Cinemascope is a useful application that can fool Marathon 2 and Infinity into displaying terminal pictures that are twice the normal width. It was developed to implement the terminals in Trojan - Legacy. Marathon expects terminal pictures to be 307 by 266 pixels and will normally stretch or compress images to fit this rectangle. Cinemascope will muck about with your pictures to allow you to use and display images that are 614 by 266 pixels, giving you an image that goes right across the terminal with any terminal text drawn over the top of its right hand side.

Note that Cinemascope is not actually a Chisel Effect - it is a stand alone application. It is just easier to store it with all the effects.

Using Cinemascope

Cinemascope can read 4 types of files: PICT files, Marathon 2 maps, Marathon Infinity maps and your scenario's 'terminal picts' resource file. Double click Cinemascope, and then choose the file that contains your image(s). Next choose to 'Fix' or 'Un-Fix' the double width images in your file. Cinemascope will do its stuff and then report back which images were altered.

Once fixed, the images will display correctly in Marathon, but not in any other application. Opening and saving a 'fixed' image with any application could well result in you losing the right hand half of the image, so be careful and un-fix anything you want to work on. I'd recommend fixing the images in your terminal picts file and nowhere else.

Why do I need this?

Well, probably you don't. Hamish Sanderson wanted to do terminals without text in Trojan Legacy without using lots of #LOGON terminal commands, so I came up with this hack to do it. If it lets you design some killer terminals (remember text will overlay just fine) then it has served its purpose and I can sleep easy.

What is it doing to my precious images?

All PICT images start off with a rectangle that describes how big they are. Marathon looks at this rectangle and scales it to fit its hard coded picture display rectangle. All Cinemascope does is stuff the rectangle Marathon is expecting into this initial boundary rectangle and then change a few instructions within the PICT image so that it still displays properly. This will only work for bitmapped images but I seriously doubt anyone is using draw-type images with Marathon. If you don't understand the difference, don't worry - the nice thing about PICT files is that you don't ever have to - they just work.

Version History

Cinemascope 1.0
First version.

Cinemascope is © Mike Trinder, 1997, although the actual word Cinemascope is probably somebody's trademark. You may use it and distribute it (non-profit distribution only) provided this document accompanies the Cinemascope application. Marathon is a trademark of Bungie Software Products Corporation.
The author takes no responsibility for any problems this software may cause.