CharPad C64 Pro + SpritePad C64 Pro

Hi,

Thank you very much for your purchase, your support is greatly appreciated.

On the Commodore 64, "multi-colour text mode" allows both hi-res and multi-colour (wide) pixel chars, the choice is made using the colour value in each screen matrix cell (ie. the relevant Colour RAM byte),

Colours 0-7 make the cell "hi-res" and colours 8-15 make the cell multi-colour.

So in CharPad, to make characters appear in "text - multi-colour mode"...

1. Choose "Text - Multi-colour mode" on the Project form..

2. Select "Colour Matrix (low nyb)" on the Project form.

3. Choose any colour on the bottom row of the colour palette (these will have red dashes on them to indicate "wide pixel").

It has always worked this way and always will, there is nothing to fix.

Ps. "multi-colour bitmap mode" works differently, all chars are wide pixel.

Cheers.

FungusN0S1 year ago

Weird, the first time loaded the char set and set that mode it worked as I expected, but then didn't afterwards.

I guess it's a bit unintuitive for me, setting MCM mode in my brain would disaplay all chars in multicolor mode. There is no color information in a character set so that just seems weird to me. I get it though because of how the c64 works with how color memory is set. It'll just take some getting used to.

GallonOfAlan1 year ago

Hi, great tools. With Charpad, is there any way to colour individual cells on the map? I'm designing a fixed screen shooter so it's just one 25x40 high res text screen, not a map as such. And no need for tiles. I don't want every instance of a given character to be a particular colour, I effectively want to specify colours in the C64 colour RAM and export that. Thanks.

jweinh1 year ago

Is there any chance you could let us define the filenames for the Binary->Export All? Maybe a custom export option to also only export specifically what you need? My game uses Chr attr1, map, charset, and tiles, but my current flow is to manually export each, and every now and then I forget one, or overwrite one with the wrong thing.

Anyhow, love the apps!

Hi,

Ok yes I see your point, that sounds like it would be a useful feature, request noted!

devnull731 year ago

How much success do people have with Wine on linux?

Hello, I'm not a Linux user myself but I know that many people do run our tools using WINE on Linux.

Conversely, I have not heard of any particular problems with it.

If you are capable of installing Linux and WINE then you shouldn't have any problems running the Win32 or Win64 versions of our tools.

To run the .NET version(s) you would probably just need to install .NET (3.5 and 4.0) into your WINE installation.

Fantasy Software Designs1 year ago (1 edit)

It get's better and better with each new release.

A couple of additions to the program would be really time saving.

1. Is there any chance you can add a search for a char facility? My map design covers 64x6400 chars and finding a rogue char is a logistical nightmare.

2. Is it possible to increase the re-tiling operation to utilise more than 65536 tiles. To tile my maps takes 102496 tiles which I can't with a limit of 65536. The only way I can create a tile map is to export the map, then import the map back into CharPad. The trouble is it then breaks the colour map.

I've also discovered a bug. If I import a map of size 64x1250 it works fine. Increasing this over 1250 causes issues whereby graphic rows are missed and the imported image gets compressed. If the map was square 640x640 this issue doesn't occur.

Fantasy Software Designs1 year ago

Hi,

Thanks for the feedback and the bug report, I have saved a copy of your post and will look into these things.

Yes the size of a tile-set is currently limited to 65536 and a char-set is limited to 500,000, allowing more tiles would be simple enough, although the CTM project file format only supports 16-bit values (max 65536) for both chars and tiles, so you would still need to reduce the count before a project could be saved.

Was the bug you found seen when doing a binary file import of map data?

Anyway, I will try and look into these things before the next release.

Cheers!

Hi,

Thanks for your response.

Was the bug you found seen when doing a binary file import of map data? Yes.

Thanks

pirat28hh1 year ago (1 edit)

Another question I can't solve.
I edited a nicht Map in the Display mode "Bitmap - Multi-colour" but struggle with getting it displayed in ASM on my C64.
Can you give your users in ASM an complete example who to display a "Bitmap Multi-colour" map / screen.
In my case I just have a screen - no tiles just the font and a 40x25 char map.

I also edited a map (40x25) in Text Multi-colour and when I export the data I thought I would see also the colour data ($D800), but in the ASM file is only charset_data, charset_attrib_L1_data and map_data.

Subchrist Software1 year ago (4 edits)

Hi,

Sorry for the late reply, yes including asm code examples is something I have considered before and I have large amounts of code that I could include with the apps.

Part of the reason I haven't is that I don't want to deprive users of the pleasure of discovering how to do these things for themselves.

Writing code and finding good ways of doing things should be exciting and fun and educational, not just an exercise in copying and pasting somebody else's code.

As for your colour data problem, the "charset_attrib_L1" data IS the per-char colour data, the upper nybbles may also contain material data which you may or may not not need.

If you decompress the project so the charset contains 1000 chars (for a full-screen bitmap), then the charset data IS your bitmap data and the map data is not needed.

The chars just need loading/copying to your 8K bitmap and the L1 attribute data (1000 bytes) just needs to be loaded/copied to the colour matrix at $d800.

For a MC bitmap, the L2 attribute data (1000 bytes) will need to be loaded/copied to the screen matrix.

I hope that helps.

HagarTST335 days ago

Brought CharPad and SpritePad some months ago.

I'm having the same problem as pirat28hh, and agree on the matter that he raise that it could be nice with some ref. examples. Yes, people might find pleasure of figuring it out themselv, but I guess they could find this in refining and optimizing their code instead.

pirat28hh1 year ago

Is there an option to move chars in the charset from position a to position b?
I would like to organize the charset for better programming stuff like a vertical font scroll for a game.

Yes there are lots of ways to move chars around such as using Cut, Copy, Paste, Swap, Reverse Order, Cycle Order.

The Paste function has 3 versions (insert, overwrite, append) depeding on how you want to do it.

You can swap any two characters by selecting one and then selecting another with CTRL held.

Have a look in the "Chars" menu when the Char Set form is active for all the options.

pirat28hh1 year ago

Oh... There ;)

Thanks a lot... I was to blind...

tony@west-racing.com1 year ago

Just a note to readers that the reported issues with the anti-piracy system have been resolved with the most recent (CharPad 3.60) release.

baardbi1 year ago

I just installed Windows 11 on a new computer and downloaded CharPadC64Pro359. I could not save my project (the options were greyed out). Also I did not see the "Flexi-Grid Settings" under Options. At first I thought it was because I was using Windows 11. But then I tried the previous version of CharPad (3.42) and that worked fine. Could it be that there's a problem with the version you released yesterday?

Subchrist Software1 year ago (3 edits)

Hi,

If the save/export options are greyed out then that is the anti-piracy system doing it's thing, make sure you are running it from it's original folder and not just running the exe moved somewhere else.

The flexi-grid options are on a second tab marked "Misc" on the project form.

If you ARE running it from it's original folder (with all the pre-packaged files) then you may need to email me for further instructions as I cant post a solution here for obvious reasons.

nb. you may need to wait 15 seconds after starting it for the save/export options to become ungreyed.

Fabulous software, so much easier than the programs I used back in the day. I have a couple of feature requests I would like you to consider. I would like a way to show how many times a particular character has been used in a map as this would help me cull characters that only get used a few times so are being wasted (maybe at the bottom of the Char Set window). I would also like to a char to be highlighted in the map so i can see where it is being used. To compliment this a quick replace option so I can quickly relpace one char with another char across the whole map.

Thanks though for making this software and making it fun.

tony@west-racing.com1 year ago

Hi, thank you for the positive words :)

Yes it was very much designed with ease of use and enjoyment in mind, especially regarding tile editing which has been a tedious chore in basically all tools until we made this.

Ok so your first suggestion is already handled by.. Import/Export.. Text/Asm.. Export Char Usage Statistics.

Your other ideas seem perfectly reasonable too, I have added them to the list.

Cheers!

Thats great, appreciate the effort you are putting into this.

damzgaard1 year ago

I'm currently using both CharPad and and SpritePad via Wine + CrossOver on MacOS.

Unfortunately the latest version 3.50 of SpritePad won't start :-(

It just keeps printing:

00f8:fixme:unwind:RtlVirtualUnwind unknown unwind info version 0 at 000000000065FF50

- in the terminal windows until I kill it.

MacBook Pro (15" 2021) M1 Max
MacOS Ventura 13.4
Wine Crossover 7.7 (CrossOverFOSS 22.0.1)

BubbleSoftGames1 year ago

Hi,

Sorry you are experiencing problems, is the same problem present with all (.NET, W32, W64) versions?

So far I received 1 other bug report about the .NET version not starting, unsure which OS the user is on yet.

damzgaard1 year ago(+1)

I have now tried out SpritePad 3.52 and it works :-)

I was and still is using the W64 version.

cbmeeks1 year ago (1 edit) (+1)

BTW, you can also install winetricks and then isntall .NET. What I did was run "winetricks dotnet45" and after that, I can run the .NET versions with just a "wine Char...."

Correction...

It seems SpritePad 3.52 is not working for me with .NET in Wine. However, the W64 version works with:

wine64 SpritePadC64Pro_W64.exe

Not sure why the .NET version doesn't work but it does with CharPad.

Yosdu1 year ago

Hey,

Is there a way to copy a tile without unpacking?
Every time I need a slightly different tile, I have to redraw it from scratch, as I can't find how to copy it.

Any tips would be greatly appreciated!

Subchrist Software1 year ago (8 edits)

Hi,

You can "copy" a tile without decompressing but you will always need to decompress before you can paste it back in and even if it were possible to paste a tile to a compressed project you would still need to decompress before you could use the tile editor to actually (pixel) edit it.

(nb. copied tiles are always buffered in memory in a decompressed state).

These restrictions are in place for extremely good reason, so if you want to do these things then you will have to change your methods to allow for the decompression to occur, ie. if you have "other characters" (non tile chars) in the set then try keeping them in a separate project and combining them at a later time to create the final set for your game level.

Yosdu1 year ago

Thanks for reply.
A pity it can't be done, in my project there is multitude of roads etc, which need to have a character or 2 altered to match the location they connect to - and I have to keep redrawing these.
I already combine charsets separately, but can't allow it to unpack it as it makes terrible mess, and I do have 4 color versions for each char, so while it's easy to do recoloring on static set in 4 separate projects, its becoming a nightmare after de/recompression. Not to mention that I would need to change the code to match where my special chars are after such operation (as some are used to dynamically draw tiles).

Any chance for different coloring methods support? I.e. color map per char in tile (where each char in tile has its own color)?

Subchrist Software1 year ago (8 edits)

Ok well that all sounds very complicated!

Right now I can't quite visualise what you are trying to do but thanks for trying to explain.

CharPad's tile (pixel) editing features are pretty unique, no other tool that I know of can do such things and it formed a large part of the reason we made it, but, as you are finding out, there are certain restrictions such as the need for decompression to avoid affecting "other tiles" when (pixel) editing any one chosen tile.

(nb. you are only really free to use the Char Brush tool in the tile editor without first using decompression).

Re your second request.. Yes other colouring methods are possible, namely "Per Map Cell" and "Per Tile Cell" .

Literally "a couple" of other people have requested these colouring methods before now and these things are actually on the todo/maybe list, however, to be perfectly blunt about it..

It would require an *enormous* amount of work to add these things and the income generated from these apps gives us very little motivation to even attempt it.

Sorry.

Maybe it will happen if business picks up considerably or if we were to get offered proper payment (privately) for the necessary months of work.

Yosdu1 year ago

Fair enough, I fully understand.

Btw, if you want to see what I'm messing with I'm happy to share the project files.

Yosdu1 year ago (1 edit)

Hi,

I've been using Charpad for a while now and I find it really good.

We even created a separate tool to use alongside it to add some extra information to our maps - and here comes the question - how could we add feature requests?
In essence, we got a map layer that describes locations (simple byte map same size as map) - I think it would be great to have it built into Charpad if possible.
Also, where materials come, ability to switch to bitwise ops and have labels against bits would be great (i.e. road, water, passable, quick move, slow move etc).

Lastly - colouring methods - would it be possible to get colour support per-tile-character? So I can have the same chars in varius tiles, but with different colours per char (not per whole tile as now).

Also for SpritePad - ability to draw on sprite and overlay at the same time would be awesome.
Same for charpad and editing a char inside tile without unpacking and switching to a char editor would greatly improve usability!

Thanks for the great tool!

Hi, I`m running the latest version of Sprite Pad Pro, I have a number of sprites that have overlays...some sprites have 4 frames...others have 5 ...problem is I can only set the offset as one value so its difficult to visualize all the sprite.. is this something that can be changed in a future version? (im sure we used to have the ability to do this at one point?)

Thanks so much for a great set of tools.

Deleted post1 year ago

Deleted 1 year ago

Hi,

Thanks for your post and appreciation!

"Overlay distance" in SpritePad has only been variable (but same for all sprites) in the last couple of years.

Older versions just had an "Overlay Next" switch in each sprite's attribute.

(equivalent to an overlay distance of 1)

So anyway if you've got a number of sprites that use overlays you should be able to solve your issue by ie. moving all of those sprites to the start of the set, then move all of their relevant overlays (in matching order) to some place further on in the set and use that distance as the universal sprite overlay distance.

So the arrangement you end up with is...

[Sprites that need overlays][Sprites that don't need overlays][Sprite overlays]

you could also use...

[Sprites that need overlays][Sprite overlays][Sprites that don't need overlays]

Basically just keep ALL of your underlays in one big block and ALL of the overlays in another.

ie. Avoid trying to do...

[Sprites1][Sprites1overlays][Sprites2][Sprites2overlays][Sprites3][Sprites3overlays] etc.

You will be severely restricted by the single (universal) overlay distance value when using such a scheme.

I hope that helps.

plynch19691 year ago

Really great software, one option I would would be to reverse pixels per character, so saving recreating the reversed character for all my custom character sets. I am assuming that you can not do this already.

Hi,

Yes CharPad can already do this, just select all the chars you want to affect (or a single char) and hit CTRL+SHIFT+N, or choose Negative from the Char/Chars item in the menu.

plynch19691 year ago

Perfect, thanks for the quick response and it works great, saves me some time!!

DavePlunder1 year ago

Hey there, I bought both editors :) I've been using Spritepad for a few days and I like it, but I cannot for the life of me find a way to add frames to an animation. I have all the frames I need in the spritesheet, but copy/paste does not work. Help please....

Hi, thanks for supporting the projects, much appreciated!

Ok, animations in SpritePad are all based on ranges (ie. A to B) of items in the sprite or tile sheet.

nb. sprite animations and tile animations are handled by different forms.

You can select a range of images using the LEFT mouse button without (then with) the SHIFT key held down.

Then click "Create animation from selection" from the toolbar or menu (the sprite/tile sheet form must be active).

Alternatively you can just use the From/To controls on the animation form to set desired frames.

Playback speed etc etc are all handled by the animator form.

I hope that helps.

DavePlunder1 year ago

oh ok I was missing the button "Create animation from selection" from the toolbar or menu !! Because it is not there all the time grayed out, it just appears when it is useable and I did not notice it. Thanks, everything else makes perfect sense and I’m enjoying making animations already!!

Right right, the option to create an animation will only be available if animations are enabled in the project.

I might change this so it gives the option to enable animations when it's clicked.

Anyway, glad you enjoying it! updates coming soon hopefully, stay tuned :)

I absolutely love CharPad and SpritePad. I use them a lot. There are two things that could make my life a little easier though (in CharPad):

I wish that the Flexi-Grid Settings were saved with the project file. I have to adjust these every time I open a project file.

I also wish that there was an option to export the Flexi-Gridded Sub-Maps to one big file instead of several small ones. I have made my own script to merge these, but it's extra work every time I change the map.

Subchrist Software2 years ago (3 edits)

Thanks for the feedback, yes I can see how these things would be useful, the (ctm) project file format does get updated occasionally but I tend to wait until I have a good number of new ideas ready before designing/releasing a new one, this idea is on the list now.

I will try and get the "big block of sub-maps" (binary export) into the next update.

Fantasy Software Designs2 years ago

Great! Thank you for listening to feedback from the community.

Any chance of C16/+4 support?

Fantasy Software Designs2 years ago

It's been on the 'todo/maybe' list for many years but has hardly ever been asked about so I've never been quite sure if it's worth the effort.

What do C16/+4 developers currently use? just native 8-bit tools?

I was using CBMPrgStudio’s sprite/char editor but with each release it gets progressively worse to the point it’s now not worth the effort. Now I use CharPad pretty much exclusively I colour manually which is a bit of effort.

cbmeeks2 years ago(+1)

Would love to see Linux versions of these. I've almost been able to uninstall Wine on Linux but need it for these two apps and WinCUPL. :-)

angelday2 years ago

Hey, I have published a how-to using Crossover 22. It also runs on Linux and you should be able to try it out using the trial version of Crossover: https://medium.com/@angelday/how-to-launch-charpad-pro-on-a-modern-mac-97de8c7a4...

marauder_C642 years ago

These tools are fantastic! I have been looking for something like this for a while. Keep up the great work!

Fantasy Software Designs2 years ago

Awesome piece of software.
Apologies, only just realised there is a pro version. Now purchased. #awks

Thanks so much for your support :) we hope you find the apps useful, there's always an update in the pipeline but do let us know if you have any suggestions etc. Cheers!

Hello. I love both SpritePad and CharPad. Been using both for years, but recently bought the Pro versions. I was wondering if it's possible to include some plotting system for sprites in the flexi-gridded maps. Then that could be exported as a separate text file. Right now I'm making a game and I have to write down the X and Y coordinates manually for each sprite in each room in my game.

Hi, thanks for your suggestion,

Something like this (a sprite layer) has been on the todo/maybe list for quite a while, the idea has just taken a back seat to the more char-related features (of which there is, and has been, an enormous amount to do).

I'm sure at some point there will be a merging between SpritePad and CharPad to turn the tool into more of a programmer's "level editor" than the tile-map editor that it currently is.

The idea is on the list!

Awesome! That makes me very happy. Thank you for all the work you're putting into these products. I really appreciate it.

mazinger642 years ago

Hi SubChrist,

Is it possible with 3.19 to define different areas in the same map? I mean to display different BG, MC0, MC1 colours in the map.

BubbleSoftGames2 years ago

Hi,

I'm afraid the answer to that is no.

I *will* consider it (and possible alternatives) for a future version but it is the kind of feature that could become very complicated very quickly and the current set of display modes and colouring options are really quite challenging as they are.

I have so far found the "one project/one map/one palette" model to be the least confusing for myself and for users so perhaps there is another way to tackle the problem.

Deleted account2 years ago

Deleted post

Hi there, I've been using both Sprite Pad and CharPad for several years now, and recently I've become involved in a project that will span both C64 and spectrum. I was wondering if it would be possible to add support for either custom colours in the palette or failing that the 16 colours of the ZX Spectrum palette so that I can use the one set of tools for both versions of the game. So far I've not found a better map editor so I would really love to be able to stick with it !

kind regards,

Andy

BubbleSoftGames2 years ago

Hi,

Thanks for the suggestion.

While CharPad (Pro) *does* support custom palettes and includes a built-in palette editor where they can be created/saved/loaded and thereafter will draw all graphics using it, it will not currently display the tweaked palette in the Project window's colour selector, instead always showing the same (pre-drawn, c64) palette image(s).

I have made a note and will definitely look into it.

Awesome thanks, ill take a look at the palette options, i must have missed those but sounds like ill be able to go ahead and use this for both projects.

demesos3 years ago

Hi! I have recently purchased the pro version and made a text-multi-color, per-char-colored, tileset project with CP3.09 Win64. But when I exported via File->Text/Asm->ExportAll the Tilesetdata and the Tags were missing in the file. I have used this function many times with Charpad 2.86 without problems so far. Any idea what could cause this problem?

Hi frodewin, thanks for the bug report, yes you are quite right, there is a fault, it is present in the Win32 and Win64 builds of CharPad Pro 3.09.

The .NET build is unaffected.

I have just fixed it and will try and get a new version up tomorrow.

Dereks Projects3 years ago

Version 3.10 is now available. Merry Christmas!

demesos3 years ago

3.10 works like a charm! Thanks a lot!

Hi,

Is the Export Flexigrid opening at the last saved folder on the cards for a future release of CharPad Pro?

Thanks in advance.

Dereks Projects3 years ago

Hi, thanks for posting, the issue has been noted, I will investigate and try and get a fix into the next release.

Hi - that would be great and also very appreciated. Great product by the way!

Vaxolydian3 years ago

Hi, I'm a coder working with your pad software. I am presently writing a program which deals directly with *ctm files so I can process their contents without loading the app. First of all, thank you very much for supplying comprehensive documentation. It saves a huge amount of time to have a direct reference to work from. Here are my points:

1. I'd like to lodge one gripe against it which is the use of decimal. This makes life a little harder when verified my understanding of the format using a hex editor which predictably uses rows of 8 or 16 bytes and a hex offset. I can do the conversion, but it would be nice if the doc had offset values in hex either as well as or instead of decimal so the numbers fell more conveniently into references to a hex editor.

2. Having designed some full game maps before we started to talk the artist has defined all their chardefs within a single set. The char images too, do not appear in the set where I would ideally like them to be, the numeric chars for example. How can I copy out into a different set the alphabetic chars which don't appear in the game and also later rearrange the chars within the set without disrupting the map? I want to pull out some of their char defs and then move around some defs within the set.

Subchrist Software3 years ago (4 edits)

Hi, thanks for the feedback.

#1, yes I take your point, hex offsets would probably be more useful.

#2, CharPad will 'auto-correct' (tile/map data) for all operations that move chars/tiles around, ie.. cut/paste, delete/insert, compress/decompress.

If the chars/tiles for a font need to exist in the same charset/tileset as a game map (but are not used directly by it) then it is best to keep the font as a separate project and simply copy/paste (from the font project) into the game map's project when you need to combine them (auto-correct will be performed).

If you need to rearrange chars or tiles within a project then this can be performed by swapping items (CTRL + RIGHT mouse button), auto-correct will be performed.

I hope that helps.

Mrmo Tarius3 years ago

Turns out I really like making sprites in SpritePad :D

Subchrist Software3 years ago(+1)

Nice! you clearly have a natural talent for this stuff :) I would be happy to include a few examples of your work in the packages if you ever have any spare/unused bits and pieces that you would like to show to our users.

Mrmo Tarius3 years ago

Hey! I was wondering if there's a way to preview the underlying sprite while editing its overlay sprite? I can't seem to find it.

Subchrist Software3 years ago(+1)

Hi Mrmo,

For the time-being you will probably find it easier to work on the overlay first, ie. a black outline, then move to the underlay sprite and fill in the previously drawn shape (where both will be visible in the editor).

In the current system, sprites can only "have" overlays, so both sprites will only be visible when working on the "underlay".

Thanks for raising the issue though, I will take a good look at it and see if there is an improvement to be made.

Mrmo Tarius3 years ago

Thanks for the prompt response! Don't know if this is a good idea, but what if the overlay sprite was essentially the same as the underlay sprite (as in, shows the same preview) but only allows editing the overlay sprite data?

Marco Cappellari3 years ago

very nice

paaco3 years ago

Sorry to bother you, but I get an "unknown publisher" warning when starting CharPadPro30 and now also 3.01. I guess CharPadPro290 was signed, since I get no warning there.