Vic 20 Screen and Character designer

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beamrider
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Re: Vic 20 Screen and Character designer

Post by beamrider »

johncl wrote:Great! Thanks for the update!

Just a word of warning for users of this editor - pressing backspace can sometimes perform a back navigation on the browser and basically you loose everything then (unless you do as I do now, save frequent backups). :)
Yes, I did mention that in the caveats section of an earlier post for the previous version... :roll: :D
johncl wrote: PS: Only one feature request for the keyboard input. Holding shift while typing could set bit 7 of the char - to get reverse chars! That would be cool, and it would also solve an issue that many will get into, when you put a charset at $1c00 (to get 64-128 user defined chars and 128 ROM chars) keyboard entry would need to be in the inverted ones where bit7 is set as that is where the ROM chars are then. :)
Not sure, quite what you mean by this. I wouldn't expect typing to modify the character data, presumably you mean to select the char from the range 128-255? The shift key is used to disciminate between upper and lower case in the mixed keyboard mapping that I provided. I think what you're after is best achieved with a different keyboard mapping?
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beamrider
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Re: Vic 20 Screen and Character designer

Post by beamrider »

..just posted another update to v0.45 to correct an issue preventing the display of multicolor characters.
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beamrider
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Re: Vic 20 Screen and Character designer

Post by beamrider »

instructions/documentation updated...
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Re: Vic 20 Screen and Character designer

Post by johncl »

Indeed a keyboard mapping would solve that problem, I didn't think of that. And I missed the caveat - sometimes I guess the best thing is to get burned. ;)
Btw when I use Shift-A it just adds normal A and not a different character. Is the mapping set up by default to repeat the standard chars?

I have used it extensively today and worked out some nice prototype graphics for the game I am working on if I go for a custom charset in it.

Just a UI tip: When you have all destructive buttons like the "Revert all characters to ROM" its wise to show a confirmation dialog, although from experience the wisest thing is to save as often as possible in case one does something stupid.

If you plan on developing more on this tool, here are some tiny improvements:
- Ctrl-A on the Data Import/Export to select all (focus seems to be stuck at screen editor even if you click the text field)
- Rotate and flip right/left that detects if its in multicolor

Just wondering what palette you are using for the tool, I notice the colors are different than Vice at least. Perhaps an option to switch between PAL and NTSC palettes (not sure if Vice does emulate PAL or NTSC correctly?).
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beamrider
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Re: Vic 20 Screen and Character designer

Post by beamrider »

johncl wrote: Btw when I use Shift-A it just adds normal A and not a different character. Is the mapping set up by default to repeat the standard chars?
I mentioned that in my earlier post. There is an alternate mixed-cased mapping for use with ROM bank 1 - see the updated documentation.
johncl wrote: Just a UI tip: When you have all destructive buttons like the "Revert all characters to ROM" its wise to show a confirmation dialog, although from experience the wisest thing is to save as often as possible in case one does something stupid.
Yes, good idea - although the tool was never designed to be "Idiot proof" :wink:
johncl wrote: If you plan on developing more on this tool, here are some tiny improvements:
- Ctrl-A on the Data Import/Export to select all (focus seems to be stuck at screen editor even if you click the text field)
I think making use of the Ctrl+A has interefed with that. It seems more trouble than it's worth to fix it as 90% of people will update it in a separate editor.
johncl wrote: - Rotate and flip right/left that detects if its in multicolor
Yes, thought about that, but never got around to it...
johncl wrote: Just wondering what palette you are using for the tool, I notice the colors are different than Vice at least. Perhaps an option to switch between PAL and NTSC palettes (not sure if Vice does emulate PAL or NTSC correctly?).
I got the pallete from the following link but not sure how accurate it is..

http://computingvoyage.com/613/the-pale ... r-matcher/

..suppose a definable pallete would be nice someday :idea:
johncl
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Re: Vic 20 Screen and Character designer

Post by johncl »

Ah yes the mixed case button is yet another one I missed, it seems to get stuck if you swap it back and forth between default and mixed case a couple of times, requiring a restart of the page to get it working again. I am sorry if I have contributed to your "can of worms" - I am a developer (consultant) myself so I know that tiny "features" soon permutate into many bugs as often as possible. :)

About the palette, I am not sure really what is the correct one - but seem to have read that the colours in Vice are too bright compared to a real Vic. The NTSC colors 8-15 available for background and auxillary are supposedly very different to the PAL.

Some palette info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_8- ... e_palettes

And a lengthy discussion here: http://wayofthepixel.net/index.php?topic=13904.0

That one has credits going to Mike at this forum with these two palettes:

NTSC
Image

PAL
Image

That "quite usable" light orange/brown at color index 9 in the PAL palette becomes a rather gruesome pink on the NTSC (perhaps replacable by index 15).
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beamrider
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Re: Vic 20 Screen and Character designer

Post by beamrider »

I've uploaded a fix for the UDC mapping issues (0.46).

Please read the "Key mapping" section in the documenation as I've changed how it works slightly.

If you can find the RGB values for those palettes and the conensus is that they're the ones we should be using, I'll add them and provide an option in settings to switch between PAL/NTSC palettes.
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Re: Vic 20 Screen and Character designer

Post by johncl »

This is the PAL file initially posted by Mike on another thread: PAL Palette

And I used Mike's image of NTSC colors in that image above to create this one: NTSC Palette

Both of these should work on the latest Vice 2.4.
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beamrider
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Re: Vic 20 Screen and Character designer

Post by beamrider »

OK, I've posted a new version (0.47) that uses these palettes to provide a choice (persisted) on the settings tab.

[edit:updated to 0.48 to fix a minor issue]

I must say, the NTSC one seems a bit 'neon'...
Last edited by beamrider on Thu Nov 20, 2014 3:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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beamrider
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Re: Vic 20 Screen and Character designer

Post by beamrider »

I've just posted vesion 0.49 that should hopefully include the last "missing" feature.

A new option has been added to the settings tab: "Automatically save and reload current drawing". When this is checked, the current drawing is automatically saved when the window is closed/navigated away from thus preventing accidnental loss of work [under normal cicrumstances]. A new button "Start New drawing!" is provided should you wish to discard current work.

Enjoy!

Adrian
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Re: Vic 20 Screen and Character designer

Post by johncl »

Great, thanks! I agree both palettes are very bright, but supposedly they measured some real Vic20 output to some screens. With CRT emulation enabled in Vice they naturally become darker and more muted, so perhaps your default palette is perhaps closer to the colour it looks like on a real CRT. Hard to know really whats correct as its so much based on what kind of telly people connect their Vic20 to.
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Re: Vic 20 Screen and Character designer

Post by rhurst »

Excellent work. It could remain as-is, with its polish and usefulness, thank you. I am encouraged to have more fun on VIC because of this handy tool. Is this something that can downloaded or copied to vanity web sites?

Some feedback for your consideration:

The UI layout lends itself for a 4:3 display, which I would recommend using more of the horizontal landscape for more commonplace wide aspect displays. I can zoom my Linux Chrome browser only to 125% (150% on a 16:10 display requires a little bit of panning up/down), with quite a bit of unused space to the right.

Can the drawing canvas get centered and maintain a sensible ratio, especially when resizing rows and columns?

The "Cursor pos" indicator seems to work only with the mouse hover, not updated from keyboard events.

With your added palette choices, I am begging for better selection methods to pick color for each register, i.e., from a hot-spot grid instead of the dropdown picklist.

It would be friendlier if the Clear, Copy, Paste, Fill action buttons were active only if the selection area was more than a single cell, as well as being inactive during draw mode entirely.
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beamrider
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Re: Vic 20 Screen and Character designer

Post by beamrider »

rhurst wrote:Excellent work. It could remain as-is, with its polish and usefulness, thank you. I am encouraged to have more fun on VIC because of this handy tool. Is this something that can downloaded or copied to vanity web sites?
Thanks, I'm glad it's proving useful. That was the main reason I produced it, I was thinking of starting a second project but the hassle/hard-work of creating screens etc put me off from even starting. Yes, feel free to copy it as you please. I was thinking that perhaps it could be hosted as a resource on Denial when it stops getting updated.
rhurst wrote: Some feedback for your consideration:

The UI layout lends itself for a 4:3 display, which I would recommend using more of the horizontal landscape for more commonplace wide aspect displays. I can zoom my Linux Chrome browser only to 125% (150% on a 16:10 display requires a little bit of panning up/down), with quite a bit of unused space to the right.
Yes, I was thinking about that. Perhaps the whole area below the screen view which isn't used constantly could be moved to the right as a second tab interhangeable with the character view and consequently the screen enlarged. Let me have a think....
rhurst wrote:Can the drawing canvas get centered and maintain a sensible ratio, especially when resizing rows and columns?
This might be alleviated by the proposed measure above or have I missed your point?
rhurst wrote:The "Cursor pos" indicator seems to work only with the mouse hover, not updated from keyboard events.
Yes, a bug. Noted!
rhurst wrote:With your added palette choices, I am begging for better selection methods to pick color for each register, i.e., from a hot-spot grid instead of the dropdown picklist.
Hmm OK. Not sure why, surely the VIC's colours are fixed?
[edit: OK, I think I get what you mean, I thought you meant that you wanted to pick an arbitry 32 bit colour. You want a 16 square grid with the defined colours in it?] - Perhaps for the character colour, I'm not sure about the others as you tend to decide what they should be at the begining of the project and leave them alone after.
rhurst wrote:It would be friendlier if the Clear, Copy, Paste, Fill action buttons were active only if the selection area was more than a single cell, as well as being inactive during draw mode entirely.
Sorry, but have to disagree here , I often use Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V for a copying a single character from one place to another. Agree that they should be inactive during draw, paste inactive when nothing in the copy buffer, undo when nothing to undo etc, but didn't get round to that level of polish.
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Re: Vic 20 Screen and Character designer

Post by pixel »

Awesome! This thing really hits the spot!
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beamrider
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Re: Vic 20 Screen and Character designer

Post by beamrider »

Thanks!

I've just uploaded version 0.50

New features:-

- 'Clear' facility for multiple table rows
- 'Invert' facility for multiple table rows
- 'SmartPaste' facility for table (see below)..
- Additional two KeyMaps for REV chars (>127)

Bug fixes:

- Import single screen function was broken - now fixed
- Defaults to screen show screen '0' after multi-screen import.
- Cursor pos display now also works from cursor keys
- Code to infer intended multi-colour now working better/properly.

Mixed UDC/ROM mode - I needed to adjust a project I'm working on to support 128 udc's & also use the ROM characters >127 for normal text, so I added the above facilities. The "key maps" will allow you to type from the >127 range to the screen, the table 'invert' button will be able to reverse the upper 128 characters/table rows to look correct (not reversed) and you can also use "SmartPaste"..

SmartPaste - this feature allows you to copy characters in the table from one place to another and retain any screen references in doing so. All existing screen references to the copied characters are upated to point to the new index(s) of the pasted characters.
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