ART Programs

[BrianBeuken]

Hey all,

 

I'm in the very final phases of my project, a port of a classic C64 game, which I will let my publisher tell you about when its ready, but I have been trying to touch up some of the artwork and finding it such a chore.

 

I know we have the IPCH toolkit which is very useful on a character by character basis, but really quite limited when it comes to designing full screens or small sections of screen, sometimes you just want to draw a line from a to b on screen and let the internals take care of the chars

 

I am painfully aware the 2 colour system on the TMS chips and the grouping of 8 chars per colour is problematic, but are there any art packages around, perhaps even on MSX that will let me draw screen based art, swapping to new character group and producing finally a character set and name table I can then use in games?

 

If not, is this something others would find useful if I wrote one?

 

 

cheers and watch this space for more details

[Kiwi]

Yup, There's CV toolkit to make bitmap backdrop and sprites. And my favorite, ICVGM303, which can export graphic data in C or ASM.

Edited July 26, 2014 by Kiwi

[CrazyBoss]

Actually I started to code my own tool, not finished yet, found out most of the tools available, ether crash when using windows 7 64bit, or can't do what I want. I dont remember which one, but I tried out a char designer, which could not handle if I use different colors in each line in a char. Also A tool, agan dont remember the name, will force to export data as compressed data.

[BrianBeuken]

Thanks, I hadn't tried to use CVgraphictoolkit for bitmaps, it does seem to do the job, I'll test it out.

[artrag]

Try magellan for windows. It is conceived for ti-99/A that has the same vdp of cv and msx1. You can find it in the ti-99/A forum on atariage.

[artrag]

Nb: Magellan allows you to import converting it to tms any png image.

[BrianBeuken]

do you have any links/sources for it? goggle is failing me?

[artrag]

Look here in the Graphic section:

 

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/153704-ti-994a-development-resources/

[hardhat]

Actually I started to code my own tool, not finished yet, found out most of the tools available, ether crash when using windows 7 64bit, or can't do what I want. I dont remember which one, but I tried out a char designer, which could not handle if I use different colors in each line in a char. Also A tool, agan dont remember the name, will force to export data as compressed data.

Okay, so ICVGM 2.x uses graphics mode 1, which is 2 colours per 8 graphics characters. But ICVGM 3.x uses graphics mode 2 (well, an unofficial variant with a single 256 char tile set). Either tool exports compressed or uncompressed, and the native format is basically assembly language that can easily be reprocessed. Daniel has lost the source unfortunately so I can't easily add other compression algorithms. But I have other tools that will process the native format into whatever form I need. They are just command line so I haven't distributed them.

 

CVToolkit is quite nice for making sprite sets that are animated. And it does bitmap drawing or import/export via the clipboard.

 

I'm not much of a polished tool writer but someday, I'd like to see a tool that combined all of those features into one tool and allowed for various compression schemes so that I could see which would be the best for my project.

 

I will look into Magellan. I gave it a quick try and it isn't obvious to me how to use graphics mode 2 work, but it seems to address the mode 1 stuff quite well.

Edited July 28, 2014 by hardhat

[artrag]

In magellan "mode 2" is named "bitmap color mode". Just set it in the options.

[hardhat]

Yeah, I got that far, but the user interface for dealing with the char set with 8x1 pixel segments is not very clear to me. I'm sure it'll be clearer if I work with it more. It doesn't seem like it has features that I'd miss from ICVGM v3 though. So it may not win me over.

[nitrofurano]

i use Gimp mostly, some converters, and a lua script for GrafX2 for limiting 2 colours for each 8x1 cell (i think i have it at http://nitrofurano.altervista.org/lua/ )