SCREEN 2 tutorial

Spanish MSX friend aorante has published a tutorial in his blog, to create SCREEN 2 graphics. There you will find different techniques to, e.g., apply dithering and to combine sprites. The information in his blog is in Spanish.

Relevant link: SCREEN 2 tutorial part 1 & part 2

Comments (8)

By Leo

Paragon (1229)

15-04-2010, 20:21

msx 1 can prosuce very nice gfx , i discovered this only recently, i like this tuto ..

By Google

By MäSäXi

Paragon (1616)

15-04-2010, 20:51

Very nicely done!

I have just one wish:

180 BSAVE"BENDER_S.SC2",0,&H3FFF,S

20 BLOAD"BENDERSX.SC2",S

Please add a solution for cassette users too.

,S is for disk drive owners. (read: LUXURY in the 1980s)

I know, many already has disk drive and/or MSX2 nowadays, but there are still many who use cassette drive and real MSX1 without disk drive.

By the way, Jannone, have you got my email about a bug in Tinysprite? (thought to say, as Jannone´s tinysprite was mentioned in this article)

By Hrothgar

Champion (341)

15-04-2010, 21:40

,S is disk-only?

Am I hallucinating that I used that command with tapes back in the days? Or am I confusing that with loading and saving graphics from the built-in Philips MSX Designer?

By NYYRIKKI

Prophet (2771)

23-04-2010, 13:26

Yes, ",S" is disk only and not implemented in MSX1

By NYYRIKKI

Prophet (2771)

23-04-2010, 17:24

This looks like way too hard way to make proper SCREEN 2 pictures...

Here is my suggestion:

1) Make your picture in your favorite picture tool
2) Convert your picture to SC2 using your favorite tool (Like Jannones converter)
3) Convert your SC2 picture to SC5 (Tool here doesn't really matter)
4) Edit the worst SC2 conversion bugs away using your favorite SC5 editor (like DD-graphics)
5) Convert the result back to SC2 using the X-BASIC tool below
6) When you see the result with artifacts, push SPACE
7) Move mouse over the artifact blocks and use button 1 to remove them.
8) When you have removed the artifacts you wanted to remove, press mouse button 2
9) Now you see the final result
10) Press SPACE to save the result on disk.

10 '******** SC5-SC2.BAS
20 '*** converts a screen 5 picture to screen 2
30 '*** take care of using only 2 colors per 8 pixel
40 '*** the sc5-picture will be cut from 212 to 192 lines
50 '***
60 '*** made '94 by MI-CHI   -   this program is FREEWARE
70 '*** Fixed for sprite support By NYYRIKKI
80 '***
90 CLEAR 200,&H9FFF
100 SCREEN 0:FILES"*.sc5":LOCATE0,20:INPUT "Filename (without EXT)";N$:COLOR 15,0,0
110 SCREEN5,0:IFN$<>""THENSETPAGE,1:BLOADN$+".sc5",S:SETPAGE,2:CLS:SETPAGE,0
120 SPRITE$(0)=STRING$(8,255):PUTSPRITE0,(0,-1),15,0
130 COPY(0,0)-(255,191),1TO(0,0),0
140 _TURBO ON
150 DEFINT A-Z
160 DIMS(7),D(7),C(15):FORI=0TO7:S(7-I)=2^I:NEXTI
170 P=0:Y=0:X=0:O=0
180 A=0:C1=16:C2=16:FOR N=0 TO 7
190 CO=POINT(X+N,Y):D(N)=CO:IF CO

By Manuel

Enlighted (7237)

23-04-2010, 18:37

Why convert back and forth from 2 -> 5 -> 2?

By NYYRIKKI

Prophet (2771)

23-04-2010, 19:15

The reason is that real screen converters do much better job in the actual conversion than this crappy BASIC listing. This program is meant only to make the sprites more automatically.

I'm really not a graphics expert, but here is an example picture I used for testing the method I described. (Sprites flicker on and off)

www.msx.fi/temp/sprites.gif