itch.io

Funny you should ask :)

Some years ago I started a Linux port (of CharPad C64) using Qt4 (or 5), the biggest problem I ran into was that the resulting binary only seemed to run on my own machine and no amount of tinkering seemed to fix it. 

I ended up with the distinct feeling that the only viable solution was to release all of the source code so users could build it for their own machine too.

Well, that didn't seem like a very good idea for a commercial project!

So, it got shelved.

I still have the source for that port and might well dust it all off and see if anything has changed in the Qt world these last few years.

If so then a native Mac version also becomes possible I guess.

Frankly I've lost track of all of the cross-platform options these days.

Mostly I just remind people that our existing apps seem to run quite well using WINE.

Hello,

There are no tutorials, I would just direct you to take a look at the bundled example "Sprite Animations (game rips)/Quedex (ball).spd" for a good simple example of how to animate with overlays.

Basically you need to keep the overlays and underlays separate rather than interleaved, and adjust the "Sprite overlay distance" value in the Project window to suit your quantities.

As far as the animator is concerned, you are just animating a single (underlay) sequence, the renderer adds the overlays according to "Sprite overlay distance".

I hope that helps.

It's on the todo list, been suggested before also.

Quite how easy it will be is another matter but will investgate.

Hi,

No immediate plans for a "Complete Works" yet no.
 
I like the idea but we have had quite a few problems with piracy over the years and so putting "all of our eggs in one basket" is probably unwise.

There are updates in the pipeline though.

Yes I think I see what you mean, this kind of thing can really get extremely complicated! :D 

Where there is a need to combine different char based elements, ie. a 2x2 tile -set (and it's chars) and another simple charset, the best CharPad can currently offer is the option to manually copy/paste between projects.

ie. If project 'A' contains a tile-set (+chars) of your game's large letters and project 'B' contains your 1x1 alphanumerics (chars)...

..to combine them you could copy project B's chars, then load project A and paste the copied chars to the front of the charset.

The paste will push forward the existing chars (and automatically refactor the char references in the tiles) of project A.

This would give you a single charset that contains all of the images for your 1x1 and your 2x2 elements.

I'm sure you can appreciate just how complex this kind of thing can get!

At some point I may begin work on a separate tool that just deals with the problem of CharPad project combinations, although it would be better if such things could be done dynamically by the C64, then your game could shuffle things around as needed at run-time. 

The thing you are asking for is kind of a Holy Grail! 

Hi,

I'm not quite sure what you are asking..

CharPad uses a pretty simple structure, you can design a single charset, a single tile-set (if desired) and a single map (of chars OR tiles if you have created a tile-set).

ie. The map will always be a tile-map if you have a tile-set.

There is no support for layers or adding additional objects into a map or combining a char map with a tile-map.

Hi,

No you are not missing it, it just doesn't exist, sorry.

While I understand that it could be useful for adding a few sprites as data in BASIC, it is generally more useful and greatly more optimal to load sprite data from a separate (PRG, binary) file from a BASIC program than to have hundreds of PETSCII text decimal values (DATA statements) written/pinned on to the end of your program.

It is something I might add at some point but most users are either building their projects using the data files exported from SpritePad/CharPad (ie. with the data "baked in") or explicitly loading them (from disk/tape) at run-time.

ie. 10 LOAD "SPRITEDATA",8,1

I will consider adding it but it's kind of a pain in the butt with so many different exports possible (from CharPad, SpritePad) for something that is not needed by many people.

Lines/lists of decimal values never align neatly either, unlike hex :)

Will consider further.

Ps. It may be possible to find a hex editor (or some other standalone tool) that can export a file's byte values as a list of comma separated decimal values .

Hi,

Thank you very much for your support and feedback,

So I think you have basically just run into one of the few features that are not currently supported, ie. a "per map cell" colouring/attribute method.

CharPad currently supports 3 colouring methods, 'per project', 'per tile' and 'per char'.

ie. a colour (or set of colours for the bitmap modes) can be attributed to either the whole project or each tile or each char.

L1 attributes (bytes) are Material (nybble) + 1 colour nybble (Colour RAM).

L2 attributes (bytes) are for the bitmap modes (each byte = 2 colour nybbles for each Video RAM cell).

'Per map cell' colouring/attributing has never been supported, mainly due to it being very uncommon, probably due to the amount of memory it would consume, ie. one extra byte for every map cell (potentially two for the bitmap modes), I have yet to find any commercial game that uses it.

But you are not the first person to ask about it and almost certainly will not be the last!

Other reasons for its exclusion simply come down to the complexity that it would add to an already very complex piece of software, it may seem simple but CharPad supports 5 display modes and 3 colouring methods, that's already 15 configurations that need to be considered for most operations, adding 'per map cell' and possibly also 'per tile cell' would raise that to 25.

In a nutshell, if it were simple, it would have been done, believe me.

Maybe some future version will support it but the work and complexity involved to add it has just not been considered worthwhile thus far.

I am sorry to disappoint. 

Ps. the 'Project' window contains the tools you need to control the colour and material values for each char (in 'per char' colouring method) and likewise for the other colouring methods.

ie. select a char (or a tile if using per tile colouring) and you can change it's own matrix colour(s) using the the Project window.

nb. Materials (0-15) are always 'per char'.

nb. If you really want to use the same char with different colours you could try creating a 1x1 tile set and using that instead of a simple char map.

I'm sure you can appreciate just how complex things can become and how we have done our best to accommodate the most commonly useful configurations. 

Cheers.

Ok, I had an e-mail this morning from somebody with the same problem and replied to it (You are not Riku? I guess not).

I can help you with this problem if you email me with your purchase details...

subchrist@protonmail.com

Hi,
I have sent you an email.

Ok, I know that the apps do work on Ubuntu with WINE as I've personally done it many times.

The .net builds probably won't work unless you have the correct .net version (4.0 i think) installed in WINE but the Win32 and Win64 builds should run just fine with only a basic install of WINE available. 

I'm not sure what more I can add.

Have you managed to run any other Windows apps on that laptop using WINE?

Hey,  thank you for your appreciation!

So in the last public release it is already possible to export map binaries in bit-depths greater than 8...

 - Import/Export >> Binary >> Export All (essentials, multiple files, configurable)

There you can select between 8, 12 or 16 bit and also between whole map, selected area and sub-maps.

Does this solve your request? or maybe you are wanting a single binary file containing lo,hi,lo,hi,lo,hi bytes etc

This is not yet available, having two arrays for the low, high bytes of 16-bit values seems to be the most commonly used way but there are definitely some further options that could be added to the current Import/Export system in future releases.

Cheers.

Hello,

We don't do sales.

The prices have not really changed in 4/5 years so in fact it could be argued that our products have only got cheaper (ie. inflation) as they have got better and better.

We would love your support! 

Join the party! We are #1 and worth every penny (2 killer apps, 3 versions for each,  $20+tax).

-Designed for Windows but also WINE tested (Linux, Mac).
-Free updates forever.

It's a win-win, step into the matrix :D

+ New versions coming soon!

Hi, I will put out an update on Saturday 11th Oct.
I'm not sure if you can use the .NET version but that one does not have the char-set copy/paste issue.
Thank you for your patience, please let me know soon if you have any other faults to report.

Hi, apologies for the delayed response.

So when you create a tile-set, each cell of each tile would ideally be blank to give you a nice blank set to work with, but that is only possible if a blank character is available to use to fill the new tiles.

So rather than trying to find an existing blank character (which may not always be desirable), the program just fills the new tiles with character 0, but if we find that character zero is not blank then we offer to insert one for you.

If you say yes then all of the existing characters will be pushed forward by one to make room for the new blank character (as you have discovered), but if you say no then you will not get blank tiles, they will all be filled with whatever is visible in character 0.

So the choice is really up to you, generally speaking it is a good idea to keep character zero blank when using tiles as whenever you create a new tile it will be filled with that character.

Following the linked tutorial video, you/he could just clear the @ sign (CTRL+DEL) to make that a blank character.

Personally, when I make a tile-set I use the pen tools to draw directly into the tiles and not worry about what is happening in the character set, if I need a character font then I would add that in at the very end when I was happy with the tile-set and the map, by ie. copying/pasting from an existing project which contains only the font that I need. 

The way Baardbi is doing it in the tutorial is really quite "old-school", ie. using a very "char-centric" approach, this is definitely worth learning but CharPad has special powers that allow you to pixel your tiles directly and not worry about individual chars.

I hope that helps ;)

Thanks for the bug report (and your appreciation!) I have found and fixed the chars copy/paste problem (it affected the win32/64 builds, the .NET build works fine)  but can't seem to reproduce the tile editor shortcuts issue, any ideas how i can reproduce it?
nb. in the tile editor, if the Tag or Name text box has focus, CTRL+C, CTRL+V will copy/paste only the text from those controls, not from the tile, could that be the issue?

Hi,

Thanks for the suggestion, I don't entirely see the value in it though, I mean surely the colour of the chars is already visible just by looking at the map + the compressor has the ability to reset the colour(s) of any char that is not actually using it's assigned colour(s).

Also I think it would only be (theoretically) useful for some of the display modes and colouring methods, ie. in the bitmap modes each char has multiple native colours (2 in hi-res, 3 in multi-colour).

It would be a lot of work and I will need some convincing.

No problem.

Yes it's just a very tricky thing to work into an "all-in-one" tool like this without making it incredibly complicated, we already need to handle 5 display modes in 3 possible matrix colouring methods, so that's 15 possible configurations that each need to be carefully handled in most of the operations, adding 2 more colouring methods (per tile cell, per map cell) would raise that to 25.

Some kind of dedicated tool is probably the answer, one that can take a CharPad project, strip out any "per char" colours/materials and recompress, then allow free colouring/attributing of the map cells.

Ps. you might find some use from the existing "Export Colour Map" option, it allows you to export a "per map char cell" array of colour data (colour matrix data) regardless of whether the project is tiled or not.

See...

'Import/Export >> Binary >> Export colour map (per map char cell, CmLo)'.

'Import/Export >> Text/Asm >> Export colour map (per map char cell, CmLo)'.

Thanks for your suggestions.

Yes such modes (per tile cell + per map cell) have been suggested many times before, usually because people want to be able to use the same character in different colours without needing to duplicate the character in the precious char-set (256 items max on the real machine).

While this may seem simple to do, it is absolutely not, there are several good reasons why we chose not to .

1. Memory usage - whatever size (in bytes) the tile-set or the map may be, using such a mode would instantly double the storage needed.
For multi-colour bitmap mode this could be triple (x3) as two colour/attrib bytes would be needed for each cell.  It's very wasteful and unpractical for most games.

2. Char/tile editing - when editing a char or tile we can easily find the correct colour(s) for the item as they each store their own native colour value(s).
ie. In a 'per tile cell' or 'per map cell' mode there would need to be some kind of "default colour(s)" used instead. Possible but complicated/confusing.

3. Such modes would add a lot of complexity to an already very complex system and the chance of something (or probably many things) breaking is very high, potentially requiring years of further testing/debugging for very little reward.

The last releases of CharPad/SpritePad added support for 1x1 tiles, if you want to use the same char/sprite with different colours we would suggest using this feature as a work-around.

ie. a tile-set is not limited to only 256 items like the char-set (on a real machine).

I hope that helps.

Cheers.

Hi,

Interesting question! Quite honestly, I have no idea, I have never attempted to run any of our stuff on Windows 98.

While we do include "Win32" builds with CharPad/SpritePad it is really no guarantee of it working on an old OS, what they called "Win32" or "Windows API" back then is probably quite different to what it is now on Windows 10/11.

For instance, Windows 98 did not feature any support for Unicode strings and the Windows graphics library we use for 2D (GDI+) probably didn't exist back then either.

I would quite like to have a functional Windows 98 or Windows XP machine myself for testing purposes but these OSes won't even install on a modern motherboard/CPU (ie. no hardware drivers available, no UEFI, no 64-bit etc).

It's a complicated problem with probably 100's of reasons why it won't work, couple that with trying to do it virtually using a Mac and it really is a recipe for a headache!

I would be very interested to know if you have any success but my instinct says "no", not without a complete rewrite/rebuild using a very old PC.

Ok cool, yes with the most recent releases all being 3.79 it probably isn't so easy to spot the differences it in the product list :)

Thank you very much for supporting our work!
Happy pixelling!

Hi,

Yes this can be a problem when editing tiles using "Per char" matrix colouring.

The tile editor has a '?' button explaining a solution, ie. you can just click with the middle mouse button on a tile cell to instantly select the pixel colour and the character in the set, this loads the pen(s) with the matrix colour(s) for that cell so you can paint with it/them + if you change the matrix colour(s) it will only affect that one cell/char.  

Auto-selecting the first char of a clicked tile may help slightly but is not really a solution.

Thanks for your feedback though, I will have a think about it.

That's good to hear, thank you!

Thank you for letting us know.

Unfortunately we have absolutely no control over the tax additions and are only able to set the basic prices for items.

Please know that your support is hugely appreciated, thank you very much, we hope you enjoy the tools.

Updates coming soon.

Hi Martin,

Thanks for your suggestion (+ apologies for the late reply), the next release will at least support 1x1 tiles, separate colour maps are kind of tricky to implement, a "per-map cell" colouring method has been requested several times by various people but it's kind of a deep rabbit-hole of complexity that I would prefer to avoid.

Hopefully 1x1 tiles will be sufficient!

Hi,

Thanks for your suggestions. Do you have any links for those sideways-seuck file formats?

CharPad did used to support the original sideways-seuck some years ago but it got removed for some reason, maybe I felt that nobody was using it, I don't remember right now.

Hello, 
I'm very sorry to hear about this problem but thank you for reporting it, would you be willing to send me your project file so I can try and fix it for you?

If so then you can email me the file and I will return you a fixed version while I investigate the problem.

subchrist@protonmail.com

Good morning!

Yes tile tag data can be exported from CharPad Pro although currently only in the form of an asm/text file...

File >> Import/Export >> Text/Asm >> Export Tile Set (and attributes)

If it would be more convenient to have the data as a raw binary file then you could just trim out the tile data section in that file, assemble it and trim off the first two bytes of the resulting PRG file (the load address).

 A binary export option might be useful though I guess, I will add it to the todo list.

Hello,

Exporting colour maps is currently quite limited, you can only do it for the whole map right now and only for the Colour RAM values (so it is not so useful in the bitmap modes as they use 3 matrix colours).

The easiest way to export a colour map (file) for just a selected area of a map is probably this...

1. Select the desired map area.

2. in the Map menu (visible when the map form is focused), choose Crop.

3. File -> Import/Export -> Binary -> Export Colour Map (per map char cell, CmLo).

The Export Colour Map option is also available as a text file...
File -> Import/Export -> Text -> Export Colour Map (per map char cell, CmLo).

Then you can undo the map crop and select a different area for export if required.

I hope that helps!

Ps. the "per map char cell" colour map can also be exported from a project that uses tiles, CharPad figures out the correct char colour values.

Hello,

Thank you for supporting us and for your suggestion, it's a good one.

I will definitely be looking into expanding the code examples in a future release, we already include a little video basics library in the Help files to get you started but it could use some expansion for sure.

In the mean-time it shouldn't be too hard to find some example code online for drawing bitmap images and scrolling tile maps.

I would be very surprised if there was not already some good example code on ie. GitHub, I will be taking a look into this myself soon.

Cheers!

I have just attempted the same thing myself and can confirm that it works but only in the C++/Win32/Win64 versions (the C# .NET version doesn't like it).

I will add better support in the next releases.

Oh wow, well done! yes I thought it could be possible, I guess starting by exporting the smallest possible tiled project makes it fairly easy to hex edit to any tile size, for a high IQ person like yourself at least.

Impressed! :D

Hello,

Sorry yes I know you posted this question before, I didn't mean to ignore you, I've been thinking about it.

It is definitely something I'm going to consider for the next release, in fact you can already do it (sort of)...

What I mean is that if you have a project file that is configured for 16x16 tiles, CharPad should load it and let you use/edit it, you just can't currently create such a project in CharPad, so it's probably not very useful to you!

(hex editing an existing project's tile dimensions can be done very easily but you would still need the file size to be correct, it could be done).

I have added your request to the todo list and will do some tests very soon.

Thanks for the suggestion!

Hello,

Thank you for your appreciation and for your question, it is something that has come up many times over the years.

The simple answer is that it is currently only possible to have 1 charset, 1 tile-set and 1 map.

We have thought about adding support for multiple maps many times over the years and while it would be theoretically possible, it also introduces many complications, for instance, currently each project has a single display mode, a single matrix colouring method and at least one common colour (ie. screen colour)...

If multiple map support were added, we would soon be asked to allow different display mode, colouring method etc for each map, some people would then not be happy that all maps have to use the same char-set or the same tile-set, so would request multiple support for those as well.

The point I am making is that any introduction of multiple maps, tile-sets or chars  would almost certainly add enormous complexity to the program, opening a proverbial "can of worms".

In the end, we decided to just keep it simple, a lot of "multi-map" situations can be resolved by simply drawing all required maps into one big map and using the Flexi-grid feature to export the data for each sub-map separately if required.

Also, would you really want to use the same char-set on ie. all 16 levels of your game? that could be quite boring for the players (ok many classic 80's games did this!)

So I'm sorry if this answer is disappointing but I hope you see what I mean about the "can of worms" it could become, it's really not as simple as it may seem and there is usually an alternative route that can be taken.

Cheers.

Ok I have replied to your email, please check your spam folder if you havn't seen it yet (that is where I found your email!).

I hope that helps, please don't post any details about it on here.

Cheers.

Hi, thank you very much for supporting us with your purchase, it is really appreciated.

Please email me (subchrist@protonmail.com) and I will try and help you ASAP.

Hello,

Ok, firstly.. the sprites in those cells do not need to be empty/blank, instead they need to contain (references to) sprite image *zero*, ie. the very first sprite in the set (it is a good idea to keep it blank).

You can use the Sprite Brush tool to paint sprite images into the cells of a tile.

You may also find it helpful to use the compressor to make sure only one blank is present (in the sprite-set) and used in the tiles...

ie. If you are pixelling tiles by hand then decompression is enforced/necessary before you can do this which will make every sprite-cell (in the tile) refer to a different sprite image, so try compressing when you have finished pixelling (to make all the "blanks" use sprite zero and that will let you see the expansions).

I hope that helps!

Hello,
Thanks for your comment, I totally agree, a feature to change the grid colour (and window background colour, they are one and the same) was added a few weeks ago and will be in the next release.

If you want to copy and paste some chars from the set...

- open a project that has chars you want to copy/paste.

- click the starting character in the Char Set form, then hold SHIFT and click the ending character to select the range.

- hit CTRL+C, or go to the menu and choose Chars->Copy.

- open up the project you want to paste into, select the starting pos/char in the set and hit CTRL+V or go to the menu and find Chars->Paste for a few different paste options (insert, overwrite, append).

Hello,
Thank you very much for your support :) ) much appreciated.

Please try doing a copy/paste from project1 to project2, doing a binary load will just overwrite the chars in project2 (colours/modes will be the same as the overwritten chars).

Copying/pasting should work out better and can be done as an overwrite if necessary (see the Chars menu when the Char-set window is active for all the Paste options).