Another thumbs up for an early version of Paint Shop Pro - I've been using
version 6 for years.
I save images as a 256 x 192 pixel 16 colour .BMP file, then use Edwin's SAM
Screen Viewer to convert it to a SAM SCREEN$ when adding it to a disk image.
Colin
=====
Quazar : Hardware, Software, Spares and Repairs for the SAM Coupé
1995-2013 - Celebrating 19 Years of developing for the SAM Coupé
Website: http://www.samcoupe.com/ Twitter: @QuazarSamCoupe
----- Original Message -----
From: "Chris Pile" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Sunday, October 20, 2013 2:44 PM
Subject: Re: Windows Tools for Sam
Hi Andy,
I've always used "Paint Shop Pro v7.04" - setting the "canvas" to
256x192 and 256 (byte per pixel) colour mode. Then make sure you
only use the first 16 palette entries (in Paint Shop Pro) when you
design your graphics. These 16 entries will then map directly to
the SAM's 16 palette colours.
When you come to save the image save it as filetype "RAW" and make
sure you set the "header" bytes to zero. This will spit out your
image as a simple byte-per-pixel, linear 256x192 block of data of
48k in size.
So, for example, if the first 5 pixels of your image used palette
entries 1, 12, 3, 9 and 15 the first 5 bytes of the RAW data block
you saved from PSP would look like (in HEX):
01 0C 03 09 0F ... and so on.
Then you can either write a simple PC program to take these bytes
and combine them to produce the required nybble-per-pixel layout of
the SAM, or you could "import" this block using SimCoupé and write
a simple SAM program to to this conversion. After conversion the
above example would look like (again, in HEX):
1C 39 Fx (where "x" would be whatever the 6th byte was in the RAW)
The disadvantage to this method is the palette information isn't
saved with the RAW image data. So you must hand-build the CLUT on
the SAM from whatever 16-colours you decided to use in Paint Shop
Pro. An extra step, but not too troublesome.
If you try this method be sure to find a version of Paint Shop Pro
that is <=7.04, as all version after that sucked big time!
Chris.
On 20/10/2013 10:35, Andrew Park wrote:
Hi
Does anyone know of any windows based tools to create graphics for the
sam? What i mean is you can draw the graphics in a windows based
environment then export the data to be used in assembly such as JAM etc?
Andy
