Question(s) about HIDE

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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Chema
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Question(s) about HIDE

Post by Chema »

This one is intended mostly to Twilighte, but anybody using HIDE could help me.

I am trying to settle up some attribute color changes in the converted picture of my Elite-Clone, and I tried HIDE for that purpose. Indeed it is an excellent tool, and an impressive one for the Oric! But I could not do the job.

The problem comes when I try to delete the attributes that PictConv placed in the conversion. In Twilighte's website it states that pressing "d" (small caps) should delete the byte, but I did not find a way to do so. Whenever I press "d" it takes it as "D" (capital) so it deletes the whole grid. As there is no way of undoing, I have to restart the work again.

I tried SHIFT+D, pressing CTRL-T and everything I could imagine, and even I thought it worked at one occasion; unfortunately I was pressing keys madly and deleted the grid, so I am not sure what I did, or even if I did it.

After I can fix this, I would like to see if anybody can tell me the easiest way to get back the picture to asm .byt statements... (save to disk, then to tap, then some tool out there...)

The more I have to do this kind of things, the more I thing we would need an editor such as this (which is incredible), but running under windows, with cursor support and such.
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Twilighte
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Post by Twilighte »

I tried SHIFT+D, pressing CTRL-T and everything I could imagine, and even I thought it worked at one occasion; unfortunately I was pressing keys madly and deleted the grid, so I am not sure what I did, or even if I did it.
Ooops naff instructions methinks, i use Del or backspace to delete a byte. Sorry for bad manual.
After I can fix this, I would like to see if anybody can tell me the easiest way to get back the picture to asm .byt statements... (save to disk, then to tap, then some tool out there...)
Ahh well i would have suggested the modified HIDE utility that dumps screen areas to .byt asm statements in the printer file except it will only manage half a screen and is very slow.

http://forum.defence-force.org/viewtopic.php?t=358

You could just modify that version of hide to do the whole screen ofcourse.
Now how did i do it before? hmm.. let me think now..
save the image to tape, run HEADER to remove the header then run BIN2TXT to convert to .byt statements.
Personally i created a TAP2S.BAT which contained..

Code: Select all

header -h0 %1.tap %1.bin
bin2txt -s1 -f2 -h1 -n16 %1.bin %1.s ;
Not sure why the ; but nevertheless both header and bin2txt exist in the osdk. Then just type TAP2S rembrandt.tap to get back rembrandt.s
Simples!

But anyway back to the subject, i will always use HIDE for all my editing stuff so if anyone has any further suggestions how i could improve it please let me know.
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Chema
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Post by Chema »

Thanks Twi, for your help.

I downloaded HIDE 20 and tried it a bit. Did not have time to work extensively with it yet, but I must say that it is a really impressive little utility :)

Unfortunately I think I crashed it trying to print without the printer set to ON (why I don't read all the screen messages before doing something is a mystery for me). And worst than that, I though I had saved my work to tape, but when I tried to restart it just was not there.

Surey I did something wrong. So I need to restart over. Not a problem, really, as I wanted to change a few things. Simply that I will need more time.

Anyway I find HIDE very easy to use and very powerful. Just need some expertize to create those nice effects using the inverse bit :)

As soon as I use it more, I will post any question or comment.

Pitty it is not a windows utility, really.

Thanks!
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Twilighte
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Post by Twilighte »

Under the emulator (not sure about the real machine) if you attempt to send to the printer without it being attached (or turned on in F1 screen) it will crash the computer as it waits indefinately for the ack). Unfortunately entering the F1 screen and then enabling the printer appears to make no difference.
This is why HIDE20 clearly prompts the user to enable the printer before commencing :P
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