Translating Dark Sider. Trying to read the graphics... they are BLOAD'ed to the screen from several different files. It seems this BLOAD format is markedly different from QBASIC's. Can anyone explain how it works in Screen 5? (I need details... just mentioning the 7 header bytes and then saying "go see the VDP manual" really isn't helpful).
Well... that description should be almost enough, but ok, I open it up a bit more:
Header is like this:
db #fe ;ID byte
dw {VRAM begin address}
dW {VRAM end address}
dw {not used when loading to VRAM}
What goes to where depends of how you have set up the VDP... (See BASIC commands VDP, BASE, SCREEN and SET PAGE) When you boot your computer the default addresses in SCREEN 5 are:
The most interesting part is probably the bitmap... In screen 5 the screen is filled from left to right and up to down. Each nibble represents one color out of the 16-color palette. This means that the whole screen size in bytes is 128 * 212. Please note that in screen 5 you can use second parameter (0-3) of SET PAGE command to add (#8000) offset to BLOAD, VPOKE etc commands... This way you can access whole 128KB (#00000-#1FFFF) although BLOAD header and command parameters use only 16-bit addresses.
Thing is, this file is not full screen. It's 7508 bytes. Game was apparently written in 1986... inspired by Dragon Quest... got a feeling someone wrote it right after finishing DQ. One of the most ambitious -- and impressive -- interpreted BASIC games ever written. Nothing like it until DarknessEthereal's "Lianne in... the Dark Crown" in 1997 (although this game is actually more impressive than that! Full screen smooth scrolling (if not full screen... it's as big a window as Gameboy anyway).
I looked at the file format for Copy in your wiki. it specifies a 2 word header for the width and height. However, these would be larger than the screen size in the case of (MSX-BASIC) mode 5 (mode 4 from the VDP's standpoint). No idea what is going on... but MSX-BASIC apparently likes it right out the box because a simple "BLOAD "dstitle.pic", S is all the program uses to load it.
I've tried viewing it with MSXview. No dice.
Also I think this game is either unfinished, or the dump is incomplete. There are several references to files in the code that are not in the archive. Although several of these are created as aspects of the save system, "dsending.bas" is not. Does anyone have a fuller dump of the game? (I got my dump from planetemu.net)
Please note I'm not trying to edit this within an MSX or an emulator... trying to create a converter between this format and others.
PC programs like MSXview might not like if the extension is wrong or the picture is not full screen... Maybe you should try to save it as full screen picture? ... Something like:
It depends on what do you want to do. If you only want to see the image, you don't need to know the format. If you want to modify it and save it back in the same format, you need to know how the compression works. Unless the packer is also included in that bin.
The plot thickens... I can detokenize all the BAS files except ds.bas. Not only does this file not detokenize, but its tokenization seems to derail all efforts to run non-tokenized code alongside it... I keep getting this "Direct statement in file" error. Is it using some sorta defeat technique to prevent modification?
