RGAS palette export to (cpctelera) code

[teopl]

Hello!

Can someone help me with exporting palette from RGAS to firmware (or hardware) values which I could then automatically embed in (cpctelera) code?

I have found where the palette info is stored in .rgas file:

  "Inks": {
    "$type": "System.Byte[], mscorlib",
    "$value": "AAkTGQ8FEBcUAwYCBwEEGg=="
  }

but I did not manage to reverse engineer it... 

[Duke]

I have found where the palette info is stored in .rgas file:

  "Inks": {
    "$type": "System.Byte[], mscorlib",
    "$value": "AAkTGQ8FEBcUAwYCBwEEGg=="
  }

but I did not manage to reverse engineer it... 

Looks like base64 encoding, you can use ie. this online converter to decode it into hex values: https://cryptii.com/pipes/base64-to-hex
Which will return:
00 09 13 19 0f 05 10 17 14 03 06 02 07 01 04 1a
For your above "value".

[teopl]

Thanks Duke, that is exactly that!

[teopl]

And if someone needs a bash one-liner for this:

Code Select Expand


base64 -d <<< AAkTGQ8FEBcUAwYCBwEaBA== >foo.bin && cpct_bin2c foo.bin -an g_palette >palette.c && rm foo.bin


Result:

Code Select Expand


// File foo.bin converted using cpct_bin2c
const unsigned char g_palette[16] = {
0x00, 0x09, 0x13, 0x19, 0x0f, 0x05, 0x10, 0x17, 0x14, 0x03, 0x06, 0x02, 0x07, 0x01, 0x1a, 0x04
};


[awergh]

When I wanted the palette I just copied down the hex values on the Ink Select screen (standard palette) and then plugged them into a program I wrote to convert them to the correct values to put into cpctelera but your way might be easier.

[teopl]

Well, I really like automation

There is a lot of info (maybe all?) which you can extract from .rgas file easily since it's a text file.

I used this to detect output format, mode, palette, sprite dimensions...

Also, I am using rgas.exe from command line to generate .c source with graphics and (as of today) even levels! (didn't know levels can be drawn and exported in rgas, very cool)

Code Select Expand

./rgas/RGAS.1.2.5.EXE ${SPRITE_INPUT} ${SPRITE_OUTPUT_C}

One thing which bothered me is why rgas is generating 2 times more data then needed, but I solved it by removing it...

So, for example this:

Code Select Expand

const unsigned char G_round_01[34] = {
    0x04, 0x08,
    0xCC, 0x30, 0x33, 0xC0,
    0x88, 0x70, 0x11, 0xE0,
    0x11, 0xE0, 0x88, 0x70,
    0x33, 0xC0, 0xCC, 0x30,
    0x33, 0xC0, 0xCC, 0x30,
    0x11, 0xE0, 0x88, 0x70,
    0x88, 0x70, 0x11, 0xE0,
    0xCC, 0x30, 0x33, 0xC0};

is an 8x8 pixels sprite in mode 1, so there should be 4 pixels per byte i.e it should take 64/4=16 and not 4*8=32 bytes...
(first two values are sprite dimensions - width in bytes, height in pixels)

So I just removed every second column...

Or maybe I don't understand this fully, there may be some alpha channel or something else... Anyway, it works, so I will leave it for now

[awergh]

Automation is great  , I don't think I've ever had enough time to consider it for my projects.
I've always used rgas in a very manual way, same for when I've built an editor I manually save the output .c and .h files and put them into the project.
However I do refer that it makes the code very easy to distribute and build as opposed to requiring a bunch of utilities to build the thing.


Doesn't look like the author of rgas has been around lately unfortunately.
http://www.cpcwiki.eu/forum/programming/retro-game-asset-studio-beta/

I have though about whether I could contribute to development when I feel like something different but I guess he isn't around at the moment so that stops that as as I gather rgas is in a private repo somewhere so not quite public open source.