Stop Press Canvas

File Format
Name	Stop Press Canvas
Ontology	Electronic File Formats Graphics Stop Press Canvas
Extension(s)	.spc

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