Tools

Recently I wanted to use a set of sprites from one of my most loved demos of all time – Camel Park / Camelot. Released about 20 years ago, I watched it a lot over the years and still return to it for some nice classic effects and some great tracks. One of the parts has a nice plasma with a cool font used for the sprite scroller. I wanted to use this font in a few things I’m trying out (saves me having to design up a large font set for a sprite scroller (plus I love the font. How can I use it I wondered.. I decided to look at how to extract the font from the demo and get it into a format I could use.

Camel Park - Camelot
Continue Reading

Amica paint is a C64 tool designed to create bitmap images. I’ve never used it myself, but I know of people that do. One person in particular who has helped me out with some graphics (JSL) uses this a lot. The bitmaps he has sent me have been in this format. To get them into my productions, I have to jump through a few hoops, so I decided to create a script which could export them into a format ready to go into my .asm files. This post will go into those hoops a little bit, along with the script to make my life easier when extracting the bitmap data.

Amica paint loader
Continue Reading

Since posting screen shots of my code in previous posts, I’ve received a number of queries from people asking about what editor I’m using and what the syntax highlighting is. So I thought I’d go into it quickly.

My choice of editor is Sublime Text 2. I find it the most feature packed and flexible editor around. Plus I can use it on the Mac, Linux and Windows to maintain a consistent editing environment. When I began writing 6510 assembly a few weeks back, I couldn’t find much in the way of syntax highlighting for it. Once I settled on using the win2c64 assembler, I set about creating a custom theme and syntax highlighting definition to use with it.
Continue Reading