Oric Character Generator

[peacer]

After a of period of time, I finished one of my dream project of Oric Character Generator for PC. I had chance to do this because I broke my ankle bone. I have to stay at home for another month so I try to build this application.



This utility is aimed to load/edit/design Oric font characters with different tools by using PC facilities.

Its mainly based on our beloved Twilighte's CHED90 utility. So I include every tools that Jonathan implemented in that utility.

Usage of the program is not hard.

First you need to load default or alternative set of characters.

Then you select the characters one by one and edit the font with clicking on the font matrix or toolbox tools.

You can copy & paste from one char to another. Shift or rotate to X and Y axis either way. Mirroring in 2 axis is also possible. You can fill the font with random pixels or reset to its original.

Its possible to load from .TAP files saved from emulator. You can save the char data as oric .TAP file and use it with your programs too. I include some font files that I created or edited with this tool too.

I tried to implement an "animation tool" to see selected characters as font matrices one another but couln't make it for now. Maybe I will try that in future versions, if you like it.

I am open for all advices and modifications.

Best Wishes

Char Editor.rar

(129.97 KiB) Downloaded 136 times

[Chema]

Hey! That is nice! Thanks for sharing it

I will have a look at it asap.

[Symoon]

Looks nice!
What language did you program it with?

[Godzil]

Looks nice!
What language did you program it with?

I would say VB6 but I may be wrong..

[iss]

Thanks, peacer! Nice and very useful tool.
The language is MS Visual Basic - I had missing MSVBVM60.DLL and COMDLG32.OCX,
but this is my local problem after I added them everything works fine.
May I suggest to add an option so it's possible to switch between Hex and Dec representation of
the values for ASCII code and character row bytes?

PS: ... and take care of your ankle!

[peacer]

Yes, VB6

From my early experience with Oric, BASIC was always my language to choose. later on, GWBASIC, QBASIC, Quick Basic, VB3 and at last VB6. After that, it is beyond my experience like VB.NET etc.

Thanks for your compliments !

@ iss, I forget to include MSVBVM60.DLL and COMDLG32.OCX , sorry about that. I will include them in the rar file when I add that HEX-DEC switch. If it's useful, I can make an option to copy the data together into clipboard, or into a textbox area. Do you mean hex format as in Oric like #FF or visual programming format like &HFF ?

[coco.oric]

Nice build, thanks a lot for sharing this tool.

Is it possible to add an option without tap format but only dat file ?
or to save in .c or .s format to osdk and cc65 ?

Didier

[iss]

My personal taste is just 'FF' .
+1 for coco.oric wish for raw format and if possible *.C and/or *.S compatible export.

[peacer]

.dat is quite possible, I can remove .TAP start sequence and save only the data. But I don't know how .C or .S format is..

can you give me an example?

[iss]

C/C++:

Code: Select all

unsigned char FontName[] = {
   1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,
   0x1,0x2, ..., (for hex)
   .....
};

ASM/S using XA syntax:

Code: Select all

FontName    .byt 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8
            .byt $01,$02,... (for hex)

[peacer]

Can you give detail a bit.. I am confused ..

unsigned char FontName[] = {
1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,
0x1,0x2, ..., (for hex)
.....
};

I have ascii of char and 8 bytes data for each. How this data should looks like then?

e.g.

Code: Select all

unsigned char Bold[] = {
63,60,30,30,45,40,50,50
0,0,21,42,21,0,0,0
..
..
..
(All 90 chars data here)?
};

Also how can I determine standart or alternative set, which data is for which font?

[iss]

Your example is OK, only ',' should be on every line excluding the last one, i.e:

Code: Select all

unsigned char Bold[] = {
 63,60,30,30,45,40,50,50,  <---- ',' here, these are 8 bytes for the first character in the set
 0,0,21,42,21,0,0,0,  <---- ',' here, these are 8 bytes for the second character in the set
 ..
 ..
 ..
 1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1 <--- NO ',' here, these are 8 bytes for the last 96th char in standard set
};

For the alternate set you can store only 80 definitions (80*8=640 bytes total).

BTW, .C ans .S are ONLY to be exported, there is no need to be able to open and read data from them.

[peacer]

Ok. Lets see what might it will look like

can it be like 63,60,30,30,45,40,50,50,50,50,40,40,30,40........................ 90x8 = 720 byte data in on line?

[iss]

Sure, one line is ok for compilers. It's just little bit inconvenient for reading by human,
but there are source code formatters - so no problem at all .

[Dbug]

If there's a binary format, you can still call Bin2Txt (in the OSDK bin folder) to get whatever C or S format you want