MAMEWorld Forums - MAME Artwork: Official - Vectrex overlays in need of vectorization (yeah, irony)

> > Posted this on the MESS forum thread:
> >
> > I have overlays for Berzerk, Solar Quest, Mine Storm, Armor Attack, and Scramble
> and
> > would be fine with scanning them. What would be the preferred way? (Normal scan,
> scan
> > with transparency adapter, scan both sides to get opaque mask, etc). And what dpi
> and
> > format, I suppose.
> > -
> > Did a test scan last night and the transparency mode one is inexplicably much
> higher
> > quality, both were done at 600dpi but the transparent one had many, many times more
> > HxV pixels in the actual resolution, so there is obviously some other setting
> > applying to the scan when using the transparency mode. It is noticeably much
> better,
> > the tiny text is clearly readable and the colors seem more true, but the file is
> ~1gb
> > compared to the standard scan which is well less than 100mb (want to say in the
> 20s).
> > If the end result is vectorization then bigger and better is probably best, but I
> > know that files that large will be hard to exchange. Downside is that the
> semi-opaque
> > areas appear dimmed out, but that's obviously because of the method used to scan.
> >
> > Either way, let me know if you guys want them and how and where.
>
> I'm not sure what actual resolution the transparency adapter scan is yielding, I'm a
> bit curious (is it scanning with an alpha map as well?)
> Not sure if the transparency thing is completely necessary, but if certain ink colors
> are more transparent than others it does make some sense. (Though I'm not sure mame's
> artwork system can handle that right now, to be honest! I.E. one additive layer and
> one screen/mask layer?)
>
> 1200dpi 24 bit color to png or lossless tif is how I'd do the scans.
>
> LN

I'm honestly not sure what's making the difference, the only thing I chose differently was using the transparency option, though, there may be something in the way it's scanning it...by default it tries to slice up the image as if it were slides and I have to override it to scan the whole area, so maybe it is doing some kind of ultra-hires-mode. When both are scanned as 600dpi TIFF, the normal one comes in at 58.6MB and the transparency one is 1.88GB, with resolutions of 3900x5010 vs 15729x19953 accordingly. Everything else seems to look the same, though obviously it is getting all the "extra" pixels from somewhere. If you have somewhere I could upload it to, you're welcome to take a look at them.