I have written a small application that can help MSX developers to design graphic tiles for their games.
The graphic tiles are meant to be used under SCREEN 1 mode
Here are some features:

* Edit 8x8, 8x16, 16x8 and 16x16 tiles
* Add/Edit/Delete multiple tiles at once
* Available functions: Rotate left/right, Flip Horizontal/Vertical, Invert tile, Cut, Copy And Paste
* Load and save your tiles onto the hard disk
* Can export tiles to a MSX Basic program automatically. It handles your new tiles without having to write a single line of code. All you have to do is to put a GOSUB <LINE NUMBER> into your program to load them in memory.


Here's a screenshot of the Tile designer:




And here's a screenshot of what you can do with it:



You can download MSX Tile Editor here: www.cescoware.com/altro/msx/msxtile100.zip

I wrote the application with Visual Basic 6. I've not included any library in the compressed archive, so it may not work on some machines.

extend it to edit screen 2 tiles and groups of tiles

And add also asm support! Very easy, just convert the DATA &hXX to DB XXh. Guess it will be very useful too for assembler developers!

perhaps, but *please* use a real canvas, not those (I guess) on/off buttons for the drawing.. you can only draw by clicking all the way now and not even on the border of those 'buttons'..

It's a cool tool. I'll put a link to it in my Downloads Section

Ok. I've tried it and I like it, but there are some things that I should mention:

- No colours for a tile designer? A full tile requieres a pattern and palette data too.
- Cannot be used directly for 16x16 sprites, because the order is top left, top right, bottom left and bottom right. For sprites is should be top left, bottom left, top right and bottom right.
- Support for other numeric formats, not only decimal but also hexa at least.

A cool tool that I'm sure that will be even better on the next version!

And just another detail:

9004 FOR I = BASE(7)+512 TO BASE(7)+799
9005 READ A: VPOKE I,A: NEXT I
9006 DATA 253,2,2,239,16,16,16,191,255,0,0,239,16,16,16,255,64,64,255,1,247,8,8,8,0,255,0,0,255,0,0,0
...
9014 DATA 0,85,0,85,0,85,0,95,0,85,1,85,1,85,1,245,10,93,14,87,0,85,0,127,241,117,177,229,1,85,1,255
9015 RETURN

Would be even better if the return goes just before the DATAs. And you can speed it up by using:

- Integer variables (DEFINT)
- Using a constant for the BASE value instead of calling the function everytime
- Compute the value of the addition BASE+512

But I really like the look and feel of the program! That's why I'm posting all these suggestions

Quote:

- No colours for a tile designer? A full tile requieres a pattern and palette data too.

Because it was originally meant to be a Tile editor for old (B&W) palmpilot games that I've written almost 5 years ago; I've just fixed some stuff in order to have it working with MSX standards. And because until yesterday night I didn't know where to VPOKE to change tile colors

I'll add a basic color support in the very next release

Quote:

- Cannot be used directly for 16x16 sprites, because the order is top left, top right, bottom left and bottom right. For sprites is should be top left, bottom left, top right and bottom right.

I'll fix this bug in the next release

Quote:

- Support for other numeric formats, not only decimal but also hexa at least.

Ok, I'll try to implement it

Quote:

And just another detail: ...

Thank you very much for these suggestions

you can speed it up also by putting the for loop in one line and removing the "I" following the next

try something like this:

DEFINT a-z
...
FORI=XTOY:READ A:VPOKE I,A:NEXT
RETURN

Quote:

perhaps, but *please* use a real canvas, not those (I guess) on/off buttons for the drawing.. you can only draw by clicking all the way now and not even on the border of those 'buttons'..

They are already PictureBoxes, in the next release I'll deactivate their border

picture 'boxes' .. that's the problem then.. it should be one big picturebox, not 256 individual ones..

I've just updated MSX Tile Designer to version 1.11




What's new:

- Colour support (Foreground & Background, remember that you can only change the colour of 8 characters at once, so if you have four 16x16 tiles to colorize you can only put two different colors, as a 16x16 tile requires four characters to be displayed so 4 * 4 = 16 ---> 16 / 8 = 2 Colors).

- The generated code should be a little faster, thanks to your suggestions

- As requested, now 16x16 tiles are generated in this order: top left, bottom left, top right, bottom right. So they can be also used as sprites.

- Now you can show / hide the grid


You can download it from here: www.cescoware.com/altro/msx/msxtile111.zip

Quick fix:

Download v1.12 from here: www.cescoware.com/altro/msx/msxtile112.zip

Version v1.15

- Fixed some bugs and added the support for hexadecimal output

Download v1.15 from here: www.cescoware.com/altro/msx/msxtile115.zip