25 December 1983: It's Christmas. I am four years old. My dad, disguised as a fat man with a white beard in a red suit (I didn't know it was him, honest), delivered a small, door-wedge-shaped computer with a chunky block hanging out the back. (No, it wasn't a prototype QL.) I was over the proverbial moon. I wrote my first ever program!
10 PRINT "NO"
20 GOTO 10
25 November 2022: Crash Live. The Next team are there, handing out freebies to anyone who backed the Issue 2 Kickstarter. One such freebie is a copy of the Issue 1 Next manual, which I'd assume they had a surplus of and were trying to offload them somehow.
9 January 2023: I opened the manual and started reading it, even the introductory waffle and bunk at the beginning, and all the obvious bits and pieces that I'd known since I had a ZX81.
11 January 2023: having reached chapter 17 and the section on tiles, which was all new to me, I started writing a program to convert a 16×16 drawing on screen to a tile. After working out how to convert an on-screen graphic into usable tile data, I was floored by the concept of the tile bank. And so began a couple of days of consultation here and elsewhere. Several users of Discord (including @Seven.FFF) were very helpful.
14 January 2023: The program was complete, and working - on CSpect, at least. @Seven.FFF already has a copy and might possibly be testing it on a real Next to see if it works there, which it should - but I can't test that bit myself until September or so.
Anyway, without further PAUSE:
Tile Cutter: GET IT HERE!
So this is my first Next program, just north of 39 years after the ZX81 effort. All right, so I'm also 39 years older, and it helps when writing programs on a platform that's vastly upgraded to what I recognise.
To use it, take your favourite graphics package - even Microsoft Paintbrush on Windows 3.1 will suffice - and draw your intended tiles, either 8×8 or 16×16, in the top third of a 256×192 image (so, that's 256×64 pixels to play with, enough for 64 large tiles or 256 small tiles).
Save it as a .BMP file.
Take this to Remy Sharp's Next Tools and convert it to .SL2 format, thus ensuring it fits the Next's default LAYER 2 palette - which is what this program is intended for.
Copy the .SL2 file to your SD card, in the same directory as the Tile Cutter program (TILECUT by default). This may involve HDFmonkey if you're working with CSpect and an SD image - which is finnicky, but necessary without the real hardware.
Run the program, load in the .SL2 file, and watch the Tile Cutter do its work.
Save as many tiles as is required.
With a bit of luck, this might be useful to someone, somewhere. And if that certain someone who was told, repeatedly, to RTFM is watching (fat chance) - well, I did. And most of this is what I could do after RingTFM, just that the concept of the tile map needed a bit of further explanation. I have provided that, in a way the manual doesn't, in my own instructions so there should be no further confusion.
Next users on Faceache have reported that it might be possible to get this program working with a straight .BMP file - though I find the .bmpload command hasn't yet done what I wanted it to do, and any bitmap to be loaded in that way still requires some external manipulation. I'm sticking with .SL2 for now, and I'm sure someone will point out that Remy's already made an online sprite-and-tile designer that can automatically output the required data. That, though, doesn't help me practice programming with new concepts, and this does.
I suspect there may be a sprite program in the making somewhere, but I have to get to grips with chapter 18 first, and I already have a CSSCGC entry brewing which won't take too long, but which I dare not waste.
