Got the “Numerals” version of the Pengo Control Panel Overlay

There was a post in the Google Arcade Group by a collector by the name of Troy Akey. Troy has a number of NOS pieces of arcade artwork that he is guaging interest to do reproductions. One of listed pieces of artwork was Pengo, but he failed to mention whether it was a control panel overlay or the sideart. I am assuming it is the CPO.

I posted that the Pengo control panel overlay is about 90% vectorized already, as well as the Pengo sideart. I have a great scan of the bezel, and that shouldn’t be that hard to vectorize. I also own both of the marquees, and as of tonight have scanned in the pieces of the standing Pengo marquee. (The “numerals” CPO is the only piece of artwork I don’t own.) I hope Troy just lets me make my kit and focuses on one of the other six to eight pieces of artwork he listed. Besides, you can already purchase a numerals version of the Pengo overlay from Mamemarquees.

But, with my post, I was fortunate to find a bunch of other collectors who are interested in the Pengo kit of artwork I want to reproduce. One collector in particular has a couple of NOS Pengo control panel overlays with the numerals. He has a good network, and was fortunate to get the original NOS Pengo artwork from an operator’s warehouse. Really awesome and nice guy, and we made an agreement on the Pengo reproductions that I am doing in exchange for what he has. The main idea is I am hoping his work will save me some time.

The fact that he has the NOS artwork is pretty cool, but he has also scanned in one of the overlays at 600 DPI, 24-Bit color, and to take it one step farther, he has already vectorized the whole CPO in Paint Shop Pro. Pretty amazing.

We spoke a lot via email over the last 24 hours, and I got the three pieces of the Pengo CPO scan with the numerals, as well as the Paint Shop Pro vector file he made. Here is a small image of what it looks like;

From what I can tell he didn’t finish the Pengo lettering with the halftone pattern overlaying the red to blue gradient. But other than that, he artwork looked pretty good. But I’ll tell you what. Before today, I had some pre-concieved notions about Paint Shop Pro. I thought, “It’s a dumbed down former -freeware made by Jasc that is good for the most basic image manipulation, but nothing else”. Well, PSP has a new name, Paint Shop Pro Photo X2, and a much cooler looking interface. Oh yeah, and Corel Draw owns it now, and it isn’t free, but pretty cheap. But the fact that they combined a raster and vector program should make most designers run screaming in the other direction, and for good reason. From what I could find, there is absolutely no way to get vector artwork out of PSP as a vector format. It will save artwork out as a .ai, or .eps, but it is a flattened raster image and nothing more. It also doesn’t save as a .svg, only reads that particular file format.

I researched their “message” boards, which are so old and antiquated…I searched the web finding only indications that what I wanted couldn’t be done, and I emailed their custom support which let me know that the trial version of the software doesn’t merit troubleshooting from their staff.

So, what I have is, a nice vector traced file of the Pengo control panel overlay numerals version, with no way to manipulate and add to it. (Unless I want to learn PSP…no thanks.)

So, does anyone out there know anything about Paint Shop Pro and what I need to do here? Can anyone help me?

~ Edit: I posted on the Klov forums, the BYOAC forums, Google’s Arcade Group, and rec.photo.digital. I got some good ideas on things to try to export or save vectors out of Paint Shop Pro Photo X2. The one comment I got twice, was to try exporting the file as a .wmf. Well, a .wmf was the only suggestion I got that worked in some sense. But the vector lines that came out as a .wmf were terrible, the curves were angular and it would have taken more time to correct the original vector trace from Paint Shop Pro than it would take to redraw it.

I ended up trying ImageConverter Plus to try to convert the .psp file to a .pdf. (Paint Shop Pro can’t export as a .pdf) I installed the software fine, opened a file, set my presets on what I wanted the output file to be and everything else. I hit start, ImageConverter said it was converting the Paint Shop Pro file…but it never made a file. Like there was an error.

I tried copying the vector artwork to the clipboard in Paint Shop Pro, and then pasting it into Freehand, Illustrator and Corel Draw. All of the software interpreted the PSP vectors as .bmp images.

I checked to see if Paint Shop Pro would save as a .cdl, Corel Draw file. But it doesn’t. Funny, since this Photo X2 is a new release, and both software are owned by Corel now. I even registered and posted in what looked like a well traffic’ed Paint Shop Pro forum (http://pspug.org). But no reply posts. What a piece of crap software, seriously. This isn’t that hard.

So, as of now, I am giving up. Unless someone out there with a licensed version of Paint Shop Pro wants to contact Corel for me and see if there is a way, I don’t think there is.

I zipped up the file and sent it to another collector to see if they could have any more luck. We’ll see.

~Edit 12/13/2007: I never did get a solution figured out on how to convert the vector art of the Pengo “numberals” control panel overlay from Paint Shop Pro into Illustrator. I haven’t heard back from the other collector, so as of right now I am assuming it can’t be done. I will be re-tracing this Pengo artwork soon, check my “Pengo CPO Vector Update 3 – Tracing Complete!” post to vote on whether you want this to be the next piece of artwork done or not.

Here are some similar arcade posts

• Pengo Numerals CPO Vectorized!
• Pengo CPO Vector Update 3 – Tracing Complete!
• Pengo CPO Scanned
• Pengo CPO Vector Update 2
• Sega Pengo Pushing Marquee Vectors Complete

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