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KingMike
03-25-2004, 10:19 PM
I remodeled my website a bit.
So far only the Banana Prince project page has been redone.
I also released a few misc. tools. All DOS stuff, I think the source C++ code has been included for if you want to improve it.

Firenoid - some DOS pseudo-game trying to combine Arkanoid and a shooter. I wrote it a couple years ago for a C++ class. However, they didn't really explain how to speed synch or anything, so it's probably a useless download unless you still got a Pentium 1 in the neighborhood of 133mhz lying around (and glitchy if you can play it). I tried to fix it up, but apparently only the program used to originally compile it understands the graphics code.

BPFormat - Compresses and inserts ASCII text into Banana Prince for the NES (which uses MTE text). Source code included if you want to modify it to support other games. (use <*> for end of message) In Banana Prince's case, just remember every 0x20th string needs a pointer.

Dungeon Kid compression pack - An NES game that lets you create your own first person RPG. Going to be tough to do translation hacking (window rearranging, and you'd probably need to expand the limits for item/magic/enemy names). Too much for me right now, so here's a program that'll undo the simple compression scheme and reinsert the edited graphics/data blocks. I was kinda lazy when I wrote this, so I hardcoded some file names and also required file offsets to be in decimal. See the source/docs.

DTE-Opt - written to generate Magna Braban's DTE table. Checks an ASCII script file for adjacent letter patterns (only compares letters, and ignores stuff in <> symbols), then the program will list the top however many combinations you specify.

EFCreate - possibly useless program that just creates a new file with a user specified number of 00s.

Thinking about plugging back in my Win98 comp. to extract this fixed-length text dumper I worked on a bit. I think I added support to skip a certain amount of bytes after each entry. Any demand for that if I can rescue it? I remember I just did it one day when I wanted to screw around with Lufia 2's item list for some reason or another.

KingMike's Translations (http://kingmike.emuxhaven.net)

filler
03-26-2004, 07:37 AM
Much better! ;)

filler

Dark Cloud
03-26-2004, 04:19 PM
looking good ;)

Shiva
03-26-2004, 05:33 PM
Much better. But using more GIFs or PNGs and less JPEGs would probably help the site look a lot better.

KingMike
03-26-2004, 08:24 PM
Maybe it's just the programs I use, but BMP->PNGs (formatted with PhotoShop LE5.0) seemed to give me much larger files, and BMP->GIF (created with MSPaint '98) seemed to really screw up the colors.

I also put up a news archive, partially from archive.org. I think I've fixed/deleted irrelevant links.

Gakre
03-27-2004, 05:52 AM
Originally posted by KingMike@Mar 27 2004, 03:54 AM
BMP->GIF (created with MSPaint '98) seemed to really screw up the colors.
have you tried to first save a new and empty/blank gif-file before copying the bmp-picture into the file?

Shiva
03-28-2004, 04:21 AM
Originally posted by KingMike@Mar 27 2004, 02:54 AM
Maybe it's just the programs I use, but BMP->PNGs (formatted with PhotoShop LE5.0) seemed to give me much larger files, and BMP->GIF (created with MSPaint '98) seemed to really screw up the colors.
Well there's your problem. Both of those are outdated and/or too simple. PhotoShop LE 5.0 probably only saves PNG files in the true colour (16.8 million colour) format. Paint '98 only saves GIFs using a fixed palette rather than making a new palette for each image (a problem that remains right into Paint XP). I use Paint Shop Pro 7.04 myself. While not the newest around, it gets the job done an gets me rather small files.

I've done some tests to compare the size of a rather average gameplay shot from Rockman & Forte for the SFC. It has 82 colours in it and is a rather average image.

First is a regular GIF file (http://home.graffiti.net/lillymon:graffiti.net/images/RnFTest.gif). 87a format (89a format yielded a file no smaller). It's got pixel-perfect quality, and came out as 14,929 bytes in size. Not bad really.

Next is the optimized (256 colour) PNG file (http://home.graffiti.net/lillymon:graffiti.net/images/RnFTest.png). Still pixel-perfect quality, but a much better 8,597 bytes in size. The extra compression of the PNG format really helps. Using one of the PNG optimization programs going around would probably make the file smaller still, but this is good enough.

Lastly, I decided to compress it as a JPEG file (http://home.graffiti.net/lillymon:graffiti.net/images/RnFTest.jpg) until it was small enough to be compared to the PNG. Compressing it to level 57 (level 1 is highest quality, level 99 is lowest) left me with a file 8,606 bytes in size. However, the quality is far from pixel-perfect this time.