[Release] PSPComic v0.9 Beta

[Archaemic]

Finally! Someone got around to programming a comic book reader for the PSP that reads cbzs and cbrs directly from the memory stick. It's a little slow, as would be expected from a program that resizes such large images on such a slow processor, but fortunately, you can overclock to 333MHz from the program itself. It's got all the good features, such as zooming, two different resample algorithms (one faster but harder to read, one slower but easier to read), rotation, and the like.

[Download PSPComic]

Source code is included. It is (mostly) GPL. This software is written by me, and Kip helped with the graphics and ideas.

If you encounter a bug, please send a full bug report to the email address listed in the readme or post it here. More details are inside the readme. This program is still in beta, so it might be buggy.

Put comics in MS_ROOT/comics. I hope you know how to install the program yourself. If not, read the readme. You'll need it.

The controls should be rather intuitive. If not, read the readme for more details on the controls.

Feel free to email me or post feature requests!

<edit>Also, please post which firmware you're on so I can confirm that this works on different firmwares</edit>
<edit2>This version is old! New version here: [RELEASE] PSPComic v0.9.6</edit>

DO NOT ASK WHERE TO OBTAIN NON-FREE (E.G. MARVEL OR DC) COMIC BOOK ARCHIVES. THESE REQUESTS WILL GO UNANSWERED AND ARE AGAINST THE PIRACY POLICY.

[Chappo]

Screenie?

[dx169]

This sounds... Sexy... Would you be kind enough to provide us with screenshots first?

[Archaemic]

Sorry, I can't get SVCapture to work when I'm running this program. Plus, what would I take a screenshot of? A copyrighted comic? Or the menu maybe?

[kip]

Screen shot wouldnt be usefull as its a cbr/z reader but enjoy this realese Arch and i passed a lot of time debuging it

[dx169]

Take a picture of the menu and stuff...

[Archaemic]

Originally Posted by Archaemic

Sorry, I can't get SVCapture to work when I'm running this program.

Is that so hard to understand?

[dx169]

Yes. Yes it is.

[Spirit Hawk Leon]

Would this be able to read other images from zips/rars?

[spindoc]

Originally Posted by Archaemic

Finally! Someone got around to programming a comic book reader for the PSP that reads cbzs and cbrs directly from the memory stick. It's a little slow, as would be expected from a program that resizes such large images on such a slow processor, but fortunately, you can overclock to 333MHz from the program itself. It's got all the good features, such as zooming, two different resample algorithms (one faster but harder to read, one slower but easier to read), rotation, and the like.

[Download PSPComic]

Source code is included. It is (mostly) GPL. This software is written by me, and Kip helped with the graphics and ideas.

If you encounter a bug, please send a full bug report to the email address listed in the readme or post it here. More details are inside the readme. This program is still in beta, so it might be buggy.

Put comics in MS_ROOT/comics. I hope you know how to install the program yourself. If not, read the readme. You'll need it.

The controls should be rather intuitive. If not, read the readme for more details on the controls.

Feel free to email me or post feature requests!

DO NOT ASK WHERE TO OBTAIN NON-FREE (E.G. MARVEL OR DC) COMIC BOOK ARCHIVES. THESE REQUESTS WILL GO UNANSWERED AND ARE AGAINST THE PIRACY POLICY.

Woohoo! Thank you! I'll definitely put it to the test!

[MjW]

Hey that's really nice. I read the entire spawn series on the psp and almost every silver surfer issue using pep viewer.

I'll definitely give this a try for the simple reason that it reads cbr/cbz directly and it will save me lots of time unpacking cbr/z and stuff. I'll let you know how it goes.

Gread job, it was about time

Edit : After I pressed start or/and select several times and tried the program for a bit it gave me an out of memory error and crashed.
And I have trouble noticing the quality change when I use the resize method option.
The idea of zooming a bit more than the psps resolution was great though since it does not ruin the reading experience and it provides a slight zoom.

Things that would be nice implementing:
Reverse L+R trigger.
A resizing option for double pages.
Scrollspeed settings for d-pad and analogue.
Maybe directories inside the Comics folder?

Well that for now. Its quite nice for a beta release, I am sure with a bit of tiding up it will become a standard program

[qxz86]

This is very good and all, but you need to take some cues from Jview.
Like, precaching of images. Precaching is soooooooooooo important. Seamless page transfers make the whole experience much nicer.
Support for uncompressed images in folders to scroll through. This is just nice in general.
Also, a better algorithm for resizing. The current one in PSPComic leaves the pixels very jaggy. =/

Actually, if you could just port CDisplayEX to the PSP, that'd be the best solution. It's open-source.

[Archaemic]

Originally Posted by Spirit Hawk Leon

Would this be able to read other images from zips/rars?

Yes it can.

Also, the PSP doesn't have enough RAM to do precaching. An uncompressed image can take up to 10MB, and when doing zoom and rotate, the amount of RAM in use can quickly go up to or exceed 32MB. Precaching often uses more than 100MB of RAM, something which the PSP does not have.

If no-one is complaining about speed, I guess I'll implement a third resample method.

I was considering subdirectories, but I don't know how to differentiate a file from a directory in C without trying to open it as a file and as a directory.

And I guess I'll get on adjustable scrolling speed, too.

I'll need to investigate the crash, though. Did it crash to the menu, crash to the XMB or did the page just not work anymore? From the readme:

Originally Posted by readme

- Large pages, when made full size, may cause the PSP to run out of memory if
attempting to rotate, or sometimes if just loaded. Make sure not to use very
high resolution comic books with this program. If memory runs out, the page
will "freeze", meaning it will no longer be able to be operated on, but you
can still change pages in the comic book.

[qxz86]

Also, the PSP doesn't have enough RAM to do precaching. An uncompressed image can take up to 10MB, and when doing zoom and rotate, the amount of RAM in use can quickly go up to or exceed 32MB. Precaching often uses more than 100MB of RAM, something which the PSP does not have.

Yes...it does.
Try out JView from my last post. It caches multiple pages ahead of time, despite the PSP's small amount of usable RAM. Very few pictures, even accounting for the large size that lots of comics' pages take up, exceed one or two megabytes, anyways.

As well, customizable controls and amount of zoom would be appreciated.

I don't mean to undermine your program, by the way. It's excellent. On par with JView. But, it still could do with some improvement, is all.

[Archaemic]

Hence why I am asking for suggestions.

And, so far, I've not come across any images that, when compressed, exceed two megabytes. But when uncompressed, I've seen one that comes damn near close to ten megabytes. If I did precaching, you probably wouldn't be able to zoom all the way in on a double page.

What do you mean "customizable amount of zoom"? You can zoom anywhere from 50% to 100% (in increments of 10%). Do you mean a menu option that does it in any increment?

By the way, I'm almost done with subdirectory control (which, incidentally, is easiest to write if you can browse ANY folder). I just need to write a path simplifier (ms0:/comics/../Runaways/.../Deadpool/../ is not a simplified path ) and make it go up to a higher folder when you hit back.

Customizable controls could take a while to program. They're...more or less built in. Also, I foolishly linked the zoom in and zoom out controls to go back and select, respectively.

Edit] Okay, I checked out JView, and the file it gave me doesn't work.

[TuncaCeleste|]

Nice app, at last can we read directly from archives like RAR, ZIP, cbr and cbz

You might want to check out PePViewer, which is what I've been using to read my mangas, great-solid app. http://dl.qj.net/PeP-Viewer-v0.7-PSP...7918/catid/140

What I like about it is the resize quality and the scroll speed (or pan speed) which is very very appropiate. What I dislike is the inability of the program to load compressed archives .

Good luck with your program, I'll be looking forward to its completion

[Hartbreakkid]

Very nice work. I like it.

As for any improvements I'd suggest, definately try for sub-dir & uncompressed image support (I seem to be in the minority that prefers to unzip my comics)

Also, by "customizable amount of zoom" I think they may mean make it so you can lock the zoom to a certain setting (as opposed to it zooming to the width of the screen every page change).

I certainly get what you mean by "If I did precaching, you probably wouldn't be able to zoom all the way in on a double page". I stopped reading on psp for a while because every time I hit a 2 page splash page (which are in just about every comic now adays) my psp would crash.

Keep up the good work.

[macbxx]

Originally Posted by Archaemic

What do you mean "customizable amount of zoom"? You can zoom anywhere from 50% to 100% (in increments of 10%). Do you mean a menu option that does it in any increment?

It would be nice to allow changing the increments in zoom from 10, because sometimes images look kinda jagged at certain zoom levels and not at others, so there can be a page that looks jagged at 70% zoom and 80%, but look "antialiased" at 75%

[Blackbelttcon]

can u use this on a normal 3.03

[Jain7th]

you should add support for .pngs

often scanslate groups use this format and converting and then compressing stuff is not what i think of comfort

anyhow, i`m happy to see a new comic reading prog for the psp and hope you are going to stick to it. pep didn`t get new versions, and i even had to leave my precious eReader behind, because it wouldn`t like my 4 gb ms (never saw better resizing options)

EDIT:
found the source code files of a later eReader version, i`d be really happy if you coud use most of the eReader stuff (little preview picture, fast scrolling,..)

source code files

[spindoc]

Program runs great, it hasn't crashed on me (yet). I've tried opening cbz's that are over 250mb, no problems there. I'm not sure on how the resampling filters work (you cycle through them?)


Here's a bullet point of improvements everyone's suggested.

-Subdirectory support.
-Remember the zoom level of previous pages.
-Reverse L+R trigger. (that way you only need one hand to use the reader..hur hur)
-Smoother scrolling (not sure how pepviewer managed, but they had a pretty smooth scroll)
-Magnifying glass (quick toggle, check pepviewer)
-Scrollspeed settings for d-pad and analogue.
-Indicate which sampling filter is being used.
-Precache (pepviewer allowed you to enable/disable it)

Pepviewer was great, apart from the ugly UI and the lack of compressed support. There are plenty of more ideas, but I think those are the most important/useful. MP3 support isn't totally necessary, thanks to the mp3 prx.
thanks for listening!

[Urameshi]

Originally Posted by dx169

This sounds... Sexy... Would you be kind enough to provide us with screenshots first?

that's what i thought too

[Archaemic]

Um, this program DOES have PNG support. Also, I'm working on subdirectory support.

There are only two resample methods, as cited in the readme:

Originally Posted by readme

- Toggle resize method
Switch method with with to resize the page. Options are nearest neighbor
(default) which is blockier but faster, and simple resample, which is slower
and blurrier, but often makes text slightly easier to read. Please note that
the page you're currently on is not reprocessed, and the change doesn't take
effect until you zoom, rotate or change the page. Only the nearest neighbor
resize method works on 8-bit images, and as such, the program defaults to
using this method for 8-bit images. It does not, however, change the setting.

I think I'll work on smoother scrolling next.

[matriculated]

Wow! What a great start to this app! The resampling could use a little more work (text is pretty hard to read) but still, this is awesome. It works really well using IRShell and WifI redirection so I don't have to copy my cbrs onto my memstick.

[fishdrop]

Thanks for your affort!!!

I modified your source for following functions.
1. keep state (zoom, rotation)
2. bookmark
3. bug fix : no crash when press "select" key in orignal image size

here is source

http://www.sendspace.com/file/ade8vk

[Chrizzly]

Thank you Archaemic for releasing this program and especially the source code. I really love this app.

Originally Posted by fishdrop

Thanks for your affort!!!

I modified your source for following functions.
1. keep state (zoom, rotation)
2. bookmark
3. bug fix : no crash when press "select" key in orignal image size

here is source

http://www.sendspace.com/file/ade8vk

Looking good. I really like the bookmark function. I didn't notice the crash bug.

I also made my own version. The changes are:
- Pictures are opened in full-size. (I resize the images on my pc before I upload them to the psp so I never use the zoom function, but it still works)
- Replaced the menu with a more graphical version. (Maybe I'll remove it later, because I keep pressing start for some sort of reason.)
- Removed the text "-- more --" and added a scrollbar.
- In the goto page menu you can use the L and R button to do a step of 20 pages. Selecting pages > 100 took me too long
- Lowered the menu scroll rate from 175 to 125.

Source code:
http://www.sendspace.com/file/fqb93q
Too bad we can't do screenshots in homebrew.

My Todo list:
- Reduce screen flicker in the menu.
- Add fishdrop's changes.
- Find new things to do.

@Archaemic: I really hope you don't mind I did a few changes and uploaded the new source. I made my own version just for the fun of it, not because the program wasn't good enough

[eldiablov]

this is the beauty of open source programs good work Archaemic

[Archaemic]

I've already got a new version in the works. Subdirectory support is complete, and toggleable rotation and zoom persistence is also complete. I haven't isolated that crash bug (it didn't seem to affect my PSP). Coming attractions include writing/reading a config file to keep all of your preferences saved and a customizable pan rate. (In the source code I differentiate between panning and scrolling, where panning is what you do on a page, and scrolling is what you do in the menu.)

Also, for v1.0, Kip and I are planning to make a graphical menu. For now, though, text is easier. This is, after all, the beta version.

[Chrizzly]

Understood, I'm looking forward to the next release.

[Archaemic]

Good news! I've figured out why both resize algorithms look the same.

BECAUSE THERE WAS A BUG TO MAKE IT USE NEAREST NEIGHBOR ALL THE TIME (except on 8-bit images).
Oops!
This has been fixed, and will be reflected in the upcoming release (v0.9.5)

If you want to roll your own binaries, change the line

	int resize_method = old->format->BytesPerPixel<3?*access_int_global(access_resize):resize_nn;

to

	int resize_method = old->format->BytesPerPixel<3?resize_nn:*access_int_global(access_resize);