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12 hours ago, Lee Stewart said:

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

I don't think so. It can only import character images, e.g. PNGs.

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  • 3 months later...

I have actually made a new version of Magellan: 4.0.0 beta. It's available from https://magellan.js99er.net/

 

The main new feature is that you can select a Super Character set with 1024 characters. The idea is that you have a much bigger workspace, for instance when you import an image and want to see how many characters it takes, or you just want a buffer for keeping your draft characters. It's something I did a while back inspired by a discussion I had with @matthew180 and I haven't used it a lot since, so this feature must be considered a beta. Just to be clear, the TI cannot show those characters, so if you export them you're on your own. 

 

Other new features include the ability to rotate, flip and mirror whole maps. It's something I added because a had mirrored some maps for my raycaster, and programming the feature was easier than fixing it by hand. You can also flood fill on a map - changing all characters in a region bounded by another character to something else.  

 

Since there are many different versions of Java runtime now, and they might not all work with Magellan, I decided to include the last free version of the Oracle JRE 1.8 v 202 with the installers (except for Linux).

 

This is a beta so using it is on your own risk, not that the risk is very high. ?

 

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4 hours ago, Asmusr said:

The main new feature is that you can select a Super Character set with 1024 characters. The idea is that you have a much bigger workspace, for instance when you import an image and want to see how many characters it takes, or you just want a buffer for keeping your draft characters. It's something I did a while back inspired by a discussion I had with @matthew180 and I haven't used it a lot since, so this feature must be considered a beta. Just to be clear, the TI cannot show those characters, so if you export them you're on your own.

Thank you!  I can definitely make good use of the Super Character space.  Would you consider increasing the number of sprites as well?  (For reference I have 6 mag files for Tilda, about 384 sprites. For future projects, 512 might be a good limit.)

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10 hours ago, PeteE said:

Thank you!  I can definitely make good use of the Super Character space.  Would you consider increasing the number of sprites as well?  (For reference I have 6 mag files for Tilda, about 384 sprites. For future projects, 512 might be a good limit.)

Yes I will consider that. 

Do you think 1024 characters is enough or should I double it to 2048? 

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I have a question about how mag files should work with the super character set. Internally Magellan will always use the super character set, so you can change character set size freely without losing and data. But when a mag file is saved, should the number of characters be truncated to the current character set size? The former has the advantage that mag files are compatible with older versions of Magellan if you don't use the new feature. The latter has the advantage that you never lose data even if you changed to a smaller character set. The beta version is doing the former, but I'm leaning towards the latter. What do people think? 

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If you're running Magellan in Windows 10 and it looks blurry, you can disable the scaling by opening the properties for the Magellan.exe file, click Compatibility, click Change high DPI settings, check Override high DPI scaling behavior, and choose Application from the list.

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10 hours ago, Asmusr said:

I have a question about how mag files should work with the super character set. Internally Magellan will always use the super character set, so you can change character set size freely without losing and data. But when a mag file is saved, should the number of characters be truncated to the current character set size? The former has the advantage that mag files are compatible with older versions of Magellan if you don't use the new feature. The latter has the advantage that you never lose data even if you changed to a smaller character set. The beta version is doing the former, but I'm leaning towards the latter. What do people think? 

Please don't truncate the number of characters.  The .mag files are in an easily-to-parse text format, which makes it possible to extract the data directly using awk or a custom tool as part of my build script.  I rarely use the export features in Magellan.  I don't think you should worry about files saved with super character set to be loadable in older versions of Magellan.

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If you're working on sprites, If we could define a range as a flip book to work on sprite animation that would be useful

 

ie, select sprite 3 as the first frame and sprite 8 as the last frame and have it cycle through all sprites "frames" at a defined frame rate.

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54 minutes ago, PeteE said:

Please don't truncate the number of characters.  The .mag files are in an easily-to-parse text format, which makes it possible to extract the data directly using awk or a custom tool as part of my build script.  I rarely use the export features in Magellan.  I don't think you should worry about files saved with super character set to be loadable in older versions of Magellan.

I thought so. I have uploaded the new beta version with more sprites and even more characters to https://magellan.js99er.net/

This version also includes an 'Open recent' feature.

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1 hour ago, LASooner said:

If you're working on sprites, If we could define a range as a flip book to work on sprite animation that would be useful

 

ie, select sprite 3 as the first frame and sprite 8 as the last frame and have it cycle through all sprites "frames" at a defined frame rate.

It's not high on my to-do list because you can click manually through the sprites. Actually my to-do list is empty at the moment. ?

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  • 4 weeks later...

As a test for the new Super Character Set, you can try to import the graphics from Zaxxon:

  • Choose Options > Super Character Set
  • Choose Options > Enhanced Color mode - 2bpp
  • Choose Import > Map Image and select the first attached file "Arcade - Zaxxon ... ".

The result is 1829 characters, so it's good the maximum was increased from 1024 to 2048.

 

[ I have attached the other, normalized,  files in case anybody feel an urge to implement Zaxxon for the F18A. It can do the isometric scrolling just fine, but there are too many characters to show. I haven't tested if there are more than 256 on a single screen, otherwise it should be possible to load them dynamically. ]

Arcade - Zaxxon - Background.png

level0.png

level1.png

level2.png

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7 hours ago, ZippyRedPlumber said:

How does one convert screens into Colecovision data, mainly C language?

Looks like the simplest option right now requires an extra step.

 

You can export as binary data, and then use a tool like my own "bin2inc" (http://harmlesslion.com/software/bin2inc), or there are many others, to convert the binary file to a C-style array.

 

The data itself isn't TI specific, since the VDP isn't tied to the CPU. :)

 

 

 

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  • 4 weeks later...
  • 3 weeks later...

This might be a bug.  How do you export the sprite data to RAW?  I used the export to binary image, but no sprite char showed up in hex editor.  I imported the sprite sheet image into the program, so it is organized properly.  Export in binary data only saves the nametable and the char.  No sprite char data showed up, even when include sprite is selected.

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5 hours ago, Kiwi said:

This might be a bug.  How do you export the sprite data to RAW?  I used the export to binary image, but no sprite char showed up in hex editor.  I imported the sprite sheet image into the program, so it is organized properly.  Export in binary data only saves the nametable and the char.  No sprite char data showed up, even when include sprite is selected.

I added sprite editing a long time after the original author stopped maintaining the program. I have not kept the binary format up to date since I have no need for it, but the code is now on GitHub so it's possible for anyone to contribute. You should be able to extract the sprite data in hexadecimal either from the .mag file or from the assembly export.

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  • 7 months later...

Newbie alert here, sry. Just found this great tool and build my first screen with it, so far great!

But is it possible to point me to a code example of actually loading the created screen using C with TMS9900-GCC? I am a liitle bit clueless still on how to use the exported Magellan data in a C program. Thx!

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Yeah, I should have posted the link to the turmoil example sooner.  The nice thing about .mag files are they are plain text, so utilities such as gawk can extract data from them pretty easily.  The .mag file format should be mostly self-explanatory, but if you have any questions, post here and I or someone else can probably answer.  The turmoil mag is in bitmap mode, so lines starting with CH are 8-byte character patterns, and CO are 8-byte color patterns.  In graphic mode 1, there are 32 CO lines with foreground and background color for each 8-character group.

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