RE: Cross-development tools
For quick stuff I use edwin's scrviwer (http://www.samcoupe-pro-dos.co.uk/edwin/software/scrviewer/scrviewer.ht m) to save a bmp to a dsk then use dodgy basic code to convert the screen$ to raw data. Other than that I sometimes write oneoff utils. I still use comet to do the code :) Long term in the back of my mind I was to use the TCP/IP stuff im working on to do a cross plat. Dev system to real hardware, that's the ultimate :D Adrian -Original Message- From: owner-sam-us...@nvg.ntnu.no [mailto:owner-sam-us...@nvg.ntnu.no] On Behalf Of Chris Cowley Sent: 14 June 2012 09:31 To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Cross-development tools Am starting to poke about a little more with Coupe development as time permits and I wondered what, if anything, currently exists by way of publicly-available cross-development tools. I have my favourite text editor and pasmo set up, which I use for occasional speccy stuff, and have augmented this with pyz80 (coz it writes out DSK files, which has been handy). Have also got SAMdisk and DiskManager for manipulating disk images, which seem to be working nicely, but... What I really could do with is a utility (preferably with a palette editor) for drawing graphics (tiles, sprites) that runs on Windows and spits out either DEFBs or binary files that I can INCBIN. Does such a thing exist? Failing that, something that has a reasonable stab at converting PNGs or GIFs into a form I can use in asm would be useful. What do you guys use to do this sort of stuff? And also are there any other useful cross-development tools that I should be looking at? Cheers, Chris.
Re: Cross-development tools
Am 14.06.2012 10:23, schrieb Chris Cowley: What I really could do with is a utility (preferably with a palette editor) for drawing graphics (tiles, sprites) that runs on Windows and spits out either DEFBs or binary files that I can INCBIN. Does such a thing exist? Failing that, something that has a reasonable stab at converting PNGs or GIFs into a form I can use in asm would be useful. Retro-X and BMP2SCR EXP can both convert to SAM and spits out a ss* file which then can be loaded directly as screen. DEFB export is at moment only available for Spectrum screens. Palette editor is build in in the included Painter, where you can paint from scratch.
Re: Cross-development tools
I use a tool I coded in Delphi or whatever the free open source clone of it is called. It converts pngs into defbs and creates the palette but it needs the source image to be made up of the Sam palette accurate colours. It does not create valid screen$ files though as I have never needed to use them. The images are straight mode 4 ones. It does a bunch of other things like sprite masking and reversal. It is very rough but it does what I need it to do, it also works well under wine. If it would be of use I could publish it online for anyone to use, but it is so specific to my dev environment I never thought to mention it really. Cheers Andrew On 14 Jun 2012, at 09:58, Adrian Brown adr...@apbcomputerservices.co.uk wrote: For quick stuff I use edwin's scrviwer (http://www.samcoupe-pro-dos.co.uk/edwin/software/scrviewer/scrviewer.ht m) to save a bmp to a dsk then use dodgy basic code to convert the screen$ to raw data. Other than that I sometimes write oneoff utils. I still use comet to do the code :) Long term in the back of my mind I was to use the TCP/IP stuff im working on to do a cross plat. Dev system to real hardware, that's the ultimate :D Adrian -Original Message- From: owner-sam-us...@nvg.ntnu.no [mailto:owner-sam-us...@nvg.ntnu.no] On Behalf Of Chris Cowley Sent: 14 June 2012 09:31 To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Cross-development tools Am starting to poke about a little more with Coupe development as time permits and I wondered what, if anything, currently exists by way of publicly-available cross-development tools. I have my favourite text editor and pasmo set up, which I use for occasional speccy stuff, and have augmented this with pyz80 (coz it writes out DSK files, which has been handy). Have also got SAMdisk and DiskManager for manipulating disk images, which seem to be working nicely, but... What I really could do with is a utility (preferably with a palette editor) for drawing graphics (tiles, sprites) that runs on Windows and spits out either DEFBs or binary files that I can INCBIN. Does such a thing exist? Failing that, something that has a reasonable stab at converting PNGs or GIFs into a form I can use in asm would be useful. What do you guys use to do this sort of stuff? And also are there any other useful cross-development tools that I should be looking at? Cheers, Chris.
Re: Cross-development tools
I think Tommy Gun meets many of your requirements, Chris. Www.users.on.net/~tonyt73/TommyGun Cheers, Andrew On 14 Jun 2012, at 09:23, Chris Cowley chrr...@gmail.com wrote: Am starting to poke about a little more with Coupe development as time permits and I wondered what, if anything, currently exists by way of publicly-available cross-development tools. I have my favourite text editor and pasmo set up, which I use for occasional speccy stuff, and have augmented this with pyz80 (coz it writes out DSK files, which has been handy). Have also got SAMdisk and DiskManager for manipulating disk images, which seem to be working nicely, but... What I really could do with is a utility (preferably with a palette editor) for drawing graphics (tiles, sprites) that runs on Windows and spits out either DEFBs or binary files that I can INCBIN. Does such a thing exist? Failing that, something that has a reasonable stab at converting PNGs or GIFs into a form I can use in asm would be useful. What do you guys use to do this sort of stuff? And also are there any other useful cross-development tools that I should be looking at? Cheers, Chris.
Re: Cross-development tools
On 14 Jun 2012, at 09:23, Chris Cowley wrote: I have my favourite text editor and pasmo set up, which I use for occasional speccy stuff, and have augmented this with pyz80 I use the same mix of pyz80 and Pasmo for SAM and Speccy development, along with my favourite text editor. In both cases the editor launches the assembler, and if successful it opens the disk image in SimCoupe. Using autoexec (pyz80) and end (Pasmo) directives to auto-run the code makes for a very fast development cycle. JAM Assembler can do all of that for the SAM side in its own IDE, though I'm a sucker for my usual text editor, so I have to admit I've not used it very much. The assembler does support some extra features over pyz80 though, which may be useful. I also use Makefiles (or a make.bat on Windows) for managing any additional input dependencies, such as image conversion and table generation. Again, it's just so a single command does everything automatically. The only time I need to get my hands dirty is for proper releases, where I'll usually add a BASIC loader and keep data as separate files on the disk. Have also got SAMdisk and DiskManager for manipulating disk images, which seem to be working nicely, but... I generally only need SAMdisk when transferring disks to real hardware for testing. I still assemble on the PC, even when I can only run on real hardware (Trinity ethernet mostly). Copying the output DSK to a BDOS record on a Compact Flash card and moving that to the Atom Lite on my SAM takes seconds. For larger code listings, or if the launched program crashes and takes out the development system, it's usually faster. Even transferring DSK via floppy isn't too slow if you use the --minimal flag to only copy the used portions of the disk. It's been a while since I've used DiskManager, especially since pyz80 can add a samdos2 file to the start of the disk using the -I command-line option. SimCoupe will boot disks without it, but you still need it for cold booting on real hardware, so it's recommended to add one. I used to use DiskManager for importing images to SCREEN$ format, until... What I really could do with is a utility (preferably with a palette editor) for drawing graphics (tiles, sprites) that runs on Windows and spits out either DEFBs or binary files that I can INCBIN. Does such a thing exist? I mainly use Paint Shop Pro 7 for most SAM image editing, with a .pal file loaded containing the 128 SAM colours. I just draw sprites on a big image, keeping to a grid spacing, and making sure I stay within the 16-colour limit (there's a colour counting option). My development is usually split between Windows and Mac, and this is one area I've struggled to make equivalent. The image editors I'm using (Pixelmator and Acorn) don't support working directly with palettised images, and just convert them to RGB for editing. So I'm generally limited to making only small changes, and hoping I stay within the colour limit. Failing that, something that has a reasonable stab at converting PNGs or GIFs into a form I can use in asm would be useful. I've got a Perl script to extract graphics files from a palettised PNG image and save in raw SAM (or Spectrum) format, which can be included in the .asm using INCBIN. I think the Spectrum version of my png2bin.pl is in the pacemuzx project on GitHub, but the SAM version is likely missing as I was (and still am!) rewriting it. I wanted something script based with minimal dependencies, so I could use them on whatever OS I happened to be on. Si
Re: Cross-development tools
Thanks very much for all the tips. I didn't realise that TommyGun supported the SAM display modes... it sounds like that will do the trick for now, but I'll also have a run through of all the other suggestions too. Cheers, Chris.
Re: Cross-development tools
On 14 Jun 2012, at 11:40, Simon Owen wrote: What I really could do with is a utility (preferably with a palette editor) for drawing graphics (tiles, sprites) that runs on Windows and spits out either DEFBs or binary files that I can INCBIN. Does such a thing exist? I mainly use Paint Shop Pro 7 for most SAM image editing, with a .pal file loaded containing the 128 SAM colours. I just draw sprites on a big image, keeping to a grid spacing, and making sure I stay within the 16-colour limit (there's a colour counting option). My development is usually split between Windows and Mac, and this is one area I've struggled to make equivalent. The image editors I'm using (Pixelmator and Acorn) don't support working directly with palettised images, and just convert them to RGB for editing. So I'm generally limited to making only small changes, and hoping I stay within the colour limit. I recently discovered Pixen, which is designed for just that sort of thing. Mac OS only, though. To get those images onto the Sam, I (like everybody else, apparently) wrote a script which reads image files and outputs in various formats. Mine's in Python. Andrew
Re: Cross-development tools
On 14 Jun 2012, at 22:50, Andrew Collier wrote: I recently discovered Pixen, which is designed for just that sort of thing. Mac OS only, though. That looks promising — thanks! It's no problem being Mac only as it fills the hole I had with palette-based pixel editing. Though curiously my sample palette.png file that I thought had all 128 SAM colours is only showing 126 in the list in Pixen. I'll have to check it back in PSP to see if it's my mistake. To get those images onto the Sam, I (like everybody else, apparently) wrote a script which reads image files and outputs in various formats. Mine's in Python. I almost wrote my updated version in Python, but there didn't seem to be any built-in support for reading PNG images (unless I missed something?). I used PIL for shamview, but that wasn't part of the standard Python installation on either Snow Leopard (at the time) or Windows, but it was under Ubuntu. I found an unofficial build for Windows, and managed to copy a MacPorts-built extension to the standard Mac version, but it wasn't a dependency I really wanted for my build tools. After all that I fell back on processing the PNG file directly, and I'd already got Perl code to do enough for what I needed. Ah well. Si
