Aquarius Bitmap Graphics Tool

[First Spear]

PMFJI, but does the Aquarius have a straight bitmap mode? I thought it only had character graphics.

[Aquaman]

PMFJI, but does the Aquarius have a straight bitmap mode? I thought it only had character graphics.

You are not mistaken the Aquarius doesn't have a straight bitmap mode! It's graphics are purely character based and not even user defined graphics are possible. However there is a good chance this will change with the help of Bruce. For details look at http://atariage.com/forums/topic/233221-aquarius-320x200-bitmap-graphics-hack/

[vprette]

I have been trying to work on this program and I have a lot of inspiration but I just can't seem to get it done. First I decided that using just the bloxel characters is very limiting. The Aquarius has 40 characters by 24 characters. The bloxel resolution is 2x3 (2 wide by 3 tall) but they are made from 8x8 bit characters. So you really have 40 * 8 = 320 x 24 * 8 = 192. I want to write a program that takes a 320x192 image and converts it into the best fit of any of the 8x8 characters versus the colors in each 8x8 cell. It is not going well. First I tried to make an image of each character and run it through a mosaic program and that didn't do well. Then I tried to make a font file for windows and tried to use an image to ascii converter. The converter worked great, but it doesn't support .FNT fonts and I can't make a true type font. My last thought would be to somehow write a program to compare the bits of the characters to the bits of the 8x8 square that I've downsampled to 2 colors. I can get the image loaded, I can downsample each 8x8 block to 2 colors (I had to do this for my first program) but what I can't do is figure out which character to use for the 8x8 cell. The problem is that when I was going from bitmap to bloxel - I had every choice I wanted, any combination of the 64 available in each 2x3 cell. By using the characters, I also want to match the "essence" of the character, which is what the good image to ascii converters do, or good mosaic programs do. I think I could match this by having two arrays of 8,8 each filled with the bit values of the source image and the various aquarius characters and then compare how many bits match and take the one with the highest matches - the problem is that this means each 8x8 block would have to be compared to 256 characters and each bit in each block has to be compared (8x8=64 comparisons) we have 40 x 24 x 256 x 64 computations, roughly 15.7 million. Obviously no big deal for a modern computer, but a big deal for the high level language through an emulator that I am using. I'd like to figure out a method to reduce the 8x8 blocks down to a single number or a set of three numbers and figure out a way to do the same for the source blocks and be able to do one comparison for each block. As an example I could create a unique value for each block by converting it to the binary equivalent but that seems silly and I only want to do it because I think in base 10 and not binary. Does anyone have any thoughts about a good way to make the comparison? I feel like I am too close to the problem because I have fought with so many ways to do it, but I think the image quality will be much higher if I use the other characters in the character set as there are graphics characters beyond the bloxel's that could be used as well.

 

 

sorry is this available for intellivision also?