Commander X16

I wanted to post this earlier. But I had a power outage today. Lost 5 hours . The main source file is written in BASIC but it does load machine code for the sound track. Demonstrating @MooingLemurs ZSMKIT for BASIC.

Because it does load Machine code the program does a RESET rather than just END. I didn't know any other way to make sure the Machine was left in a predictable state. Besides ZSMKIT this program is written entirely in BASIC.

Its a good demonstration of what the Commander X16 can display with an optimized Pallette for each Image, and takes advantage of our huge disk space (There are 250 images for a total of about 20 mb). It also shows how to use ZSMKIT in BASIC.

All images were prepared either with Paint Shop Pro 3.11 on my XP Box, or (mostly once I got going) with an ImageMagick convert command. Once converted to a 320x240 8 bit inverted Windows BMP they were converted to BVLOAD format with an accompanying VPAL.BIN (holds the Pallette Info), with a BASIC program I also wrote (included here also)

I plan to capture a Video with the parameters set to SEQUENTIAL/END/FAST and post it to Youtube when I run this on Hardware. When I get that accomplished I'll post the link here.

HERES THE YOUTUBE VIDEO:


In the spirit of RETRO Computing the capture was done on 19 year old Hardware. My Sony P4 has a GigaPocket recorder. A PCI Mpeg 2 encoder .


THE APPROPRIATE IMAGEMAGICK COMMAND TO DO THE CONVERSION
convert INFILEIMG.EXT -resize 320x240! -flip -compress none -depth 8 -type palette BMP3:IN.BMP

NOTE: Requires R44. Didn't realize that until today when I tried to run on Hardware. So, I finally flashed my ROM. worked OK. I always sweat flashing firmware



The slideshow starts with a text based menu to choose some parameters.
Once the slideshow is running it has the following controls.

SPACEBAR - If music is playing toggles Music ON/OFF
DOWN ARROW - Reduces music VOLUME
UP ARROW - Should Increase VOLUME but doesn't work (@MooingLemur ----- Maybe take a peek at this ?? )
ESC KEY - Prompts for program Exit



SLIDESHOW UPDATE
Cleaned up some minor text menu inconsistencies, and changed to using the thin PETSCII font
Dropped GUILE.ZSM 3 people reported playback issues
Added STAGE.ZSM recently added on the Forum and Discord
Now 500 images almost 37mb's
added ability to Type in a new ZSM file name, though with no error checking. An invalid entry will stop the program.



NEW UPDATE
In PROGRAMMING under BMP 2 BVLOAD CONVERTOR
Native Linux program to do the entire image conversion with one command. Derived from the CBM convert code
but written in QB64 and just one command from the Linux command line will convert almost any image into a IMG.BIN
and VPAL.BIN for the 320x240 X 256 color graphics mode. ImageMagick must also be installed.


THIS IS THE 2ND REVISION WITH 500 IMAGES
HERES THE SLIDESHOW
INCLUDES BOTH THE TEXT SOURCE "SLIDE.BAS" AND A LOADABLE FILE "SLIDE.PRG" BMP2BVLOAD Source BMP2BVLOAD Loadable Program

These images came out great. That's a neat little fading effect too. The only issue I noticed was the sound slowing down a bit and getting a little static-y when a new picture is loaded. Not a lot, mind you, just a bit. But I suspect that's an issue of the ZSM player and the BVLOAD commands interacting funny.

The fade code is actually pretty simple. I'm just zeroing out the VERA Pallette RAM. Setting every single color to black.

45100 FOR A = $FA00 TO $FBFF
45110        VPOKE 1, A, 0
45120 NEXT A
45130 RETURN

Also the Image Data is BVLOADED before the Pallette Data while the Pallette is still blacked out. So you don't see the progressive load of the 72k image data. The BVLOAD of the 512 byte Pallete file is extremely fast so the Image just appears.

I noticed the little static when I loaded using the Emulator on Linux. But, not a crackle on hardware. Rock Solid.

An edited post doesn't show as new. So this post is just to draw attention to my edit and new upload on the Main post.