The Mercury PCX Reducer v1.0
by Gideon Goodwin
ggoodwin@ucsd.edu

Intro:
  I am into game and graphics programming on the PC, but time and time again
I have found myself with a seemingly insurmountable problem:  my art sucks.
Through many hours of doodling on scratch paper in class, I have realized
that, actually, not *all* of my art sucks, only that that I do on the screen.
So I use a scanner to convert pencil- or pen-drawn images to PCX files which
I can then color and use in my games.  But then you scan it and the result is
some PCX file size 1319141 pixels by 21941941 pixels, and you go Hey, better
scale that thing down.....but THEN, you have this blurry mass of scattered
pixels which you must try to connect by hand, a tedious and difficult task...
that's where this program comes in.  It takes a large PCX file in two colors,
presumably fresh from your scanner, and scales it down to a given size...but
the scaling in this program is designed from a 2-color perspective (like my
line drawings) and is better suited to such graphics...when scaling down, it
emphasizes the LINES, so when you reduce the size of your drawing, all the
lines remain intact.  Makes it much easier to preserve detail when reducing
a full-page doodle to a 64*64 pixel sprite.

Usage:
   Well let me just disclaim myself here by pointing out that I wrote this
program in 2 hours.  It is quite untested and pretty unrobust so treat it
gently.  run PCXRED using your favorite command prompt and answer each of the
questions as they are asked, wow.  if you want to keep the aspect ratio of
your PCX file, tell the program, and you have a choice between scaling by
height or by width...otherwise you can enter both the height and width and
thereby distort the image.
   I mainly designed this to fill a gap in my own development process.  I
scan an image in 2 color mode and save it as a 256 color PCX.  I then feed
that image into PCXRED, making a nice little bit-sized sprite...then color
the sprite using a paint program and import it into your app.

Hope this helps you out.


