BunnyGun Portable Sprite Editor for ZXDS

[Joefish]

This is my "BunnyGun Portable Sprite Editor for ZXDS". It's a sprite editor that runs on a 48K Spectrum but it's designed to work with the multiple button-presses you can do on a Nintendo DS running the ZXDS emulator. The purpose is to allow me to work on sprites while travelling away from home. It's based on the 3x3 character sprite templates from Go-Go BunnyGun.

This version does up to 24x24 pixel sprites with regular attributes, and stores up to 255 of them.
You can play animations (if they're in order) and also place multiple (animating) sprites on an 'Arrange' workscreen and watch them animate, or see how they line-up to make larger graphics. And it remembers how you placed them for when you switch between the Edit and Arrange screens. Cut+Paste of whole sprites works, but there's no in-sprite-pixel-scroll function. Mainly because I've run out of button-combos to control it!

I guess it would work well under emulation on a desktop if you can map a joypad buttons to extra keys. It's probably not much good on a real Spectrum as it uses multi-button keystrokes. And to extract the sprites you'd want to save them straight out of memory as binaries and probably manipulate the data into your own sprite format.

But it looks good, and I've found I can fairly quickly replicate sprites I've already drawn somewhere else.

http://railtron.com/files/spectrum/Bunn ... _v1.10.zip

[Joefish]

Oh well, I liked it...

[PROSM]

Oh well, I liked it...

Don't be disheartened! Sometimes, things just aren't that popular. Remember, most of us develop at our PCs, so we tend to use native Windows applications like SevenuP. As long as you find it useful or you had fun making it, then it was worth it!

[Joefish]

First time I've written an editor in straight-up machine code, rather than BASIC.

I forgot to mention the complete source code is included in the download, if anyone wants to adapt the control scheme or add some sort of sprite export function. You can see the sprite drawing, keyboard reading, display routines etc. all in there.

I did do some sprite designs whilst on holiday, and found it handy to have a portable sketchpad. I did also do some interesting designs with an 8x2 multi-colour version, but all that's top-secret at the moment.

If you've got a multi-button controller and can either map the buttons to extra keys in an emulator, or use something like Joy2Key to just map the whole pad onto keys, you might like to try defining sprites that way, rather than using a mouse and loads of icons.

[RMartins]

I will probably try it, for an on the go editing, on my mobile.

The saving, could be a problem on mobile emulators though.

[Joefish]

Don't worry, I know it's a very niche use case! It's probably going to perform very poorly on a touchscreen as it's very attuned to the ability to trigger button combinations, so don't feel you have to try it on any other platform!

Not sure what you could use there. Do any emulators translate touchscreen inputs into Kempston mouse clicks?

[RMartins]

...
Not sure what you could use there. Do any emulators translate touchscreen inputs into Kempston mouse clicks?

Yep, some do. They either show a super imposed cursor pad, on screen (that you can attach one of those weird physical joysticks with a suction cup to attach to the screen), or in some cases they also allow you to see the full keyboard overlayed on the entire screen (one of them allows this depending on the screen orientation).

[Joefish]

No, I mean when you touch the screen, the emulator could fix the Kempston mouse ports so in your code you can read (a) a button press and (b) X/Y co-ordinates on the screen through its X/Y registers. Then you could write touchscreen games and utilities on the Spectrum.

[patters]

Glad BunnyGun is still in progress. I tried that firing demo and it looks awesome.