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What tool for choosing 12-bit colours that work on the Lynx?


Turbo Laser Lynx

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I have an image with 16 colours in my project and I managed putting in LX.NET's nice custom palette from here:

https://atarilynxdeveloper.wordpress.com/2012/04/25/programming-tutorial-part-6colors/

 

but I wanted to change one of the light greens to a light blue. However I couldn't find any converter or palette online that would give me the correct colors on the lynx allthough they seem to be using 000 to fff like these:

http://rangevoting.org/ColorCode2.html

http://neildowning.com/HEX_to_RGB_color_converter.php

 

For example the light blue colour 3c8ee7 turned into 38D in the converter, but that shows as some sort of bright pinkish color on the lynx.

 

Any help appreciated.

post-2915-0-90100700-1472950294_thumb.png

Edited by Turbo Laser Lynx
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The original Lynx screen has big problems in displaying colours. These new replacement screens work fine.

 

The standard palette has a very nice set of colours.

 

post-2099-0-63977900-1472967012_thumb.png

GIMP Palette
Name: Lynx
Columns: 4
#
 17   0  17    Untitled
221  51  68    Untitled
255 153 170    Untitled
136 153 187    Untitled
119 119 119    Untitled
 85  51  51    Untitled
136  68  68    Untitled
238 119  85    Untitled
255 221  85    Untitled
 51 204  85    Untitled
 34 136  34    Untitled
 51  34  34    Untitled
 68  68 136    Untitled
 85 136 238    Untitled
 85 204 255    Untitled
255 255 255    Untitled

You could just edit it to create your own and put it in ~/.gimp-2.8/palettes/LynxModified.gpl

 

The way I work with the image is that I keep the source image in RGB format. I open up two windows. One is the palette window where I choose Lynx - the standard colours. The other is colour window that has an option to show only palette colours. You can use all tools like colour fills, brushes, pens.

 

post-2099-0-35631500-1472967612_thumb.png

 

Once I have most of the picture colourized the way I want I can use Image->Mode->To Indexed. There I choose Custom palette and Lynx. All the colours that are not found will be set to the closest colour from my Lynx palette. I always disable dithering.

 

Here I am just playing around with streaming objects in World of Warcraft graphics style for fun. This is still work in progress. I have only used about half of the colours available in the palette. The image is a 360 degree panorama for the Lynx. Once it is finished it will be amazing ;)

 

Edit: the order of the colours is not random. If you look closely you see the blue shades, plants, earth, flesh colours and so on. All nicely next to each other. I also attached my standard Lynx palette for the Gimp and a small demo of the picture I am working on for the Lynx. There is only scroll right implemented in this cart image. But you get an idea of how the colours work on a real Lynx with this palette.

palette.zip

Edited by karri
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Also, don't forget that the RGB values must be written as GBR in the pallette bytes. So, you have to swap the nibbles of 038D to 08D3 for them to show up as blue instead of pink.

static char palette[] = 
{
	// Green values (with RGB's for reference)
	0x0000 >> 8,	// 0 0 0
	0x011a >> 8,	// 167 26 26
	0x0692 >> 8,	// 45 109 152
	0x0946 >> 8,	// 110 156 66
	0x0404 >> 8,	// 72 72 0
	0x0818 >> 8,	// 134 134 29
	0x0666 >> 8,	// 111 111 111
	0x0888 >> 8,	// 142 142 142
	0x0616 >> 8,	// 105 105 15
	0x0b7f >> 8,	// 252 188 116
	0x066e >> 8,	// 228 111 111
	0x0b3b >> 8,	// 187 187 53
	0x0301 >> 8,	// 53 95 24
	0x0b55 >> 8,	// 92 186 92
	0x0f5f >> 8,	// 252 252 84
	0x0eee >> 8,	// 236 236 236

	// Blue and red values
	0x0000 & 0xff, 
	0x011a & 0xff, 
	0x0692 & 0xff,	
	0x0946 & 0xff,	
	0x0404 & 0xff, 
	0x0818 & 0xff, 
	0x0666 & 0xff,	
	0x0888 & 0xff,	
	0x0616 & 0xff,	
	0x0b7f & 0xff,	
	0x066e & 0xff,	
	0x0b3b & 0xff,	
	0x0301 & 0xff,	
	0x0b55 & 0xff,	
	0x0f5f & 0xff,	
	0x0eee & 0xff	
};
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That's a very nice palette, I can see it would fit many 16 colour games nicely. Yeah I noticed it was a very thought out good palette. I will use it for something for sure. Thanks for teaching me how to use gimp palettes too by the way and explaining your workflow! ^^ Gimp is really good by now it seems. I will probably start using it for pixel-stuff. Last time I tested it many years ago it wasn't nearly as easy to understand.

 

Haha, nice stuff, I took a few turns to look around. Soon we'll be running away from murlocs in elwynn forest and chasing hogger on the lynx! :-D

 

 

 

Also, don't forget that the RGB values must be written as GBR in the pallette bytes. So, you have to swap the nibbles of 038D to 08D3 for them to show up as blue instead of pink.

 

Aaah! I knew this from before and it was practically staring me in the face but I just couldn't connect the dots! How stupid but what a relief haha. Thanks for refreshing my memory!

 

Thanks for all the help again guys, now I finally have quite a good understanding of the Lynx palette again. Last thing to read about now is how to point the correct index to the correct color: https://atarilynxdeveloper.wordpress.com/2012/10/14/programming-tutorial-part-8changing-appearances/

I think I used to just mix and match back in the day 'til I got it right :-o

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Haha, nice stuff, I took a few turns to look around. Soon we'll be running away from murlocs in elwynn forest and chasing hogger on the lynx! :-D

 

Yep. But a 512k cart is limited to 28 locations. A 432 by 102 pixel panorama takes around 18500 bytes. If I add some gaming logic, animated murlocs, sounds we are down to about 20 locations. There may also be a need for transitions like climbing a tower, look around inside a building etc. So the world could be around 15 locations only. It would still be nice to implement a short game in WoW style with streaming objects just to prove that it can be done ;)

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Actually I wasn't expecting that "Yep." :grin:

 

I immediately started thinking about that 2D flash game "Murloc RPG 2", pretty funny stuff getting to play as a murloc (I've only played it for a little bit though): http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/579313

 

Btw. by WoW-style did you mean gameplay or graphics or both? I see it going over board really fast becoming a 650Mb project! ;)

 

The technique in itself sounds interresting without a doubt! I guess it could possiby then be used to stream of the flash cart for graphically huge Lynx games as discussed in the other thread? And for normal sized games as well obviously.

Edited by Turbo Laser Lynx
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What I am doing is no rocket science. The idea is just to set up a small number of containers as placeholders. During play I then read in the content from the file. An example is the graphics background. You can read it in into 3 buffers 54x102 pixels. It covers 162 x 102 pixels. Then you have one extra buffer for the tile left or right depending on where you are going. A 360 panorama view requires 8 tiles. But you only need 4 in memory at any time. When you turn you can load in a new tile over the discarded tile that is not needed anymore.

 

The next step would then be to use the scaling engine to zoom the background in/out when you walk towards it or away from it. Perhaps just in the range 100% - 125%. Just to give a little fake impression moving.

 

Who knows what kind of other containers will be required. An interesting exercise.

 

It would also be nice to experiment with ComLynx. Perhaps an Easter Egg hunt with many players running in the same space collecting eggs, picking up power ups, turning other players into rabbits to slow them down and teaming up to fight an evil witch. All ComLynxable using Mednafen or Handy and Internet :). Available Easter 2017 - perhaps...

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Sounds like a really interresting concept, and apparently not that complicated either. :thumbsup: :)

 

By the way, what's the "status" of comlynx programming these days? I saw gadgetUK and LX.NET have been able to create comlynx to usb cables! https://atarilynxdeveloper.wordpress.com/2013/10/21/creating-a-comlynx-to-usb-cable/

More multiplayer games on the lynx would obviously be really exciting! Being able to play over the internet would really benefit of some new games too, like just being able to see each others names above the player sprites would already add to the excitement.

 


 

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About ComLynx. There is the "standard" ComLynx module Redeye in lynx/contrib/redeye/redeye.s. There may still be errors in setting up the interrupts or something. But I thought of using this code base at 9600 baud to keep it compatible with standard serial ports. The first part is to make 2 Lynx units play together. And document Redeye properly.

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Yeah I've had a look at redeye.s a couple of times, but it's a bit too complicated for me at this point, I have too limited spare time and too many hobbies (=projects of passion) (and perhaps limited engineering brain) so I have to move one step at a time and learn a lot of things from square one again. I'm going to start out with a small demo game and then move back over to trying to make a simple yet complete game.

 

I've again started thinking if there's some way that I could be a part of helping new people making games for the lynx but the text got so long I posted it in a thread of it's own: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/256732-making-programming-the-lynx-a-little-easier/

Edited by Turbo Laser Lynx
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@BadPricey I found this tool that is apparently able to both load and save Amiga ILBM files: http://aminet.net/package/gfx/conv/gfxcon

 

@sage Nice that you checked it out. I guess you probably already saw/read the notes about redeye? https://atarilynxdeveloper.wordpress.com/documentation/redeye/

 

One question, did you get it to run stable for two players? I mean there's a lot of good two player games / ideas as well :grin:

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