A downloadable tool for Windows

Buy Now$15.00 USD or more

Commodore C16 & Plus/4 Tile-map Editor.

A highly detailed and powerful editor for characters, tiles and maps for old-school 1980's home computer games and demos.

Stuffed with just about every import/export ability you might ever need.

A sister product to the mighty CharPad C64 Pro containing all of it's sibling's powerful features.

Charpad C16 Pro is also able to open/convert existing project's made with CharPad C64 Pro (CTM v8/v9 files).


Includes many powerful features such as...

  • Support for *ALL* the standard C16 & Plus/4 (TED) display modes.
  • High quality interactive image import.
  • Automatic data/colour conversion between display modes.
  • Typing text directly into the Map Editor using a chosen 'Key map'.
  • Map Editor "Flexi-Grid" feature that allows map data to be subdivided.
  • Tile naming/tagging.
  • Interactive ripping of graphics from VICE snapshots.
  • Exporting of map data in 8, 12 or 16 bit formats (ie. >256 tiles).
  • Colour palette editing in RGB, HSL and YUV formats.
  • Z-Rotation of all/any items.
  • Copy/paste between program instances.


Notes...

  • Portable apps, run on Windows or Mac/Linux using ie. WINE/Crossover.
  • Includes 3 executables,  Win32, Win64 and .NET builds.
  • Buyers will have free access to all future updates of this product.
More information

Purchase

Buy Now$15.00 USD or more

In order to download this tool you must purchase it at or above the minimum price of $15 USD. You will get access to the following files:

CharPadC16Pro369.zip 6.4 MB
CharPadC16Pro369.rar 4.6 MB
CharPadC16Pro360.rar 4 MB

Development log

Comments

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verona007117 days ago

Hello!

I need help about Bitmap mode Multi color.
I want to import that in KickAssembler, but not understand the data concept.

By the way, the program works great, it's a huge help for me, coz' I am not a graphics expert.

Reply
Subchrist Software117 days ago

Hi there, ok I will try to help if I can.

Do you have a specific question? it is a bit complicated yes, CharPad C16 actually uses a simplified version of the real machine's bitmap colouring system, you can click the "warning triangle" in the Project window for some more details about that.

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verona007116 days ago

Hello.I found out what was the problem.

I didn't know how to use the exported .asm, but I already did, say you could have given it a more descriptive name instead of the L1 and L2 attribute, which is the color and luminance bytes.

Plus an example program to put the image together would be nice.

And what is the

COLR_CM_BASE 

COLR_SM_BASE ?

(And on export, when I export the colors, I can't find any brightness values there.)

But I have a few comments.

1. In bitmap mode, it would be nice to have a proper graphical

(in one file, up to $1800-3FFF only).

Maybe that's what binary export does, I haven't figured that out yet.

Which I really need:

2. be able to import another image into an opened project. Let's say I put together an image for the opening screen and I want to put a specially made 2x2 caption on it, that's not possible at the moment.

3. if I'm not designing a tile, but drawing a whole screen, there could be some editing method for that, because currently I can only edit characters individually, I can't draw on the map itself, for example, freehand.

Reply
cobbpg1 year ago(+1)

I'd just like to inform you that this tool has been invaluable in helping me port Stunt Car Racer to the Plus/4, so thanks for creating it!

After using the tool for a while, here are some of the pain points I ran into:

  • I really could have used global keys for various cursor actions: moving around in the character set/map view, changing current chroma/luma etc. without having to click in the respective window. Being able to keep the mouse in the character editor and drive everything else from the keyboard would make life much easier.
  • Global color replace (i.e. specific source to destination colour), also limited to selected chars, would have saved quite a bit of manual work too. 
  • Ability to offset bitmap horizontally when importing (to find better fits for the character boundaries). Maybe even having an automatic "minimum error" mode that just cycles through all 32/64 possibilities for sub-char positions could be interesting.
  • I found that the luma values were somewhat off. Luma levels 0 to 3 shouldn't brighten so quickly, because there's supposed to be a bigger jump between 3 and 4. Especially 2 and 3 look overly bright compared to both emulated and real machines. In the help you wrote that you're using the Yape palette, but this doesn't look like it to me. I'd look into taking the Multipaint palette into use, or even the one used by Vice (all three programs seem to be in close agreement about the luma levels).
  • For the C16 and Plus/4 it would make sense to have an importer for the Multi Botticcelli format, since it seems to be the standard used by the community.

Note that I was basically using it as a bitmap editor to translate the original C64 graphics (and partly the Amiga one as well), and it's possible that I should have used Multipaint instead for some of that work. However, CharPad has a much better importer, and it also has much better export options, so I think it was the better choice overall.

This is all food for thought, not really feature requests, since it all depends on the direction you want to take with the editor. The only clear issue from the above is the mismatch in luma levels from all the other tools, I think you should review that more carefully.

Thanks again for the excellent tool!

Reply
Subchrist Software1 year ago (1 edit)

Thank you for your appreciation of our work! 

Compliments are rarer than you might imagine and yes tools like this don't just fall out of the sky as some would like to believe.

These things have taken years of effort and perseverance through every real-life trial imaginable (well, ok, many of them).

So I have saved your full post and will take a good close look at all the points you raised in due course, I had doubts about the palette myself some months back but felt like nobody was buying/using it anyway.

So, best of luck with Stunt Car Racer, a classic, I think I only played it on Amiga, that's got to be a tough coding job on the 8-bits, I will defo keep an eye out for it.

 Cheers!

Reply
CptSparky3602 years ago(+2)

I'm not sure if I'm ever going to use this tool but you rock and that's why I want to support you.

Well, maybe the Plus/4 *IS* worth a look ;)

Reply
Subchrist Software2 years ago(+1)

Aww thanks mate that's super nice of you to say so :)

+Thank you so much for your support, respect!

Yeah the C16 & Plus/4 may lack sprites and the SID but they're still nice systems in several other ways.

Reply