Thursday, December 18, 2008


I was looking through the source of retro edit and wondering what I'd do to change it, and came to the conclusion that actually, its not as bad as I thought. The only major change I want to do is how the data is stored internally. You see when I started this I decided to store the data in a basic INT[] array, where each 0 or 1 was actually a BIT, and I would then process the data for editing and drawing. However, this is a bit yucky, and I now think it would be better to just store the data in a more native format. Thats not to say I'll store it in boxes, or colums etc. but as a simple X by Y row of bytes. This makes plug-ins to save the data in a custom format easy.

So I think I might have a little play and see if I can reorginise things so they are more to my liking, and this will (I hope) then allow me to use the custom control to actually do real graphics work.

The way I've gone about this is to have a custom control that deals with retro graphics. So you load it up with the data (in a simple rowxcolum format, and you can then select colours and plot pixels. The idea is that once its released (if ever!) then you could use the control yourself outside of retro edit to do other things. I have no idea if this would ever happen, but it might.

So I've decided to give it a few days and see how I get on. If I feel like Im getting somewhere, I'll carry on - if not, I'll bin it.

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