Sprites

Concentrating on getting the sprites done. Most of the sprites in Manic Miner have 8 frame animation sequences. I've been concentrating on getting these captured.

I've been using JSWED (Jet Set Willy Editor, a great PC program) to display the sprites using JSWED's built in sprite editor. Then, I recreate them 'on the TI' (which is actually running in an emulator, called Win994a) using a sprite editor that I have written in C, pretty much for this project, although I have released the sprite editor to the public, with source.

Here's a video of it in action:



Using this program, I can recreate each frame, and animate them to check they look ok. The program then saves them to 'disk' for me in HEX, the easiest and 'standard' format in the TI world for dealing with sprite graphics. Makes it very easy to import the sprite definitions into assembly source code files.

I guess I could have just taken a Manic Miner Z80 snapshot file and written a bit of C or .Net to find the sprites and extract them, but somehow, that takes the fun out of it! it's far more 'fun' to write an sprite editor in C first, even before you start your main project!

Even worse than that, I wrote version 1 of the sprite editor in TI Extended Basic. Yeah, yeah, I know, I know!

Mark.