Hi Dennis,

>Thomas,
>
>Whew! Power restored at last. Pretty strong typhoon lashed through the Metro Manila area last night at midnight. Power just came back right now, 20 hours after. The other areas not so lucky - they will need 4 more days!

Same here, yesterday evening. Hurricanelike thunderstorm all over southwest Germany. Power was down in Speyer (several 100 miles away from my home), but only for roundabout 20 minutes. During the last hurricane we lost power for several hours. Yesterday my APC Backups 1500 encountered several small power lacks but nothing drastic. So working on my Workstation at home wasn't a problem. But without network, as I usually disconnect LAN/WAN during thunderstorms, it was like driving without sight...


>
>Ah yes, I remember that's why need to make MSK files.. forgot about that!
>

never mind. Just don't use 255,255,255 for white anymore. Use 254,254,254 instead, just as Mark mentioned. And use Cesar's converter for doing this with all the old bmps you use and there is no more need for msks :-)


>Pardon my ignorance, but what is the easiest way to convert PNG to BMP? Can MS Paint do that well? How about free tools you may be using?
>
>Thanks again.
>
>Dennis

Interactive and for mass converting:

ACDSee 5 ('til XP)
Version 5 is a real oldtimer. AFAIK current version is 9 or 10!!

Faststone Image Viewer 4.1 (since W7)
Interface rather like ACDSee and IrfanView, free like IV and has all I need for working with thousends of pics

Within our Apps since 2003
pvw32con.exe (non-visual converter working with several parameters)

I use this little tool within my scanning routine for converting incoming images to the type the user specifies

FUNCTION picconvert
LPARAMETERS vPath as String, vFile as String, vSource as String, vTarget as String
LOCAL lcSuffix, lcOutput
IF FILE(vPath + vFile)
	DO CASE 
	CASE vTarget = 1
		lcSuffix = [.jpg]
		lcOutput = [ -j ]
	CASE vTarget = 2
		lcSuffix = [.tif]
		lcOutput = [ -t ]
	CASE vTarget = 3
		lcSuffix = [.bmp]
		lcOutput = [ -w ]
	CASE vTarget = 4
		lcSuffix = [.gif]
		lcOutput = [ -g ]
	ENDCASE 
	lcSource = ALLTRIM(vPath + vFile)
	lcTarget = JUSTPATH(lcSource) + [\] + JUSTSTEM(lcSource) + lcSuffix
	lcConvert =[pvw32con.exe ] + CHR(34) + lcSource + CHR(34) + lcOutput + [--o ] + CHR(34) + lcTarget + CHR(34)
	RUN /n2 &lcConvert

	WAIT WINDOW TIMEOUT 3
	
	IF FILE(lcTarget)
		DELETE FILE (lcSource)
		RETURN JUSTFNAME(lcTarget)
	ELSE 
		RETURN vFile
	ENDIF 
ENDIF 
ENDFUNC

However, if I had the time for a new approach, I would use GDIplusX with additional tools, codesnippets and ideas from Bernard and Cesar ;-)