Hi all

I am not sure if anyone else here uses Paint on RISC OS to design games sprites and loading screens for the BBC and Electron? I've written a small program to convert RISC OS sprites to BBC format. Download it at http://www.c.r.dewhurst3.freeuk.com/bbc/Sprt2BBC

(Set the file type to FFB (Basic) when downloaded if necessary)

At the moment it's single tasking and by no means bomb-proof. It checks for 16 and 4 colour modes but assumes anything else is 2 colour, and doesn't look to see if the sprite is bigger than a BBC screen. But if any of you find it useful I'll polish it up a bit . . . .

Thanks!

Sorry guys, I didn't want this post to be one higher in the Development Tools forum but I could only see a New Topic button in the BBC Sprite Designer section and not in the Development Tools section!

I'll be very interested to see how the colour turns out on this as previously I've only managed to get good results this way using monochrome (!Draw-->Mode 0 screenload, IIRC).

Can you give any guidelines? e.g. If I Wanted to create a Mode 5 or Mode 2 sprite, what colours need to be redefined in !Paint. Or, what would you recommend? Also, are you using RISC OS 5?

Hi Andy, thanks for the post, nice to hear someone else using RISC OS 5!
Create the sprite in any mode with the same number of colours. E.g. for Mode 1 or 5 sprites on the BBC, create sprites in Mode 25 (click Colour palette, 4 on the Create new sprite window). For Mode 2 select Mode 27. Colours will be desktop colours to begin with but you can edit the palette them to be more like BBC colours. I've uploaded (hopefully!*) a couple of Palette &FED files here, Palette4 and Palette16 to drag and drop onto Mode 25 (for Mode 1/5) and Mode 27 (for Mode 2).

*It's a Zip (Archive) file.

The only problem is that the aspect ratio will be 1:1 (in Mode 2 the pixels are rectangular of course). I suppose you could create a 'real' Mode 2 sprite on an earlier RISC OS (or using !A310Emu?) and use that as a template -- since although screen modes are a minimum of 256 colours on the Iyonix, Paint DOES allow you to edit sprites created in BBC modes on earlier RISC OS's.

Anyway, I'll write some instructions to go with the utility in due course -- for the moment I wanted to gauge the likely usage of such a utility.

Now has instructions and on the RISC OS page, under Applications:
http://www.c.r.dewhurst.freeuk.com/riscos/index.htm