Article: How to add charsets to your program

The Oric video chip is not an easy beast to master, so any trick or method that allows to achieve nice visual results is welcome. Don't hesitate to comment (nicely) other people tricks and pictures :)
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Dbug
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Article: How to add charsets to your program

Post by Dbug »

I spent a bit of time to write a small article on the OSDK website on how to add custom charsets to your projects:
http://www.osdk.org/index?page=articles&ref=ART8
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peacer
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Re: Article: How to add charsets to your program

Post by peacer »

Thank you.

Can somebody have talent to write a PC program to utilize this with a GUI?

With usage of mouse technology, a character generator program on PC having ability of "save as .tap" ?

Lets imagine.. 6x8 grid as I use excel, to design characters chosen from keyboard one by one.. Exporting it to PNG file is easy, then convert to tap file with defined commands.

Image
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Re: Article: How to add charsets to your program

Post by Dbug »

:shock:

What's wrong with just editing directly the PNG in PhotoShop, PaintShopPro, Paint.net, MSPaint, Gimp, GrafX2, ... ????
All you have to do is to create a picture 6 pixels wide and tall enough to accommodate the number of characters you want, you get the zoom, the mini view, copy-paste, etc... already available.
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Re: Article: How to add charsets to your program

Post by peacer »

Yes :) Thats one way to do it.

But for a programmer, its not so complicated to create one utility to do this at once.

There are not much Oric related PC programs and I am sad about this..
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Re: Article: How to add charsets to your program

Post by Dbug »

If you want to make an utility for the Oric, then make one that brings some unique value, like a level editor for Chema's new game, or a painting program to design AIC graphics easily, or a program to generate sequence of animations on multiple of 6 pixels, etc...
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Re: Article: How to add charsets to your program

Post by peacer »

Why are you angry?

If I had a talent, I would make all those utils, but also a character generator, a sprite generator maybe, a graphic editor which can give output as oric format would be unique as there is not one available yet. I know there are some people among us who can do that. But that's not me...

Such a utility was always wanted, sought and dreamed, even by Twilighte. But we don't have...Do we? Expressing the need for that is not a fault or crime I guess :(

I am a doctor. I am not a programmer but just an enthusiast.. I can write some simple programs but I am not capable of such a program. Its beyond my ability as I said.

Anyway, I will not express / claim my ideas again, sorry. and don't worry.
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Re: Article: How to add charsets to your program

Post by Chema »

I am sure Dbug was not angry at all. It's not like him. I bet he was just trying to express some constructive opinion. So don't take any offense.

Written language sometimes might be misinterpreted as there is no context, no facial expressions and most of us are using a second language.
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Re: Article: How to add charsets to your program

Post by Dbug »

I'm not angry :)

My point is just that we have a small community, not a lot of people, not enough time, so all the effort spent ideally should be toward things that are impacting our ability to use the oric or do things for it.

Tools that run on modern machine and make it much easier to do things (like animation sequences, sprite generators, painting program that is aware of the unique Oric HIRES constraints) would definitely be welcome.

The way you exposed your idea did not seem to me any simpler than just painting a picture directly in a painting program, but thinking of it I can see ways to actually bring added value:
- Make it possible to type some arbitrary texts and see them dynamically change when the character set is being edited
- Provide a way to edit blocks of characters at the same time (say 2x2 characters that represent a sprite for a TEXT mode)
- Ability to load a True Type font and have it overlaid with the edited characters to help create charsets based on known fonts
- Possibility to load existing fonts and make easy variants (italic-ize, bold-ify, add accents)
- Possibility to visualize in different modes, like double sized, different background or foreground colors

Since you are not a programmer, but obviously have ideas, why not make a design, possibly some mock-up pictures or how the whole tool would work, the user interface, menus, etc... and then try to find somebody to work with your to help the thing become a reality?

PS: I'm pretty sure it's the type of tool that could entirely be done as a web application, a bit like http://www.favicon.cc
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