pic2mirc - Exodus Gaming

Today I was searching for a program to convert a picture into mIRC colored text, but couldn't find any, so as this was an interesting project, I have decided to make it myself.

Don't expect much anyway, the color remapping algorithm that I made is as good as the one of Gimp, but the palette of mIRC isn't really the best, so the results with photos are really bad, it's best suited for hand-drawn stuff or game sprites.

If you'd like to edit the converted picture, you can use PixelTool now, as in v1.0 I've changed the character used to make spaces to make the resulting .txt files compatible with this program.

The picture is resized to a width of your choice (I've set a maximum of 128 pixels, but you should really keep it under 90 to support 1024 pixels wide desktops), and the height is automatically halved (aspect ratio is preserved but halved), because mIRC's font has not a 1:1 ratio, but rather a 1:2 ratio.

It supports a lot of graphics formats (BMP, ICO, PNG, JPEG, TIFF, TGA) and outputs either into a .txt file, into the Clipboard, or both.

If you don't know what I'm talking about then look at this pic:

pic2mirc1.png (5.15K)
Number of downloads: 37

The program is GUI-based so it's pretty easy to use:

pic2mirc1.png (21.36K)
Number of downloads: 7

If you have any questions or you find any problems/bugs then let me know.

Enjoy :teebeer:

CHANGELOG:

v1.0
- Now pic2mirc only sets size automatically if PictureWidth*2 can fit 128 pixels, and not just PictureWidth (this will keep original image appearance, because otherwise height would be cut in half because of mIRC's font ratio)
- Added Black & White remapping
- Added Ascii Art remapping with selectable "palette" of characters
- Added automatic saving and loading of settings
- Now you can select where to output the picture: either in a file, in the Clipboard or both
- Changed default size to 80 (was 90)
- Added a SpinGadget for "fine-tuning" picture size
- Changed "space-filling" character from X to #, to make the generated .txt pictures compatible with PixelTool
- Now preview pic is cropped if too high
- Added readme file

v0.9
- Added Gray Scale colour option
- Optimized colour remapping which now is a lot faster, though you may not notice it

v0.8
- Added preview area (picture might be cut vertically if too long)
- Fixed bug which added a white line at the right and at the bottom of the mIRC picture