump to 1:1 scale. It also has two little "bumps" for 1:2 and 2:1 scales. You can change the C64 palette that is used for the preview by using the palette dropdown list. The same palette will be used for the preview in the browser area.

1.3 Different browse modes

Take a look at the small toolbar just over the browse area (3). With the viewstyle menu (1), you can change what is shown to you. You can make ConGo show pictures only, have small thumbnails etc. - you can even smoothly change the size of the thumbnails by using the little bar (2) right here, with the maximum of 320x200 you see C64 images at full size.

1.4 Opening a file

To open a file (if it is a sound or an image file), you simpy double click it. In case of an image file, it will be shown in an own window. I'll tell more about the image window later. You can switch between different image windows by using the toolbar on the bottom of the screen, it is showing the name of the file together with a little preview. This preview always reflects the current state of the image! The browser's icon is shown on the very left side.

Instead of the toolbar, you can also use the "Window" menu to switch between windows.

2 The image window

First, take a look at the title bar.

It normally shows the filename, an asterisk * is added if the image was changed and not yet saved. You can right-click or double-click the title bar to "fold up" the image so it occupies less screen space. In the middke, there is of course the image itself (1). Change it's scale by using the large scalebar . Change it's palette (if it is a C64 format) by selecting a new one in the palette dropdown list . When the image is scaled up, you can move the visible area around by dragging it with the left mouse button. When you activate the magnifying glass , you can select the image area that you want to zoom into. You can move around the magnifying glass just as you like:

2.1 The status bar

Now let's take a look at the status bar (2). It gives you valuable information about the image - bla, bla - and reads from left to right:

By right-clicking on the status bar, you can deselect (and reselect) those parts of it that you don't need anyway.

Two items need a closer inspection: the transparent colour and the transparency slider (3). Let's say you have converted a jpg image to Koala. It is important to keep in mind that after the conversion, the original jpg is still in the background, you just cannot see it. It will be hold there until you save the image or press the "apply to background" button . To better compare the original and the result, you can now do two different things. You can either set a transparent colour. In this case, all the parts of the conversion result that have the transparent colour are made fully transparent so the original image shines through. Or you can move the transparency slider to the right - the original image will start to gradually shine through. Put the slider to the right end and you'll only see the original.

2.2 Using warning grids

There is a very useful button that helps in difficult conversion tasks - the colour warning button . There are two kinds of warning grids you can show on your image: the colour warning grid shows you all those cards that have a certain number of colours (or more). These cards are framed in yellow. You can use those warnings to manually work on these cards. To make this easier, there also is the format restriction warning grid. It shows (in red) you into which card or cell you can NOT draw right now WITH THE CURRENT DRAW colour. I emphasized this because you might sometimes ask yourself "how in the world should that 255 colour image be hires compliant"? It most probably isn't but your current draw colour might be black and black might be the background colour of the image. Also, you shouldn't worry about many red squares for multicolour compatibilty on a multicolour image. The red sqares tell you where you cannot add ANOTHER colour without making the image multicolour compatible.

(example: multicolour format restrictions in red, warn > 3 colours in yellow. Why is there only one cell with more than three colours? This is a cell where all four "multi" colours are found - background colour, screen colour and both VRam-colours.)

2.3 Drawing on images

To draw on an image, use the pencil button . Drop down the list to see all the options like pen, line, square etc. If you ever used a paint program, you know how to use this part of ConGo. With two exceptions: First, you must explicitely call to stop drawing. This is because of the many other uses of the mouse cursor in ConGo. Second, ConGo tries to handle the colour restrictions for you. If you are drawing on a hires screen, you can, for example, not use more than two colours in a cell. Depending on what you select in the menu, ConGo does not let you draw a pixel, it calculates the nearest available colour and draws it in this colour or it simply overwrites the restrictions - useful if you want to "colourize" a hires picture.

2.4 Using effects on images

There are five buttons that made those typical image manipulation routines possible. These are, from left: cut/crop, mirror, rotate, brightness/contrast/gamma, RGB and effects. Some of these are implicitely converting C64 formats to PC, meaning they break colour restriction. This is obvious for effects like "solarize" but it's less obvious for things like rotation (the C64 cells cannot be rotated, of course).

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