Convert Amstrad NC100 Notepad screenshots to a more useful format: BMP. These can then be scaled in almost any modern graphics package and manipulated as required.

Also included is source code for a PCX conversion utility. Though modified by me, this was originally published in the 1993 book The Amstrad Notepad Advanced User Guide, produced by Sigma Press and written by Robin Nixon. The original code itself was written by Chris Nixon for Borland Turbo C running on DOS/Windows 3 machines. I have updated and commented Chris’ code. It is included here because it was the direct inspiration for notepad2bmp.

Originally called NCPCX, I have renamed the utility for consistency with the other NC100 file conversion utilities included in my GitHub account, such as notepad2text — though of course you can name the binary whatever you like.

Navigate to the source directory and run

gcc -o notepad2bmp notepad2bmp.c

Copy the binary to a directory in your $PATH, eg.

sudo mv notepad2bmp /usr/local/bin

Grab a screen on the NC100 using Control-Shift-S. This will save a file named s.a in memory. Note that the extension, but not the file name, changes with each new screenshot: it will run through valid Ascii characters, ie. s.a, s.b, s.c etc.

Copy the screenshot to your computer using xmodem transfer, then run:

notepad2bmp {source file path} [bmp file path]

For example:

notepad2bmp s.a screenshot.bmp

Note A sample s.a file is included in the samples directory:

The BMP file path is optional: without it, the code will generate a target filename based on the name of the source file. So

notepad2bmp screenshot.a

will generate a file named screenshot.bmp as its output.

By default, the code upscales the image from 480x64 (72dpi) to 1440x192 (216dpi). If you would prefer to work with the image at its native size, just add the -r or --rawsize flag:

notepad2bmp s.a screenshot.bmp --rawsize

Fun Tweak

I've included in the code’s colour look-up data, pixel colouring for that old-fashioned LCD screen look:

Just comment out the WHITE line in the code, and uncomment the LCD line.

Please see CHANGELOG.md.

This software copyright © 2025, Tony Smith (@smittytone). It is licensed under the terms of the MIT Licence.