New Tool for creating PF + 48 px title screens (functional WIP)

[kisrael]

I found out that some homebrewers are using playerpal 2600 to do 48-pixel sprites (like for a title screen) and - fancying myself the provider of the finest browser-based graphic and sound tools for atari available, I thought I'd make a new tool for that! (with help on the kernel side from @Karl G) - it lets you edit a 48x??? (max 192) graphic and then generate an assembly kernel and a wrapper batari BASIC program to run it.

 

I'm open for suggestions for the name of it, but for now it's Title-Screen-Titan (which includes my ambition to support some Playfield Graphic variants) 

UPDATE: ITS NEW NAME IS Splash-O-Matic 2600 - https://alienbill.com/2600/splash-o-matic/

currently includes Image Import and a Text Tool!

 

Here is the editor and then the result running in Stella. 

 

It provides a button for the assembly kernel, and a batari BASIC wrapper to run it.

(I guess if you're using the ASM straight up you will have to set logo_color and logo_height yourself.)

 

You can see a "todo" list item of things I might try to add. I think the next most important thing might be trying to get color in there, Karl was gracious enough to assemble a kernel that can even change color on each scanline! 

Feedback/constructive criticism welcome. I like to things people find useful! Hearing 2 people use PlayerPal for this stuff was enough to get me going on this.

 

 

[Dionoid]

This is going to be another great tool, next to PlayerPal!!

[+MarcoJ]

nice one @kisrael. Have been a user of your playerpal for years. Thanks for making this. 

[kisrael]

NEW NAME: It is now the splash-o-matic 2600 (given its usefulness for splash screens)

AND A NEW URL: https://alienbill.com/2600/splash-o-matic/

AND A NEW FEATURE... colors! Thanks to Karl Garrison's nifty kernel work, you can now have a nifty (if unoptimized) kernel that changes the color every scanline.

 

TEASER: thinking about what might make this more and more useful... wouldn't a text tool be cool? Maybe with fonts at various sizes...

 

Hope the UI for changing the color makes sense to people... basically when making a color kernel "color" is a tool much like the draw tool, but instead of painting pixels it changes just those lines to the currently selected foreground color. (it also hints at the color for each scan line by drawing the color on the right side)  I might do an explainer youtube once more features get in and things are more stable. 

 

[+somebooks]

this is really fun!

the color UI made sense to me.

[kisrael]

5 hours ago, somebooks said:

this is really fun!

the color UI made sense to me.

Your artwork is extremely charming and makes me feel 10% even better about what I've made! Is it ok to share with attribution? (Certainly better than my "just make sure the damn thing works" scribble... I usually doodle better than that I swear)

 

Gentle suggestions for the UI welcome actually! Can't promise I will agree or if I do will get around to prioritize coding it, but I try not to have too much i ego in assuming a part of the controls can't be made easier to use

[+somebooks]

2 hours ago, kisrael said:

Is it ok to share with attribution?

Thanks! Sure, feel free to share.

2 hours ago, kisrael said:

Gentle suggestions for the UI welcome actually!

Hmm. Well, might be nice to have the color values listed on the side, like playerpal - or a way to eyedrop select a color previously used - so you can easily match a color you’ve used before.

[kisrael]

3 minutes ago, somebooks said:

Hmm. Well, might be nice to have the color values listed on the side, like playerpal - or a way to eyedrop select a color previously used - so you can easily match a color you’ve used before.

 

Great point. Will put on the list. Actually I have an idea for an inobtrusive display.

[bithopper]

Wonderful tool with great useability - all you could ever wish from a splash screen editor! Apart from somebooks suggestion, which I second, I can't think of anything else.   

[kisrael]

Just now, bithopper said:

Wonderful tool with great useability - all you could ever wish from a splash screen editor! Apart from somebooks suggestion, which I second, I can't think of anything else.   

Oh, the fun is just getting started (sort of) - or at least if I can hack up my ideas for onscreen text, usability will skyrocket. (i don't always like to post ambitions ahead of time but this one I want to nag myself to make happen)

[kisrael]

51 minutes ago, kisrael said:

 

Great point. Will put on the list. Actually I have an idea for an inobtrusive display.

Check it out: https://alienbill.com/2600/splash-o-matic/ (you may have to hit shift-reload to make sure you see the new stuff) 

just a kind of minimal display of the current color under the mouse - decided not to color it for now, to minimize flashing.

Also when you're in multicolor mode and pick a new fg color, it picks the "color" tool automatically, since you probably need to apply the new color before trying to draw with it.

[kisrael]

[kisrael]

Now with cut/copy/paste functionality. I think this will get the job done rather than providing an explicit "shove all pixels left, right, up, or down"

[kisrael]

Now with import from image file! Everything is still handled in the browser... it stretches the image to be the full "screen", then breaks into black and white, you can fiddle with the contrast:

[kisrael]

Progress continues! Now it supports bB PFs (regular pfcolors kernel and DPC+ w/ much higher resolution)

 

(Seems like there might be a slight bug for image import w/ the new kernels... like it works if I load the image while still doing a 48px kernel, and then switch over? Odd.)

 

[kisrael]

Improved Image Import - now when you load an image it samples at 5 different contrast levels and picks one that has a good balance of pixels on to pixels off (which might not be what a human thinks is best, you can still fiddle with the slider for that, but it prevents an image from being all black or all white from the outset)
 

[KevKelley]

First off, I want to say how much I love this. I finally got a chance to play around with this and had a lot of fun doodling, importing pictures, and editing.

 

I did have a problem and was not sure if I was doing something correctly or not. When I export the .bas and assembly files and run them with no editing, it does not seem to work. Gmthe screen would be black and running at around 300 cycles until I got a button to get to the Hello World playfield. I am assuming I probably missed a step somewhere. I tried fiddling with the code but was at a loss (but I had a couple crazy kids running around so my focus probably was not 100%!)

 

Also, thought I'd share the image I had created for my game I was working on. Despite not getting it to work, it was extremely enjoyable just as a fun little image editor.

[+D Train]

2 hours ago, KevKelley said:

thought I'd share the image I had created for my game I was working on

I already like the direction this is going in!

[+Gemintronic]

3 hours ago, KevKelley said:

First off, I want to say how much I love this. I finally got a chance to play around with this and had a lot of fun doodling, importing pictures, and editing.

 

I did have a problem and was not sure if I was doing something correctly or not. When I export the .bas and assembly files and run them with no editing, it does not seem to work. Gmthe screen would be black and running at around 300 cycles until I got a button to get to the Hello World playfield. I am assuming I probably missed a step somewhere. I tried fiddling with the code but was at a loss (but I had a couple crazy kids running around so my focus probably was not 100%!)

 

Also, thought I'd share the image I had created for my game I was working on. Despite not getting it to work, it was extremely enjoyable just as a fun little image editor.

 

 

Got it to work.  Feel free to use it however you please

 

Not sure if it was Firefox or some ad blocking extension messing with it, but, sometimes it would change the foreground or background color even whenever I clicked outside the drawing area.  Say, trying to select an option or change a color.

 

linemantitle.zip

[kisrael]

Thanks for the kind words!
pretty screen! you remind me that I should add a thing to allow separate background and playfield colors in DPC+ kernels.
 

there's absolutely bugs running around this thing  Best things to do are do "steps to reproduce" and then what you saw vs what you expected to see

 

In this case I'm able to reproduce the problem and I think I know the cause and fix, having to do with how I changed dealing with "out of bound" clicks.

[kisrael]

And image importing works better than I thought it would  at least for some images. 

[KevKelley]

I'm still learning with bB so I understand sometimes something that may be obvious is not immediately so with folks like me. I do find your program easier to grasp. I'll have to dig through the code it generates to see how exactly it works and how I can take what your program makes and integrate it. 

 

The image import function. Is definitely fun. I found the best images I made i would try to edit the image into few colors as possible and then tweak it in browser. For the image I used I hadn't even considered colorizing it. My original titlescreen kernel image I was making was a simple black and white image so I tried to remake it here and loved clicking on the lines. I kind of wish there was a playfield editor like this, as sometimes the one in VbB can be cumbersome with DPC+ screens.

[kisrael]

15 minutes ago, KevKelley said:

I'm still learning with bB so I understand sometimes something that may be obvious is not immediately so with folks like me. I do find your program easier to grasp. I'll have to dig through the code it generates to see how exactly it works and how I can take what your program makes and integrate it. 

 

Yeah. Over all I mean to put more explaining of some things.

 

15 minutes ago, KevKelley said:

I kind of wish there was a playfield editor like this, as sometimes the one in VbB can be cumbersome with DPC+ screens.

So I'm still working on some of the assembly PF editors - but did you know it already has a DPC+ editor mode? 

https://alienbill.com/2600/splash-o-matic/

(The one thing it doesn't do is let you edit the background per scanline as well as the PF color per scanline, I realized I have to build that in)

 

Is that what you were looking for? If not, could you describe what you're hoping for, and if so, maybe I need to explain more clearly how this is for 48px AND various other Playfield things??

 

 

[KevKelley]

I think the way it is designed, an editor like the splash-o-matic editor would work well as a playfield exporter too.  I find in VbB the playfield editor for DPC+ games can be hard to work with because, at least on my computer, I have to scroll up and down to edit the entire playfield instead of it being present on on screen. 

[kisrael]

Just now, KevKelley said:

I think the way it is designed, an editor like the splash-o-matic editor would work well as a playfield exporter too.  I find in VbB the playfield editor for DPC+ games can be hard to work with because, at least on my computer, I have to scroll up and down to edit the entire playfield instead of it being present on on screen. 

What I'm trying to say is IT ALREADY IS A DPC+ BB EXPORTER!!!

go down to mode/output kernal  - "select bB DPC+ color PF" - then it gives you bB DPC+ code w/o a separate kernel, and the PF editor changes shape a bit