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I don't think adamantyr is using Magellan, but when I have been working on projects that needed lots of tiles (Dungeons of Asgard), what I needed was to have them in the tile set so they could be exported (even though the 256 limit was exceeded). Sometimes I would also have liked to have different tile sets for different maps, but that can be dealt with by having multiple files.

 

I don't use Magellan for my game, no. That's partly though because I built my tools for map creation on the TI awhile back. :) And I have other metadata (lighting and elevation) that is stored along with the tiles, something that's beyond Magellan's boundaries.

 

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Unless there are more than 128 tiles in each font you should be able to use Import Map Image to import the two fonts, with a start offset for the second font Then you can use Shift-click in the tile set to rearrange them (or use the Replace Characters tool, but I never found that very useful).

In this case both sets were full 256 tiles, and I just wanted the subset of lower-case from one set merged into the lower-case of the other.

 

I don't think adamantyr is using Magellan, but when I have been working on projects that needed lots of tiles (Dungeons of Asgard), what I needed was to have them in the tile set so they could be exported (even though the 256 limit was exceeded). Sometimes I would also have liked to have different tile sets for different maps, but that can be dealt with by having multiple files.

 

It would be interesting to know what other users think?

 

I'm happy to defer to what others think. I'm not making games, and the "out of context" ideas I have come up with in the past have proven to be more than useless in practice. I was just seeing if Magellan could be a solution for the problem I was having at the moment.

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If you want to quickly merge two character sets, you could export them individually as character images, bring them into a paint package that can handle layers, layer one on top of another, erase the characters you don't need from the top layer, flatten the image, save, then import the new combined character image back into Magellan.

Edited by LASooner
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Sure, and I did some of that, along with some hex editing and such. There are always ways to get it done, I was just looking to see if Magellan had the features I was looking for.

 

On a side note, coercing modern "paint" programs into dealing with individual, single, square pixels is an exercise in frustration. And none that I have found work very well when zoomed in 1600%.

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Sure, and I did some of that, along with some hex editing and such. There are always ways to get it done, I was just looking to see if Magellan had the features I was looking for.

 

On a side note, coercing modern "paint" programs into dealing with individual, single, square pixels is an exercise in frustration. And none that I have found work very well when zoomed in 1600%.

 

 

I do it with photoshop, make sure you're in bitmap,greyscale or indexed color, 8bits/channel. Don't use a brush, use a pencil. And use pencil or block mode for the eraser. You can turn on grid and snapping to help control it.

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  • 1 month later...

it would be nice to be able to import at least 768 tiles so a 9918 bitmap screen could be done in 1 import. so self selectable 0-255 or 0-768 or 0-1024 would be great.

 

I noticed some demos here using full 256x192 tiled screens in excess of 256 tiles using f18a graphics such as the monkey island demo. how was that achieved? is it using extra memory of the ti99/4a than say the colecovision has. 

 

for coleco i'm limited to 16kb vram so 6 kb for 1 set of 256   f18a 3 bit tiles. So 3 there isn't room for even 768 tiles at full colour.

 

I guess I could go with 2 plane colour (4 colours and lower it to 12kb overall for a full screen)

 

I'd like to do full screen 256x224 f18a bitmaps or 256x192 on a colecovision without reuse of tiles.

 

thanks for maintaining magellan and updating it. it's a very useful program.

 

On 5/22/2019 at 11:45 AM, Asmusr said:

 

Or actually what other users need.

 

Edited by digress
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I can't speak to what has been done in previous demos, but there's my Convert9918 tool - https://github.com/tursilion/convert9918/blob/master/readme.md

 

In addition to regular bitmap, it can generate a 16-color bitmap with palette for the F18A (which takes the same memory as a standard bitmap, plus the 32 bytes for palette), or a per-scanline paletted bitmap (which takes nearly all of the 18k of the F18A, but does all the work on the GPU, leaving the host CPU free once it's up.)

 

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i have used your convert program. I had assumed that the full screen f18a bitmap used more memory than the 9918 fullscreen bitmap. That sounds like a good solution.

 

not sure how to pull off the (per-scanline paletted bitmap (which takes nearly all of the 18k of the F18A,)  yet and I  think the pallet  version would work fine anyways.

 

6 hours ago, Tursi said:

I can't speak to what has been done in previous demos, but there's my Convert9918 tool - https://github.com/tursilion/convert9918/blob/master/readme.md

 

In addition to regular bitmap, it can generate a 16-color bitmap with palette for the F18A (which takes the same memory as a standard bitmap, plus the 32 bytes for palette), or a per-scanline paletted bitmap (which takes nearly all of the 18k of the F18A, but does all the work on the GPU, leaving the host CPU free once it's up.)

 

 

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19 hours ago, digress said:

not sure how to pull off the per-scanline paletted bitmap (which takes nearly all of the 18k of the F18A,)  yet and I  think the pallet  version would work fine anyways.

Regular paletted images are generally pretty good. There's also (TI99) sample code for the per-scanline version in the download. (I should probably write new samples in C so they are more portable). Kind of offtopic in this thread, so just to be brief - you copy the palette data (6k) to VDP RAM, then the GPU code. Start the GPU and it will pack the palette (mostly) into the extended memory and then idle. While it's working you can then upload the screen image table, color table and pattern table as normal. Wake the GPU back up and you're done.

 

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On 7/18/2019 at 4:59 PM, digress said:

it would be nice to be able to import at least 768 tiles so a 9918 bitmap screen could be done in 1 import. so self selectable 0-255 or 0-768 or 0-1024 would be great.

If you want to edit a full screen bitmap image I think you would be better off using another program. The thing is, Magellan is a map editor - not a screen editor. It assumes that you want to use the same characters across a map that can be much larger than the screen. The 9918A bitmap mode works against this by using different character sets at different thirds of the screen.

 

Having said that, I did create a local branch of the Magellan code that supports bigger character sets, but it will only work as a buffer for copying characters into the real character set. I need to work on some of the import functions to make that branch useful. 

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  • 2 months later...
  • 2 months later...

I am working on a program in QB64 and I am able to load and display the .bas data using TI-99/4a syntax (well, sorta.  Call Commands are changed to calls without the space Example: CallClear, CallHChar, CallVChar, etc.).

 

I am trying out Magellan 3.1 in an XP vm and it is REALLY COOL!  One problem I have is Export to Basic Data doesn't work (neither does XB Program), or it was working and then stopped working and hasn't worked since.  Is there a way to fix this?

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2 hours ago, Norby said:

I am trying out Magellan 3.1 in an XP vm and it is REALLY COOL!  One problem I have is Export to Basic Data doesn't work (neither does XB Program), or it was working and then stopped working and hasn't worked since.  Is there a way to fix this?

Maybe if you delete Magellan.prefs from your home directory?

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23 hours ago, Asmusr said:

Maybe if you delete Magellan.prefs from your home directory?

That didn't work.  I tried a few things and nothing seemed to work.  Finally I gave up and found a way to run it in Linux and now it is working.  Thank you for your reply.

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26 minutes ago, Norby said:

 

That didn't work.  I tried a few things and nothing seemed to work.  Finally I gave up and found a way to run it in Linux and now it is working.  Thank you for your reply.

Hmm, that's strange since it's the only state it's keeping. I suppose you deleted the file while it wasn't running? I need to add more safeguards against loading a bad state.

Edited by Asmusr
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I'm trying to export map data from Magellan in order to help make an Extended Basic game.    Just playing with the tools right now.   I'm using version 3.3.1.

 

I created some simple characters and tested exporting them (128-143):

 

image.png.1d328a499ceb9c349a6974f097f27aaa.png

 

I exported them as basic data and this seems fine:

 

image.thumb.png.11710366e5a23ebd81e20aea669e5565.png

 

I exported as basic program.  Also seems fine:

 

image.png.d5c548cbeae6949f27302605d6ea7ba2.png

 

Now extended basic program.   Also seems fine:

 

image.thumb.png.6b799d551147ce0d84adf58b15fee7d3.png

 

same with xb256 program:

image.thumb.png.3d097420ae03665ea2be483108572c0d.png

 

Next test was to create a screen using some normal characters and some of the characters I created:

 

image.thumb.png.aa1e39997474def27affca2e699b122d.png

 

Then tested exporting basic data:

 

image.thumb.png.02c6b73b87d0709f80ee5488325e4358.png

 

The bottom of the screen looks right with all the custom characters (128-143).   I can also see some other custom characters in the data above.  But the majority of the screen data is "32" (space).   I don't see any of the "A" or "B" or other normal characters in this data.

 

Then tried exporting as basic program:

 

image.thumb.png.fa876da835776763449285fbdec9f494.png

 

I don't see any of the characters on the left or right side of the screen (columns 1,2, 31, 32).   I think this is because PRINT can't write there.  

 

The "Optional" DATA looks good:

image.thumb.png.18d1213e6d02061eef280ef5faa49c2d.png

 

And of course in Classic99:

 

image.thumb.png.98954069b1b0cbf810a8b7025aa86e44.png

 

Now export XB program:

 

image.thumb.png.b2ceb416a21e98333b69faae4a607b65.png

 

This looks similar to the basic data above. 

 

The bottom of the screen looks right with all the custom characters (128-143).   I can also see some other custom characters in the data above.  But the majority of the screen data is "32" (space).   I don't see any of the "A" or "B" or other normal characters in this data.

 

Now in Classic 99 (XB):

 

image.thumb.png.024e503dbd100327d18eed55f528dbe5.png

 

A big black screen.  Breaking the program:

image.thumb.png.d4bb14ed4b1a9aaf31d22c7385d3ec61.png

 

Suspecting an issue with this line:

 

image.thumb.png.99c695f2c6c48cfccd853e4b8cbbf830.png

 

and changing the "1" (transparent) to "4" (light green)

 

rerunning it in Classic 99:

 

image.thumb.png.d7c517032ab368aa29315bf7ac0ae72d.png

 

I can see it now, but it's missing those "A" and "B" and "$" etc.

 

That's all for now.  

 

Thanks for reading.

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  • 1 month later...

Is it possible to import into and export from Magellan the actual TI font files that are formatted like CHARA1 for TI Writer or FBFONT for fbForth?

 

Though I can happily use CHARA1-style font files (1 KiB [128 chars] or 2 KiB [256 chars]), I would prefer to work with my fbForth-style font files, which are identical except for the first 6 bytes. fbForth-style font files actually have a full representation of the last character (ASCII 127 or 255), which is 6 bytes short in TI-Writer-style CHARA1 due, I believe, to the nature of the original E/A (or similar) SAVE utility.

 

...lee

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