How BASIC saved me from Photoshop.

If you scroll a bit down this blog, you’ll see the character tileset/spritemap I created for the game. What I did was to display all characters by loading in a binary screen data file, make a screenshot, load it into Photoshop and then place every single character to the correct position by hand. 

Today I need to do this again as the game uses the regular Commodore charset for the text screens as well as the title and intro. I fiddled around a bit in PS again when I realized this can (and should, for christ’s sake!) be done better.

With this ugly little BASIC code, I was able to format the character almost perfectly for using them again later, therefore speeding up my time in Photoshop (thank god…).

5 scnclr
10 a = 0
11 b = 0
13 c = 0
20 poke 3072+a,b
40 a = a + 2
50 b = b + 1
60 c = c + 1
70 if c = 16 then a = a + 8 
80 if c = 16 then c = 0
85 if b = 256 then goto 100
90 goto 20
100 goto 100

What it does is pretty simple: first it clears the screen, then it displays 16 characters per line till all 256 characters are displayed (and goes into a loop at the end to prevent the basic prompt messing the output).

The result:

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