Is there a good working playfield editor?

[Tjoppen]

Hi everyone. First post on these forums for me.

 

I've been hacking away at a couple of VCS projects for the past months, and have come across a problem that I can't imagine is very unique:

I want to create (symmetric) playfield graphics with per-line background/playfield colors. Sadly I can't find a working tool suitable for this job, so I was hoping someone has some tips.

 

PlayfieldPal works well enough for painting monochrome backgrounds, but doesn't do colors. This is what I've used so far, with ok-ish color tables created manually.

TiaPaint is very nice, but only works in DOSBox and only does per-frame background/playfield colors.

VCS Graphics Editor looks pretty much like what I want, but I can't get the JAR to start and the Java Web Start thing doesn't appear to work correctly.

 

I might end up writing my own tool, but GUI stuff isn't exactly my strong point. I'm thinking a command-line tool that takes a BMP and spits out PAL, NTSC or SECAM data. But that wouldn't be very WYSIWYG...

 

Any ideas?

[SeaGtGruff]

Any ideas?

VisualbB has a playfield editor. Although VisualbB is specifically designed to be used with batari Basic, I imagine you could use it with assembly as well-- I haven't tried to do that yet (because I use Crimson Editor rather than VisualbB), and the code output from the playfield and sprite editors would be in batari Basic, but you could translate the output into assembly-compatible data statements.

 

http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/123849-visual-bb-1-0-a-new-ide-for-batari-basic/

 

Michael

[jwierer]

VisualbB has a playfield editor. Although VisualbB is specifically designed to be used with batari Basic, I imagine you could use it with assembly as well-- I haven't tried to do that yet (because I use Crimson Editor rather than VisualbB), and the code output from the playfield and sprite editors would be in batari Basic, but you could translate the output into assembly-compatible data statements.

 

http://www.atariage....r-batari-basic/

 

Michael

While the playfield editor generates bB code, you can paste it into the included graphics converter and you can right click on bB and convert to assembly. It's a two step process, but better than doing it by hand. You can also import an image (bmp, png, gif, jpg, etc...) and convert it directly into assembly or bb.

 

-Jeff

[Tjoppen]

Cool, thanks for the tip. I hadn't thought of using VisualbB. The editor isn't exactly the pinnacle of usability though, but it looks like it might do for now. Specifically, setting the colors per line is very cumbersome.