There's a badass app from Nitro Character Studio that converts images/bmp/tga to character map format. 16color text mode with 16 sub palettes. Does automatic tile color/sub palette sorting and such. From the output I've seen, it's damn impressive. The catch being that it's licenses software for NDS only, so there's no chance for the public/homebrew of every purchasing this. My question is if there is any other purchaseable apps out there like this? I've written my own, but it's nowhere near as nice as the output of nitro-character. It's not that I'm interested in NDS development, it's that I would love to be able to use this for PCE dev (and lesser extend SNES and Genesis). Minus tile flipping, NDS text mode and number of palettes match up perfectly with PCE (16color x 16 palettes for BG tiles). -Tom
Pro Motion http://www.cosmigo.com/promotion/index.php or DPaint for that oldskool feel But for NES/SNES I personally use YY-Chr
AFAIK, none of those apps do the conversion I'm talking about. The conversion I'm talking about is lossy; image/bitmap -> tilemap/tile/palette. It does palette and pixel/tile sectioning, sort, color reduction/replacement, etc.
Promotion can do this, except it's a bit buggy. I was able to get the author to fix it, but it still seems to have some issues. A few more tweaks, and it would be golden for this. Nitro character does that? Hmm, I use it at work all the time, but have never looked into it enough to find that.
Ohh? :icon_bigg How good are the results? Got any pic conversion(s) to show? $80 is definitely work the price for the app if they can get it to a pretty decent state. Thanks for additional info, Charles. I'll check out the demo then. Yup, for palette16x16(iirc). I know of someone that did that for some hicolor/hires pics and then converted it to PCE output. Looked great. (I've looked at ntexconv and that doesn't do it. Only handles palette256x16 or palette16). Btw, I read that OPTPiX iMageStudio for NDS also has such a converter (not sure on the quality) but again... that part of the software package is only available to licensees of NDS software. Dammit.
I get the feeling the ProMotion palette optimizations were initially designed to support color palettes of the game boy color. I don't have any of the original stuff that I did with it. The biggest problems I have with it now, is that it doesn't treat index 0 as transparent (in each 16 color palettes), regardless of the options selected. And, that it won't use all of the colors in a palette. Maybe with some examples from other people, he might refine it more. I've heard OPTPix is horribly expensive.
I tried it out. Yeah, I noticed that. It wasn't bad though. Considering... there's basically no other option for something like this.
This program was just suggested over at NESDev: Quither. What do you think of it? http://deku.rydia.net/program.html
