+MrFish Posted March 5, 2017 Share Posted March 5, 2017 Made a title screen for Miner -- tacked on the front of the game. 10 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+slx Posted March 5, 2017 Share Posted March 5, 2017 Nice, thanks for the work! (Does not seem to work on an - emulated - 800 though.) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rybags Posted March 5, 2017 Share Posted March 5, 2017 Yep, seems to have some issues, weirdly running in XL mode it was just executing a bunch of BRKs in Ram. I'd suggest combine it with one of the compressors to improve load time, you might even get the entire thing under 16K. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+S.D.W. Posted March 5, 2017 Share Posted March 5, 2017 Very nice, thank you! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+MrFish Posted March 5, 2017 Author Share Posted March 5, 2017 Nice, thanks for the work! (Does not seem to work on an - emulated - 800 though.) Yep, seems to have some issues, weirdly running in XL mode it was just executing a bunch of BRKs in Ram. I'd suggest combine it with one of the compressors to improve load time, you might even get the entire thing under 16K. It's a Graph2Font image, which defaults to loading under ROM (FWIR). So it isn't going to work on an 800 for that reason to start. I'll be glad to pass off the original G2F file and the Miner binary I used, if someone is interested in making it work on an 800. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
doctorclu Posted March 5, 2017 Share Posted March 5, 2017 This is cool!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+MrFish Posted March 5, 2017 Author Share Posted March 5, 2017 Very nice, thank you! I'd been wanting to do this one for a while. Had the idea a couple years back. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Keatah Posted March 5, 2017 Share Posted March 5, 2017 Well done. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+MrFish Posted March 5, 2017 Author Share Posted March 5, 2017 (edited) Part of the image got clipped during conversion of the version posted above. Here's the corrected version: Miner 2049er (Title).xex Edited March 5, 2017 by MrFish 5 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+MrFish Posted March 5, 2017 Author Share Posted March 5, 2017 Here's a color-adjusted version for PAL-land: 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+CharlieChaplin Posted March 5, 2017 Share Posted March 5, 2017 Hmmm, maybe someone can convert this title into standard Gr. 15 (four colours: 1x black, 3x brown) ? It would require only 7684 bytes then (or much less when packed). Is there some source in BMP, JPG, GIF, PNG, ... format available or only the G2F file ? The reason I ask is simple, I do have a Gr.15 to ML converter program from Antic (converts Micropainter and Koala compressed Gr. 15 into a COM file); the ML file it creates uses approx. $6000-7FFF and can be loaded in front of the game (pressing a key makes the title picture disappear and loads the game); the combined Gr. 15 title + game would work on a 400/800/XL/XE then. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+MrFish Posted March 5, 2017 Author Share Posted March 5, 2017 Ahhhh... I was up too late last night. The PAL color-adjusted version I posted above used the clipped version of the image. So I've deleted that one, and here is the corrected PAL version. Miner 2049er (Title, PAL).xex 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+MrFish Posted March 5, 2017 Author Share Posted March 5, 2017 (edited) maybe someone can convert this title into standard Gr. 15 (four colours: 1x black, 3x brown) ? It would require only 7684 bytes then (or much less when packed). Is there some source in BMP, JPG, GIF, PNG, ... format available or only the G2F file ? The reason I ask is simple, I do have a Gr.15 to ML converter program from Antic (converts Micropainter and Koala compressed Gr. 15 into a COM file); the ML file it creates uses approx. $6000-7FFF and can be loaded in front of the game (pressing a key makes the title picture disappear and loads the game); the combined Gr. 15 title + game would work on a 400/800/XL/XE then. No problem. The only parts of the image that used a fifth color were the heads of the nails. So eliminating those, they just end up looking like nail holes instead, which is perfectly fine. Here's the original binary version of the game I used and Micropainter versions of both the NTSC and PAL images (the only differences being color register values). Miner 2049er.xex Miner - Mic.zip Edited March 5, 2017 by MrFish Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+CharlieChaplin Posted March 5, 2017 Share Posted March 5, 2017 (edited) Did the conversion myself. Took me only some 2 hours fighting with Emulator, several PC GFX converters and several A8 gfx converters... 1) loaded the old XEX (PAL) version into the emulator and made a screenshot in PCX format... 2) converted the PCX into JPG and GIF87a with XnView; later converted the JPG into GIF87a again with Irfan View (when using the A8 GIF-converter, the GIF file generated with XnView gave an "Error - no null", while the GIF generated with Irfan View worked fine) 3) put the GIF and JPG pics onto an ATR image with MakeATR 4) loaded JView (GIF-converter by Jeff Potter) via emulation and set the mode to Gr.15 bw (greyscales, since I did not want Colourview / R,G,B mode) to convert Miner.GIF => the original picture had 5 colours (1x black, 3x brown, 1x dark green), alas JView took the few pixels from the green colour as one of the four main colours; saved the converted picture as standard Gr. 15 with 62 sectors and 4 greys; 5) loaded the basic program "Picture Ripper" to change the colours from greys into brown => the result looked like only 3 colours (1x black, 2x brown, the approx. ten pixels from the original green colour were not recognizable as a third brown)... did not look good, so continued with the JPG picture... 6) loaded JPEGView (JPG-converter by Raphael Espino) via emulation and set the mode to Gr. 15 greys (2:1 ratio) to convert Miner.JPG; the picture did get converted with the main colours (the original green colour was ignored!), but alas, the program generated 100 false pixels across the screen (remembered that bug from maybe twelve years ago)... 7) loaded A8JDPEG (JPG-converter by Raphael Espino) via emulation and set the mode to Gr. 15 greys (2:1 ratio) to convert Miner.JPG, the picture was converted fine with the main colours and no false pixels, great ! 8 ) loaded "Picture Ripper" via emulation to change the colours from greys into browns, but did not remember which key was used to save the changed picture, took me quite long to find out the obvious - "S" saves (the rest of the program is operated with numbers 0...9) 9) loaded the "Mic2Bin" Basic program from Antic via emulation to convert the Gr. 15 picture into a ML file, MinerTit.COM 10) downloaded several versions of Miner 2049er from atarionline and after testing kept only two of them (normal unpacked version from $3xxx-7FFF and cheat version from $7xxx-BFFF) 11) merged my generated Gr. 15 title picture with both downloaded Miner versions... 12) tested everything, when the title has loaded one can press a key to continue loading (with Miner version 1 the title would first change colours and then continue loading; with Miner version 2 the title would first show garbage and then continue loading, thus I added a screen-off routine after the title to both versions and everything seems to be fine now)... Lazy sunday afternoon ? Not me, wasted some time with A8 conversions... So here is the result, you can make it shorter by packing it. Hopefully this works on the 400/800 as well as on the XL/XE. Note that the colours are not the same as the original ones, but thats normal when converting 5-colour-pictures into 4-colour pictures (and errmm, I am not good in setting Gr. 15 colours manually)... Edited March 5, 2017 by CharlieChaplin 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+MrFish Posted March 5, 2017 Author Share Posted March 5, 2017 (edited) Wow! That was a lot of work. I just had a look at it, though, and the image (pixel placement) is way off from my original (not to mention you're using the version with part of the image clipped). So something went wrong during the conversion. You'll get a better result with what I've posted above -- and easier to work with. Edited March 5, 2017 by MrFish Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+CharlieChaplin Posted March 5, 2017 Share Posted March 5, 2017 Wow! That was a lot of work. I just had a look at it, though, and the image (pixel placement) is way off from my original (not to mention you're using the version with part of the image clipped). So something went wrong during the conversion. You'll get a better result with what I've posted above -- and easier to work with. Hmmm, tried it, but normal Gr. 15 Micropainter pictures have a length of 7680 bytes + 4 colour bytes (62 sectors), your uploaded MIC pics have a length of 9604 bytes (77 sectors), so most A8 programs will not accept these as Micropainter. Some programs still display them, but I could see approx. 1 grey colour on a black background. Need to investigate further how to display these pictures correctly... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+MrFish Posted March 5, 2017 Author Share Posted March 5, 2017 tried it, but normal Gr. 15 Micropainter pictures have a length of 7680 bytes + 4 colour bytes (62 sectors), your uploaded MIC pics have a length of 9604 bytes (77 sectors), so most A8 programs will not accept these as Micropainter. Some programs still display them, but I could see approx. 1 grey colour on a black background. Need to investigate further how to display these pictures correctly... You're right; that's odd. I assumed Graph2Font saved standard Micropainter files, since it will load standard Micropainter files. I think the reason might be because it's saving all 240 scanlines, rather than 192 (which is what Micropainter should be). I'll have a quick look and see if I can trim it and keep the color register values intact. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+MrFish Posted March 5, 2017 Author Share Posted March 5, 2017 (edited) Yeah, that's it, it just saves all 240 scalines, rather than 192 like standard MIC file. The four color-register values are at the end of the file. This image is more than 192 scanlines though, although only by a handful or so lines. Edited March 5, 2017 by MrFish Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+CharlieChaplin Posted March 5, 2017 Share Posted March 5, 2017 Well, the MIC 2 BIN converter I have converts only Gr. 15 pictures with standard 160x192 resolution. So maybe you can resize the title to 160x192 pixels Micropainter and then I do the rest of the conversion. Or you do it all by yourself with the attached converter program... (The basic idea was to save space, only 8k for a standard Gr. 15 title vs. 24k for a G2F title; Gr. 15 has four colours, your G2F title only has five colours, so we just lose one colour but save 16k space...) You can find the program on the attached ATR image under MIC2BIN.BAS... PICCONV.zip 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
toddtmw Posted March 5, 2017 Share Posted March 5, 2017 This is really cool. It would be neat to do this with some of the other classic "best of" games! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+MrFish Posted March 5, 2017 Author Share Posted March 5, 2017 (edited) Alright, pretty simple and didn't change the image much either -- except for the loss of nail head colors. Here are versions with height reduced from 199 -> 192 pixels with NTSC and PAL colors, which should both run on 800 systems (tested in Altirra). [Note: Press <RETURN> to get from the title screen into the game.] Miner 2049er (Title 192).xex Miner 2049er (Title 192, PAL).xex Edited March 5, 2017 by MrFish 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+MrFish Posted March 5, 2017 Author Share Posted March 5, 2017 (edited) (The basic idea was to save space, only 8k for a standard Gr. 15 title vs. 24k for a G2F title; Gr. 15 has four colours, your G2F title only has five colours, so we just lose one colour but save 16k space...) All Graph2Font images are not 24k; it all depends on what graphics (PM's, # of character sets), effects (DLI's, etc.), and screen mode (normal, wide, narrow) are used in the Graph2Font image. The binary image I created in Graph2Font was only 8,934 bytes; the binary produced by using MIC2BIN was 7,979 bytes. So only 1K difference in size between it and my original. Part of the issue (maybe the only issue) running on 800 systems was due to using RAM under BASIC ROM, which 800's have none of. So just moving the image to a compatible area of RAM would probably be enough. The Graph2Font ASM output code would just need to be manipulated and compiled. Edited March 5, 2017 by MrFish Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+MrFish Posted March 5, 2017 Author Share Posted March 5, 2017 (edited) This is really cool. It would be neat to do this with some of the other classic "best of" games! There are some others out there. For instance, I started working on an update for Ms. Pac-Man that I also added a similar type of title screen to: Ms. Pac-Man with Enhancements (still unfinished) Edited March 5, 2017 by MrFish Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+MrFish Posted March 5, 2017 Author Share Posted March 5, 2017 (edited) (The basic idea was to save space, only 8k for a standard Gr. 15 title vs. 24k for a G2F title; Gr. 15 has four colours, your G2F title only has five colours, so we just lose one colour but save 16k space...) Getting back to your statement here, I think there's some confusion between the G2F title size, and the total size of the title combined with the Miner 2049er game binary I'd chosen. The total was 24K, with the title only being ~8K of that. Even this Monopoly board image, which has a lot of PM's, color changes, etc., is only 8,540 bytes. So I doubt many, if any, G2F images (non-VBXE) are as large as 24K. Anyway, MIC2BIN helped solve the problem reasonably well, so thanks for the contribution. Edited March 5, 2017 by MrFish Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+MrFish Posted March 5, 2017 Author Share Posted March 5, 2017 (edited) BTW, I just noticed a problem with all the versions of Miner I've downloaded so far, including the original cartridge image, when running in PAL mode in Altirra: when BB gets to the bottom right-hand side, during the opening animation sequence, all the platforms disappear. This doesn't happen on NTSC. Does it happen on real hardware too? (I don't currently own any PAL machines to test it with) Were there ever any versions created to fix the problem? Edited March 5, 2017 by MrFish Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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