Re: Lo-Res Hijinks ... Enjoy!

["Craig Bower" <to.email.me@post.a.request.message>]

"Rob Greene" <nospam-greener@charter.net> wrote in message 
news:Xns966A5AD668A49greenercharternet@69.28.186.121...
> Craig Bower wrote:
>> Did I mention, Lo-Res Rocks?! :)
>
> "Rocks" may be a bit strong, but I've been getting a kick out of it 
> myself.
>
> You're images are a heck of a lot better than anything I've done.  Any
> secrets or just actual talent??
>
> I've got an adventure game going for my son in lores (didn't want to mess
> with hires on my first foray back onto a real Apple II).  I've got the map
> drawing routine and a shape table setup for lores (as well as a shape
> assembler to assemble the bit streams) - technically, it works really
> great.
>
> Now I just need images for monsters.  Fortunately my son is 6, so my 
> crappy
> art won't bother him, but it would be really cool to have some good 
> looking
> monsters!
>
> Any tips, techniques, tricks, or sources would be appreciated!!  I've
> already started with "LoDraw II+" for prototyping.
> -Rob
>
> P.S. By the way, what do you use for development?  I've been using 
> MD-Basic
> (I have a IIgs) and Merlin 16.

Hi Rob,

Hehe, ok maybe Rocks is a bit strong, but Lo-Res sure is fun for me!

How do I get those images?  Well, part of it I'd guess is a keen eye for 
what
just looks wrong, and what looks right when I'm drawing in LoDraw.  For
the Snake on the Snake-Byte game over screen, I took inspiration (heavily)
from the Snake on the title page of the "official" snake-byte hires game 
released
by Sirius many many moon ago.  And the "chick" if you wanna call it that for
the LoDraw title-page, well, let's say you boot up Dazzle-Draw, you'll
definitely see a direct influence there.  I printed out the Dazzle-Draw
intro page, and tried my best to replicate it in Lo-Res.  She's a little of 
a
cross between a Lo-Res Mona-Lisa (the smirk on her face) and the
Dazzle-Draw intro page.  As for the basic "written" text pages like the
intro to SnakeByte and the Lo-Res Hijinks Disk boot pages, I have a
set of Lo-Res characters mapped to a Lo-Res display and a lot of
thinking to map them in the order I want to the screen bit-map style.
I have yet to write a driver to grab the letters from the screen elsewhere
and put them onto the Lo-Res screen, but worry not, it's coming in a
future release of the L-R Hijinks disk.  Kind of a Lo-Res typewriter
if you will.  If I don't run out of RAM with future versions of LoDraw,
it'll include a rudimentary Lo-Res character text generator.

As for the Hijinks boot page, it was drawn in quite a few phases.  First,
I mapped the text to the display and used an applesoft routine to
shift it all left or right as necessary to center it.  Then I ran 
Scatter.Dots
to create the "background" for it.  After getting a suitable background
generated, I added the border, EORed the text page to it, by blacking
out the background where the text was, then doing the LoDraw EOR
function to assemble it all.  Then it was just a matter of creating the
3 other views of it by shifting colors in the background with an Apple-
soft program that checked SCRN and replotted the desired color.
The Border on it, was somewhat tricky to get right, and not mince
the dark blue highlighting around the lettering.  All I did there was
avoided reading (SCRN) or plotting to points other than the borders.

LoDraw is far from finished right now, but it's a pretty good release
candidate for DOS 3.3.  It won't load or save images at all (CTRL-F)
under ProDOS, the way it's written now.  Next time I get a chance
to really sit down and mess with it, I'll be adding ProDOS load/save
routines, Undo, (fiishing the) Excusive OR two pages together, and
I'll be rewrting the Color replace routine in Assembly adding it to the
Lodraw.Toolbox file.  Technically the EOR two pages together driver
is there in the Toolbox, it's just not interfaced completely with the
Applesoft segment yet.  Also in future releases, I may tap extended
//e memory allowing for umpteen dozen pictures in RAM at once
easily switched for editing.

Here's a list of commands, if you haven't already found them all.
(I admit my documentation sucks!)

Q W E
A      D    - Directional control of cursor
Z  X C

S - Plot on / off

Left/Right arrow - Cycle through the colors

B - Add 1 line wide border (current color) around screen - plot must be on
G - paint full display (current) color - plot must be on
N - New drawing - clear screen
P - rePlace Color 1 with Color 2 - slow as heck
I - Inverse current drawing
CTRL-F - File operations - Load / Save
CTRL-Q - Quit
"+" - Exclusive OR LoRes page stored at A$2000 with current drawing.

The EOR function is partially there, and you can sort of use it in LoDraw,
you just have to BLOAD picture,A$2000 prior to running Lodraw.  Then
when you press the plus "+" key, it will take Lo-Res picture data from
$2000-$23FF and EOR it with what is currently on the screen.  It's great
for combining two not-so-complex pictures, but if you have two pictures
that are extremely complex with a lot of color, it kind of just mashes them
together (though accurately) with what would be less than ideal results.

If you wonder why the first display LoDraw starts out with is whatever you
had on the screen prior to running it, this is purely intentional as I 
specifically
have it save what is there in case you wish to work with it.  I do a lot of
GR : CALL -151 and then moving Lo-Res pages from memory other than
the display into the display so I prefer to be able to "anytime, anywhere" 
run
LoDraw and have what's currently displayed available for editing.

The Lodraw.Toolbox, contains the "Lo-Res Dazzle Draw Mona-Lisa" picture
and some ML routines ($7400 - ) to do a few of the quicker functions, like
inverse and background fill.  For source, just BLOAD LODRAW.TOOLBOX
and then CALL -151, and list it from $7400 on.  It's all pretty basic ML,
using no exotic tricks or calls, other than GBASCALC to determine
memory locations on the Lo-Res screen.  The rest of LoDraw is in Applesoft,
so press CTRL-RESET and list away!

Images of monsters?  I could lend a hand and draw some for you.  In
essence, when I get the myriad of other projects finished, I'll be writing
a LoRes game much the same, so I'd be able to reuse them in that project.

What do I use for development?  Well, between the ( ] ) and ( * ) prompts,
I use paper, pen, and heavily reference the 6502 Op-Code chart I have
here to determine what byte opcode I need to do what I want.   No exotic
assemblers, no special cross platform (unless you count working in an
emulator on a PC) and no real tricks going on.  I just write the applesoft,
determine if I need ML to make things work quicker, if so, I'll write the
ML for it.  Sometimes it works as I anticipate, other times it's hit-or-miss
as I'm far from being a gifted ML programmer by any stretch of the
imagination.

Later,
Craig