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tomcat666 · 27 August 2002, 15:00

Okie, tought this might be necessary... a quick tour of how to use this thing ;-)

The main thing is that you don't set the Bitplanes in the beginning - first you find the pictures in 2 colour mode and after that you fiddle with the bitplanes.

The other thing is that you must have a sense of what is a bitmap. If you think that tiles are 16 pixels wide that almost never means that they are stored like that in the memory, infact they are mostly stored in some totally bogus width.
For this reason it is vital that you can "SPOT" the bitmap in any X-size... this can only be done with doing this thing a lot. But normally you can spot it when diagonal lines in the bitmap start appering. But if you don't know what i am talking about then it is best to put your X-Size (with Q/A) keys to some normal value for amiga graphics - like 320 for example. Set the Y-Size to 200 or so, so that you can go quickly through the memory - with SHIFT left/right arrows.

Now when you spot something you *think* might be tiles or bitmap or something then use thr Q/A keys to alter the X-Size and then it will show up (probably - again you need practice for this to work ).

Now you got your X-size down you have to adjust the Y-Size and position (size with W/S and position with UP/DOWN (and with SHIFT)) ... when you have done that you have it mostly done....

Now you can see the picture on the screen and bitmaps are aligned one next to each other. Sometimes there is some rubbish between them and here you can use the R/F keys to adjust skip bytes between bitmaps.

Now you can select number of bitplanes with E/D keys... when the picture comes up in desired number of bitplanes (you will see when the rubbish starts to appear - then it is too many ;-) ) - after that you can start searching for the pallete - first use simple mode (normally it works) and after that the advanced if the simple mode didn't work. Sometimes you cannot find the pallete.

OK, in about half games the tiles/sprites are stored separately and in the other half the tiles/sprites are on the same bitmap (which is much bigger) - if they are stored separately then you can select how many tiles you want to save at once in your file (and how many in x/y direction).

I think this should explain the most of the inner workings of the tool... as I said, since it is fully manual you must have some practice to "spot" the bitmap when it doesn't have the right X-size.

And then there are other things, like interleaved bitmaps (i.e. ST type of bitmaps) where each other bitmap is in each other line... but this is advanced already ;-)

OK, hope this helped even a bit....

27 August 2002, 15:00	#29
tomcat666 Retro Freak Join Date: Nov 2001 Location: Slovenia Age: 51 Posts: 1,647	Okie, tought this might be necessary... a quick tour of how to use this thing ;-) The main thing is that you don't set the Bitplanes in the beginning - first you find the pictures in 2 colour mode and after that you fiddle with the bitplanes. The other thing is that you must have a sense of what is a bitmap. If you think that tiles are 16 pixels wide that almost never means that they are stored like that in the memory, infact they are mostly stored in some totally bogus width. For this reason it is vital that you can "SPOT" the bitmap in any X-size... this can only be done with doing this thing a lot. But normally you can spot it when diagonal lines in the bitmap start appering. But if you don't know what i am talking about then it is best to put your X-Size (with Q/A) keys to some normal value for amiga graphics - like 320 for example. Set the Y-Size to 200 or so, so that you can go quickly through the memory - with SHIFT left/right arrows. Now when you spot something you think might be tiles or bitmap or something then use thr Q/A keys to alter the X-Size and then it will show up (probably - again you need practice for this to work ). Now you got your X-size down you have to adjust the Y-Size and position (size with W/S and position with UP/DOWN (and with SHIFT)) ... when you have done that you have it mostly done.... Now you can see the picture on the screen and bitmaps are aligned one next to each other. Sometimes there is some rubbish between them and here you can use the R/F keys to adjust skip bytes between bitmaps. Now you can select number of bitplanes with E/D keys... when the picture comes up in desired number of bitplanes (you will see when the rubbish starts to appear - then it is too many ;-) ) - after that you can start searching for the pallete - first use simple mode (normally it works) and after that the advanced if the simple mode didn't work. Sometimes you cannot find the pallete. OK, in about half games the tiles/sprites are stored separately and in the other half the tiles/sprites are on the same bitmap (which is much bigger) - if they are stored separately then you can select how many tiles you want to save at once in your file (and how many in x/y direction). I think this should explain the most of the inner workings of the tool... as I said, since it is fully manual you must have some practice to "spot" the bitmap when it doesn't have the right X-size. And then there are other things, like interleaved bitmaps (i.e. ST type of bitmaps) where each other bitmap is in each other line... but this is advanced already ;-) OK, hope this helped even a bit....