9 replies to this topic

[BladeJunker]

Hello I'm a retro enthusiast who likes to draw pixel doodles/mockups and study hardware. The problem is I can't find a bitmap that contains the entire built in Intellivision font found on the system EPROM. As I could not find it even after hours of searching and since I'm not tech savy enough to extract it myself I was hoping someone here could help.

I also need a bitmap approximation of the 16 colors used on the Intellivision IE. the RGB or something close to that for the sake of posting a pixel art guide for the INTV. This guide will also contain hardware specific limitations too but I need these basics for the pixel art types.

Anyway if you can help that would be most appreciated.

[intvnut]

BladeJunker, on Sat Mar 31, 2012 7:22 PM, said:

Hello I'm a retro enthusiast who likes to draw pixel doodles/mockups and study hardware. The problem is I can't find a bitmap that contains the entire built in Intellivision font found on the system EPROM. As I could not find it even after hours of searching and since I'm not tech savy enough to extract it myself I was hoping someone here could help.

I also need a bitmap approximation of the 16 colors used on the Intellivision IE. the RGB or something close to that for the sake of posting a pixel art guide for the INTV. This guide will also contain hardware specific limitations too but I need these basics for the pixel art types.

Anyway if you can help that would be most appreciated.

jzIntv may be able to help you on both counts.

You can use the "show_grom" utility that comes with it to dump the contents of GROM.  I haven't posted the bitmap myself, but the show_grom utility will generate the bitmaps for you for each character.  To make this easy, I'm going to assume you are on a PC and that you can just copy everything into one directory to do your work.

Copy the file "show_grom.exe" from jzintv\bin into this new directory.  Also copy in "grom.bin".  Then in a command window, do this:

  cd \path\to\directory
  show_grom -h grom.bin > g.html

This will make 256 files named "grom_00.gif" through "grom_FF.gif" with all 256 pictures available from the GROM.  The uppercase alphabet begins at grom_21.gif.  The lowercase alphabet begins at grom_41.gif.  If you open up the file "g.html", you'll get an HTML table that shows all of the pictures.  Each cell has one of the 8x8 GIFs.

(Note:  If you want to make the GIFs display bigger, you can use "show_grom -h -x 32 -y 32 grom.bin > g.html".  This will display them as 32x32 images, although the GIFs themselves will remain 8x8.  You can replace the '32' with whatever number you like.  Modern web browsers 'blur' the bitmaps when they scale up.  Rest assured the actual 8x8 GIFs are not blurry.)

For the colors, well, I will state for the record that jzIntv's color table is far from perfect.  That said, the file jzintv\doc\color\colors_new.png snapshots the palette that jzIntv uses.

[BladeJunker]

intvnut, on Sat Mar 31, 2012 7:51 PM, said:

BladeJunker, on Sat Mar 31, 2012 7:22 PM, said:

Hello I'm a retro enthusiast who likes to draw pixel doodles/mockups and study hardware. The problem is I can't find a bitmap that contains the entire built in Intellivision font found on the system EPROM. As I could not find it even after hours of searching and since I'm not tech savy enough to extract it myself I was hoping someone here could help.

I also need a bitmap approximation of the 16 colors used on the Intellivision IE. the RGB or something close to that for the sake of posting a pixel art guide for the INTV. This guide will also contain hardware specific limitations too but I need these basics for the pixel art types.

Anyway if you can help that would be most appreciated.

jzIntv may be able to help you on both counts.

You can use the "show_grom" utility that comes with it to dump the contents of GROM.  I haven't posted the bitmap myself, but the show_grom utility will generate the bitmaps for you for each character.  To make this easy, I'm going to assume you are on a PC and that you can just copy everything into one directory to do your work.

Copy the file "show_grom.exe" from jzintv\bin into this new directory.  Also copy in "grom.bin".  Then in a command window, do this:

  cd \path\to\directory
  show_grom -h grom.bin > g.html

This will make 256 files named "grom_00.gif" through "grom_FF.gif" with all 256 pictures available from the GROM.  The uppercase alphabet begins at grom_21.gif.  The lowercase alphabet begins at grom_41.gif.  If you open up the file "g.html", you'll get an HTML table that shows all of the pictures.  Each cell has one of the 8x8 GIFs.

(Note:  If you want to make the GIFs display bigger, you can use "show_grom -h -x 32 -y 32 grom.bin > g.html".  This will display them as 32x32 images, although the GIFs themselves will remain 8x8.  You can replace the '32' with whatever number you like.  Modern web browsers 'blur' the bitmaps when they scale up.  Rest assured the actual 8x8 GIFs are not blurry.)

For the colors, well, I will state for the record that jzIntv's color table is far from perfect.  That said, the file jzintv\doc\color\colors_new.png snapshots the palette that jzIntv uses.

The colors look close enough, I know how hard it is to match analog colors. If better versions of the color palette come up I can exchange it, still nice to get an assessment on its accuracy.

I see what you mean about the blur in the HTML output, many pixel art forums are quite annoyed by this zoom feature since they just want to inspect the pixels lol. Still I can form a larger "sprite rip" from these individual gifs into a png. I didn't know the INTV table contained so many extra graphics tiles within, neat.

Thanks for your help.

[intvnut]

Well, as I said, the individual GIFs for the characters are not blurry.  I could probably add a mode to dump the entire 256 character set as a single 128x128 GIF if that'd save time. (16 chars by 16 chars)

[BladeJunker]

intvnut, on Sat Mar 31, 2012 9:49 PM, said:

Well, as I said, the individual GIFs for the characters are not blurry.  I could probably add a mode to dump the entire 256 character set as a single 128x128 GIF if that'd save time. (16 chars by 16 chars)

Thanks for the offer, but I did the work manually despite how tedious it was. Mostly I didn't want to have to transcribe them from a bunch of INTV screen shots.

Here have a look at the sprite rip image.

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[BladeJunker]

It's actually funny how I started this, I came across this Golden Girl post and decided to give a try at making a gameplay mockup for it lol.
http://www.atariage....brew-announced/

I've been working on a Atari 2600 pixel art guide which hasn't been easy given its quirks & limitations so I was thinking a Intellivision and or a Colecovision pixel art guide would be more straight forward but also worthwhile as well.

[DZ-Jay]

BladeJunker, on Sun Apr 1, 2012 1:13 AM, said:

intvnut, on Sat Mar 31, 2012 9:49 PM, said:

Well, as I said, the individual GIFs for the characters are not blurry.  I could probably add a mode to dump the entire 256 character set as a single 128x128 GIF if that'd save time. (16 chars by 16 chars)

Thanks for the offer, but I did the work manually despite how tedious it was. Mostly I didn't want to have to transcribe them from a bunch of INTV screen shots.

Here have a look at the sprite rip image.

There's something odd with that rip.  Segments of letters seem to be out of place.  Also, the bottom looks like German airspace during WWII.

(Oh, so that's how the EXEC looks like.  LOL!)

    -dZ.

[BladeJunker]

DZ-Jay, on Fri Apr 6, 2012 6:55 AM, said:

BladeJunker, on Sun Apr 1, 2012 1:13 AM, said:

intvnut, on Sat Mar 31, 2012 9:49 PM, said:

Well, as I said, the individual GIFs for the characters are not blurry.  I could probably add a mode to dump the entire 256 character set as a single 128x128 GIF if that'd save time. (16 chars by 16 chars)

Thanks for the offer, but I did the work manually despite how tedious it was. Mostly I didn't want to have to transcribe them from a bunch of INTV screen shots.

Here have a look at the sprite rip image.

There's something odd with that rip.  Segments of letters seem to be out of place.  Also, the bottom looks like German airspace during WWII.

(Oh, so that's how the EXEC looks like.  LOL!)

-dZ.

Well you'd know better than I, but as far as the rip I just copy & pasted directly from each GIF making sure not to disturb there alignment within the card blocks that were extracted. Also what is the EXEC, I don't quite get that?

[DZ-Jay]

BladeJunker, on Fri Apr 6, 2012 6:58 AM, said:

DZ-Jay, on Fri Apr 6, 2012 6:55 AM, said:

BladeJunker, on Sun Apr 1, 2012 1:13 AM, said:

intvnut, on Sat Mar 31, 2012 9:49 PM, said:

Well, as I said, the individual GIFs for the characters are not blurry.  I could probably add a mode to dump the entire 256 character set as a single 128x128 GIF if that'd save time. (16 chars by 16 chars)

Thanks for the offer, but I did the work manually despite how tedious it was. Mostly I didn't want to have to transcribe them from a bunch of INTV screen shots.

Here have a look at the sprite rip image.

There's something odd with that rip.  Segments of letters seem to be out of place.  Also, the bottom looks like German airspace during WWII.

(Oh, so that's how the EXEC looks like.  LOL!)

-dZ.

Well you'd know better than I, but as far as the rip I just copy & pasted directly from each GIF making sure not to disturb there alignment within the card blocks that were extracted. Also what is the EXEC, I don't quite get that?

Sorry, bad joke.  The EXEC is the main game engine framework that comes built into the Intellivision.  It's the "operating system" of the console.  The story goes that it did not fit in the alloted ROM it was put in, so the designers "stole" some part of the bottom of GROM to store the overflow there.

As you can see, the last few tiles are garbage.  This is because they are actually EXEC program code and not really graphics.

Another story says that the game "B-17 Bomber" used GRAM so intensely that when it came time to make a graphic for the "flak" (German anti-aircraft fire) explosions, they had none left.  So they just pointed the MOBs to the end of GROM, and in essence used those garbage-looking tiles for the explosions.  It fit well, because explosions looks like random garbage anyway.

  -dZ.

Edited by DZ-Jay, Fri Apr 6, 2012 7:16 AM.

[Snafu-1982]

Hope this helps, this is the Intellivision colour base I constructed using the RGB 256 gradient system.

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