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Yes of course! that is the reason they exist.

Our tools have been used in the creation of hundreds of games and demos over the last 20 years including most of the biggest "physical" releases .

 There are no better "general purpose" tools for the job.

I recommend studying how the Commodore 64 (multi-colour) char mode works.

A char will only appear multi-colour (wide-pixel) if it's native colour is >7.

But fair enough, you are not the first to have trouble with this idea so I will look into making it simpler for novices.

1. make sure the display mode is "Text - Multi-colour".

2. make sure the "Colour Matrix (low nyb)" colour is one from the bottom row (ie. 8-15), you should see wide red dots on the palette image to indicate WIDE. 

You can also find information about all this in the included help files.

Ok so apparently the tax interview has to be taken again after 3 years.

Thanks for letting me know, I had to find that out for myself.

Edit Profile / Tax Information

Maybe others will find this information helpful.

So my tax information is suddenly invalid after 3+ years?

Ok, thanks for only letting me know this only after posting on this public forum.

Also I don't recall "Demanding to be paid sooner" so I don't appreciate your choice of words there. 

Unbelievable, I hope there is somebody else available to properly deal with my situation.

Thanks for your reply,

I hope you can understand my frustration with having to wait 3 weeks (so far, maybe 4? 5? who knows) to receive a mere $150 payout when up until this point the payouts have generally been 14 days or less, 4 days on at least one occasion.

I see no explanation for this longer duration in your reply.

If there is some particular issue (relating to my account) that I can assist you with then I would be glad to help.

Yeah this is getting bloody ridiculous, I been waiting 20 days now for around a $100 payment, I have no idea what the problem is and heard nothing.

Really unprofessional. It was bad enough having to wait 14 days.

Where is our money?

Is there even any point sending you an email? 

a professional would be sending *us* one offering an apology. 

It's just infuriating.

No problem :) 

Actually I made a mistake in my earlier reply so have edited it.

Hi,

The usual way to move characters around is just by using the cut/copy/paste features, you can also use the Insert/Delete keys and also the LEFT mouse button with CTRL held can be used to swap any two items in a set.

Use LEFT mouse button + SHIFT to select a range of items.

All of the various options will appear in the "Chars" menu at the top of the main window when the character set form is active.

Yes a sprite in multi-colour mode can use 3 colours (4 if you include the background, transparent).

Two of those colours are shared with all other multi-colour sprites and each sprite gets it's own colour whether hi-res or multi-colour.

Hello,

Sorry to disappoint you but only one overlay is currently possible for each sprite image or tile.

As the C64 only has 8 hardware sprites, using three or more for a single object was not something I really wanted to encourage :)

This may of course change in a future version, especially if there is a demand.

Thanks for considering us.

Hi,

With the Sprite Set (form) active if you go to the "Sprites" menu item you should see "Select All" at the top.

You can also use SHIFT and the LEFT button to select any range of sprites and change their colour/mode  all at once.

PRG files can be loaded as any binary file, the two byte load address will be detected and skipped.

I don't think I added a specific ".PRG" filter but you can just use the "Any file (*.*)" filter to see PRG files.

Hi,

Thank you very much for your purchase, your support is greatly appreciated.

On the Commodore 64,  "multi-colour text mode"  allows both hi-res and multi-colour (wide) pixel chars, the choice is made using the colour value in each screen matrix cell (ie. the relevant Colour RAM byte), 

Colours 0-7 make the cell "hi-res" and colours 8-15 make the cell multi-colour.

So in CharPad, to make characters appear in "text - multi-colour mode"...

1. Choose "Text - Multi-colour mode" on the Project form..

2. Select "Colour Matrix (low nyb)" on the Project form.

3. Choose any colour on the bottom row of the colour palette (these will have red dashes on them to indicate "wide pixel").

It has always worked this way and always will, there is nothing to fix.

Ps. "multi-colour bitmap mode" works differently, all chars are wide pixel. 

Cheers.

Hi, 

Ok yes I see your point, that sounds like it would be a useful feature, request noted!

Hello, I'm not a Linux user myself but I know that many people do run our tools using WINE on Linux.

Conversely, I have not heard of any particular problems with it.

If you are capable of installing Linux and WINE then you shouldn't have any problems running the Win32 or Win64 versions of our tools.

To run the .NET version(s) you would probably just need to install .NET (3.5 and 4.0) into your WINE installation.

Hi,

Thanks for the feedback and the bug report, I have saved a copy of your post and will look into these things.

Yes the size of a tile-set is currently limited to 65536 and a char-set is limited to 500,000, allowing more tiles would be simple enough, although the CTM project file format only supports 16-bit values (max 65536) for both chars and tiles, so you would still need to reduce the count before a project could be saved.

Was the bug you found seen when doing a binary file import of map data?

Anyway, I will try and look into these things before the next release.

Cheers!

Hi,

Sorry for the late reply, yes including asm code examples is something I have considered before and I have large amounts of code that I could include with the apps.

Part of the reason I haven't is that I don't want to deprive users of the pleasure of discovering how to do these things for themselves.

Writing code and finding good ways of doing things should be exciting and fun and educational, not just an exercise in copying and pasting somebody else's code.

As for your colour data problem, the "charset_attrib_L1" data IS the per-char colour data, the upper nybbles may also contain material data which you may or may not not need.

If you decompress the project so the charset contains 1000 chars (for a full-screen bitmap), then the charset data IS your bitmap data and the map data is not needed.

The chars just need loading/copying to your 8K bitmap and the L1 attribute data (1000 bytes) just needs to be loaded/copied to the colour matrix at $d800.

For a MC bitmap, the L2 attribute data (1000 bytes) will need to be loaded/copied to the screen matrix.

I hope that helps.

Hi

Yes there are lots of ways to move chars around such as using Cut, Copy, Paste, Swap, Reverse Order, Cycle Order.

The Paste function has 3 versions (insert, overwrite, append) depeding on how you want to do it.

You can swap any two characters by selecting one and then selecting another with CTRL held.

Have a look in the "Chars" menu when the Char Set form is active for all the options.

Just a note to readers that the reported issues with the anti-piracy system have been resolved with the most recent (CharPad 3.60) release.

Just a note to readers that the reported issues with the anti-piracy system have been resolved with the most recent (CharPad 3.60) release.

Thank you for your appreciation of our work! 

Compliments are rarer than you might imagine and yes tools like this don't just fall out of the sky as some would like to believe.

These things have taken years of effort and perseverance through every real-life trial imaginable (well, ok, many of them).

So I have saved your full post and will take a good close look at all the points you raised in due course, I had doubts about the palette myself some months back but felt like nobody was buying/using it anyway.

So, best of luck with Stunt Car Racer, a classic, I think I only played it on Amiga, that's got to be a tough coding job on the 8-bits, I will defo keep an eye out for it.

 Cheers!

Hey, thank you so much for supporting us!

Sorry you are having problems, you are not the only one, we have had to build in some aniti-piracy features and the greying out is meant to last for only 15 seconds until certain checks have been performed.

Are you seeing any popups about "Evidence of piracy?"

Hi,

If the save/export options are greyed out then that is the anti-piracy system doing it's thing,  make sure you are running it from it's original folder and not just running the exe moved somewhere else.

The flexi-grid options are on a second tab marked "Misc" on the project form.

If you ARE running it from it's original folder (with all the pre-packaged files) then you may need to email me for further instructions as I cant post a solution here for obvious reasons.

nb. you may need to wait 15 seconds after starting it for the save/export options to become ungreyed.

Hi, thank you for the positive words :)

Yes it was very much designed with ease of use and enjoyment in mind, especially regarding tile editing which has been a tedious chore in basically all tools until we made this.

Ok so your first suggestion is already handled by.. Import/Export.. Text/Asm.. Export Char Usage Statistics.

Your other ideas seem perfectly reasonable too, I have added them to the list.

Cheers!

Yeah that's CharPad 3.42, if i remember rightly the W32/W64 versions worked fine without the 0.02 update bit!

So only CharPad 3.42 (.NET version) is actually marked as such.

Either that or I just forgot to update the About boxes for W32/W64.

All versions will have received all the (important) necessary work for the update.

zip for 3.50 added.

Hi, 

Sorry you are experiencing problems, is the same problem present with all (.NET, W32, W64) versions?

So far I received 1 other bug report about the .NET version not starting, unsure which OS the user is on yet.

Ok well that all sounds very complicated!

Right now I can't quite visualise what you are trying to do but thanks for trying to explain.

CharPad's tile (pixel) editing features are pretty unique, no other tool that I know of can do such things and it formed a large part of the reason we made it, but, as you are finding out, there are certain restrictions such as the need for decompression to avoid affecting "other tiles" when (pixel) editing any one chosen tile.

(nb. you are only really free to use the Char Brush tool in the tile editor without first using decompression).

Re your second request.. Yes other colouring methods are possible, namely "Per Map Cell" and "Per Tile Cell" .

Literally "a couple" of other people have requested these colouring methods before now and these things are actually on the todo/maybe list, however, to be perfectly blunt about it..

It would require an *enormous* amount of work to add these things and the income generated from these apps gives us very little motivation to even attempt it.

Sorry.

Maybe it will happen if business picks up considerably or if we were to get offered proper payment (privately) for the necessary months of work.

Hi,

You can "copy" a tile without decompressing but you will always need to decompress before you can paste it back in and even if it were possible to paste a tile to a compressed project you would still need to decompress before you could use the tile editor to actually (pixel) edit it.

(nb. copied tiles are always buffered in memory in a decompressed state).

These restrictions are in place for extremely good reason,  so if you want to do these things then you will have to change your methods to allow for the decompression to occur, ie. if you have "other characters" (non tile chars) in the set then try keeping them in a separate project and combining them at a later time to create the final set for your game level.

Hi,

Thanks for your post and appreciation!

 "Overlay distance" in SpritePad has only been variable (but same for all sprites) in the last couple of years.

Older versions just had an "Overlay Next" switch in each sprite's attribute.

(equivalent to an overlay distance of 1)

So anyway if you've got a number of sprites that use overlays you should be able to solve your issue by ie. moving all of those sprites to the start of the set, then move all of their relevant overlays (in matching order) to some place further on in the set and use that distance as the universal sprite overlay distance.

So the arrangement you end up with is...

[Sprites that need overlays][Sprites that don't need overlays][Sprite overlays]

you could also use...

[Sprites that need overlays][Sprite overlays][Sprites that don't need overlays]

Basically just keep ALL of your underlays in one big block and ALL of the overlays in another.

ie. Avoid trying to do...

[Sprites1][Sprites1overlays][Sprites2][Sprites2overlays][Sprites3][Sprites3overlays] etc.

You will be severely restricted by the single (universal) overlay distance value when using such a scheme.

I hope that helps.

Hi,

Yes CharPad can already do this, just select all the chars you want to affect (or a single char) and hit CTRL+SHIFT+N, or choose Negative from the Char/Chars item in the menu.

I'm not sure quite which version you are trying to convert from but if it supports image export you could do it that way, alternatively use the binary method as suggested and just manually set each "low res" (multi-colour) sprite to multi-colour mode and maybe tweak the colours until they appear correct.

Export them as binary from the old version, import them as binary to the newer version.

Right right, the option to create an animation will only be available if animations are enabled in the project.

I might change this so it gives the option to enable animations when it's clicked.

Anyway, glad you enjoying it! updates coming soon hopefully, stay tuned :)

Hi, thanks for supporting the projects, much appreciated!

Ok, animations in SpritePad are all based on ranges (ie. A to B) of items in the sprite or tile sheet.

nb. sprite animations and tile animations are handled by different forms.

You can select a range of images using the LEFT mouse button without (then with) the SHIFT key held down.

Then click "Create animation from selection" from the toolbar or menu (the sprite/tile sheet form must be active).

Alternatively you can just use the From/To controls on the animation form to set desired frames.

Playback speed etc etc are all handled by the animator form.

I hope that helps.

Thank you for your support Bacchus, it really is greatly appreciated.

I've been having a think about your request.

It seems to me that things like PRG load addresses are very project specific and so would really demand to be saved IN the project file as opposed to as some general CharPad settings.

 I'm not sure I would want to expose all users to this sort of programming detail or even make them think about it, this is a graphics application after all.

CharPad already supports export to (raw) binary files (obviously), a whole export section is devoted to it and I wouldn't really want to basically duplicate this section just for PRG export .

So, on balance I would have to conclude that a better solution would be to handle conversion from BIN to PRG with a simple command-line tool.

A batch script could be tailored to perform the conversions very conveniently for any set of exported binaries and would allow very easy/quick modifications to be made (ie. in NotePad).

I would be surprised if such a tool doesn't already exist but if not then I can make one.

This may not be the reply you were hoping for but I genuinely do think this is would be a better way.

Cheers mate.

Hi,

Yes both of these things have been supported for quite some time.

Your support would be enormously appreciated! Thank you :)

Thanks for your comment, your game idea sounds cool! :)

It's not currently possible to export data as C source code, only as binary and (65xx) assembly files.

I like the idea though, C programming on 8-bit systems seems quite a rare thing but I have added it to the list for a future version.

Hey, thanks for supporting these projects! it is really appreciated.

So there is nothing particularly built in to support multiple monitors, the apps use the classic multi-document interface (MDI), ie. child forms arranged in a parent window.

There is nothing to stop you from simply enlarging the parent window into/over a second monitor.

If you have any particular suggestions in this realm then I am happy to listen.

Hi, yes CharPad supports variable width/height tile sizes up to 10x10.

Just enable tiles (Project Palette) and you will be prompted to pick a size.

You can then use the tile editor to draw your tiles freehand or stamp individual chars into the cells..

Ok thanks for your input on this subject.

Yes I would be happy to provide an "export map (char) cell colour data" option.

This would export a block of colour data of equal size to the map (in chars) by simply translating each map cell into a colour depending on the contained char.

The thing I really want to avoid is adding "per map cell" (and "per tile cell") as basic colouring methods as this would really complicate things and demand a whole world of new converters and design features to be added.

So you would have to settle for the existing colouring methods at design time and just use the export option when needed.

I imagine this would mainly be used from the "per char" colouring method, so after exporting the colour map you could switch to "per project" and compress any differently coloured duplicates out of the char set and then export the (optimized) chars/map.

If you understand this I will try and get this option into the next update.