The Character Editor of (Poor) Choice
It's small!
It's compatible with most operating systems!
It's not particularly useful!
How Do I Run This Stupid Thing?
To get it all running you'll need to do these things:
- Download the official first pre-release release version from here!
- Make sure you have the Java runtimes (you can find them somewhere around here).
- Check that the location of 'java\bin' is in your system path, (this isn't always guaranteed when installing the JREs)
- Extract the contents of the above zip file to somewhere useful
- If you're running windows, simply double click the _LaunchEditor.bat file, if not, get a console window and when in the correct directory type:
"java CharacterEditor".
So What's All This Then?
This is the first official release of a complete (albeit very sparse) character editor. It's probably a bit too simple for most uses, but it's here merely to get some feedback and give a bit of a sneak preview as to what may come.
Currently, the editor can:
- Read a character set from a URL, (the one showing is NEWCHAR.PRG, provided by Tr00per/TOF).
- Read a VICE Palette file, if you're at my release page then the CCS64 default palette is being used.
- Use the Pepto palette as default if no palette file is selected.
- Write the character set to a file of the users choosing. Saving as [filename].chr saves the raw data without the location header. (Application mode only)
- Read a character set of the users choosing (both with or without the location header normally used in PRG files. (Application mode only)
- Use a palette of the users choosing (Application mode only)
- Choose and edit individual characters in both Hi-Res and Multicolour mode, (using click and drag).
- Allow each of the four (or two in Hi-Res mode) colours to be chosen from the available palette, with the restrictions that apply to the C64 itself (regarding the fourth or RAM colour).
- Edit and show the current memory location for the set, with helpful colour syntaxing (explained below)
So any thoughts, complaints, or donations should be directed towards an e-mail address that's a bit like theBAAHdarkprinceBAAAH@meshta.BAAAAAAHorg but without the sheep noises. Alternatively you can find me on the #osg IRC channel (ircnet) or on Lemon64 and LemonAmiga cunningly disguised as The Dark Prince. Oh, and the newest release will probably be here, but that may change too.
Thankfully Short Disclaimer
Feel free to distribute this editor but only as an exact copy of the original archive provided, (although I can't imagine why you'd want to). Any damage that it may do to your computer, social life or girlfriend is your fault and entirely your fault, not mine.
Some Not Particularly Helpful Instructions
Colour Syntaxing (for the charset memory location)
To make things even nicer, when a standard bank position is inputted, the text turns black, a non-standard memory location will result in blue text, and if a location is chosen which won't allow the characters to be displayed (due to the VICs shadow ROM), the text turns purple. Of course if you're really hopeless and get it all wrong, the text will glare at you in red, but you won't do that will you? At some point there will probably be some up/down arrows to move between standard bank locations.
Loading and Saving
The system used at the moment is still very much a bare-bones IO component. Any file of size 2048 bytes (or the .chr extension) will be loaded as a raw character set, anything with the extension of VPL (a standard Vice Palette File), will be loaded as it should be. Anything else will be loaded as a character set plus the two byte memory location that is standard for all PRG files.
When saving, the character set will save in PRG mode regardless of extension, UNLESS the file ends with ".chr" (case insensitive).