Stop Press Canvas

Stop Press Canvas (extension .spc) is an uncompressed fixed-size monochrome raster image format, originally associated with the Stop Press graphics package for Amstrad PCW computers.

Format description
From John Elliott's SPC2BMP source code (August 1996):


 * SPC format:
 * SPC describes a black-and-white picture, 720 pixels across by 256 down. The aspect ratio is similar to the 640x200 CGA mode. The file is stored as 32 blocks of 720 bytes.
 * Within each block, eight lines are stored, interleaved. The top line is in bytes 0,8,16,...; the second in bytes 1,9,17,... and so on.
 * SPC files work from top to bottom and left to right.

(This is essentially the in-memory format of the PCW screen.)

Examples

 * joyce-z80-2.1.10.tar.gz - the source code for the Z80 utilities for the Joyce PCW emulator - includes "joyce.spc".

Links

 * SP2BMSEA.COM, a CP/M / DOS self-extracting archive containing SPC2BMP (compiled programs and source code), which converts this format to BMP. (Archive can be unpacked with PMA / LHA tools.)
 * http://oliwright.pythonanywhere.com/ - converts other image files to SPC format