Jim Leonard wrote: I just pulled an image formats spec book off the shelf and I'm surprised at how capable Targa format actually was; image formats could be colour mapped or direct colour, and colour entries could be 15, 16, 24 or 32 bits in length. (I used to use it in connection with 3D-Studio work and raytracing output, but I'd never looked at the details of the format itself) The format will support RLE compression, as well as developer extensions and embedded thumbnail images. Version 1.0 format was released back in 1984, v2.0 was 1989. I'm surprised it isn't more common today, to be honest (although I suppose it doesn't do anything that TIFF doesn't do). cheers Jules

Richard wrote: :-) Funnily enough, that 'feature' was listed in this book as the main disadvantage of Targa too. (I'm not even sure if there was any kind of attempt at centralised control over the extensions like there was with TIFF; it may well have been a complete free-for-all :-) cheers J.

On Dec 19, 2006, at 2:37 PM, Chris M wrote: There are two separate things, the Truevision TARGA family of frame grab and true-color display boards (progenitor of the .TGA format), and the later family of display-list based graphics accelerators known collectively as TIGA, which featured the TI 340x0 processor, were made by many different vendors, and were frequently 8514/A compatible. The two have virtually nothing in common apart from they both describe ISA-bus hardware capable of displaying raster images to a color display. Other helpful information: The Electronic Photography and Imaging Center was spun off of AT&T in 1987 and became Truevision; the original TARGA hardware were apparently AT&T branded. .TGA supports up to 32-bpp data (24 bits of color, 8 bits of alpha). Apropos of nothing in particular, I love how people on this list spout off half-cocked about stuff they think they might vaguely remember a little bit, maybe, and rarely bother to do even a tiny bit of fact checking first. ok bear

On Dec 20, 2006, at 4:10 PM, Chris M wrote: No, there's nothing wrong with asking questions, nothing at all. Sometimes you have to have a little knowledge about something before you can effectively research it, and it can be hard to get up over that first hump without a little push from somebody else (it happened to me when I was learning about the AS/400, for example). What bugs me is some of the useless or blatantly wrong "answers" that appear from time to time. If you're giving information and you write something like this contrived example: "I remember the Commodore 64 we had at school, back in 1979" it is not only careless, but disruptive as well. Wikipedia suffers from this sort of thing also. Still, it was an unnecessarily cranky thing to say on a public list, and I apologize to the listmembers for it. ok bear