 _  _                   ___
| \/ |___ _ _ ____ ___ / __|_ __ _ _ __
|    / o_) '_/ _' / o_)\__ \ '_ \ '_( _| Front end: 0.03 (1 February 2000)
|_||_\___|_| \__  \___||___/ .__/_||__)  Back end: 0.03 (1 February 2000)
             |___/         |_|            Darren Salt, 1998-2000


This program allows the merging of two images of the same size. All you need
to do is to drag a sprite file (from a Filer window) to the MergeSprs icon on
the icon bar and a save box will appear. This contains the normal save box
clutter :-)


The sprite file format
----------------------

The sprite file contaning the image to be converted may contain between two
and four sprites, representing two images.

The first image may consist of one or two sprites. The first is the image to
be converted, and may be of any depth and can have a palette. It may also
have a mask; if not, then if the following sprite is 8bpp greyscale, it is
used as an alpha channel. Otherwise, the image has no mask.

The second image immediately follows the first, and again may consist of one
or two sprites. The first is the image to be converted, and may be of any
depth and can have a palette. It must have either a simple mask (as part of
the first sprite) or an alpha channel (the second sprite, which must be 8bpp
greyscale).

All sprites must have the same dimensions.

Output is normally in the form of one 24-bit colour sprite of the same
dimensions and an alpha channel (if the first image had one). However, you
may tell the program to attempt to losslessly convert to 8bpp and/or to add
the alpha channel to the sprite if it can be converted into a simple mask.
Further, you can specify that the new-format (1bpp) mask is used for this
merge even if the sprite is 8bpp (bear in mind that, without Deep4All,
neither an 8bpp sprite with a new-format mask nor a 24-bit colour sprite is
viewable on any Archimedes.)


The back end
------------

Is run in a taskwindow whenever !MergeSprs is used to convert an image. It
may be used from the command line, as follows:

        <MergeSprs$Dir>.MergeSprs [options] SRC DEST

(Note that capitalisation & digits indicate the accepted abbreviation, *not*
that you should use capitals!)

SRC                 the source file (sprite)

DEST                the destination file (sprite)

The options are:

-r  --reduce        try to make the resulting image 8-bit colour
-1  --simple-mask   force the mask to be of the 'deep' 1bpp format
-c  --combine-mask  if simple, combine the mask with the image
    --help          display the help text then exit
    --version       display the version number then exit


Contact
-------

ds@youmustbejoking.demon.co.uk
