I have looked around but been unable to find anything that clearly describes how best to utilise the colour table features of Picotron. I may just have missed it so if you know of a good resource please feel free to redirect me!

So I was looking into the colour tables and from what I know so far, its a lookup table that describes which colour to use when colouring a pixel. By default I know that drawing over a colour with another (drawing red over blue for example) will just result in the new colour being placed, replacing the previous colour (so the pixel is now red in my example).

I know that other colour blending techniques could take advantage of this, however I cant seem to figure out how to modify the values in the table. In a game I'm working on for example I would like to be able to draw a 'shadow' that is essentially just an oval using a predefined 'shadow colour', and it would darken each pixel it draws over by 1 'unit'.

I suspect I would need to alter the values for the shadow colours 'row ' or 'column' in the colour table so it returns a different value but figuring out how is a mystery!

[ Continue Reading.. ]

I'm just curious how you might save data easily that would otherwise be a bit much for the usual 64 number limit of dset/dget. I am trying to store high scores and have tried a lot of things and just ended up confused, the data format is something like:

AAA - time (minutes:seconds) - clicks
(1 byte per letter) - (1 for m, 1 for s) - 1 for clicks <---when I tried poke this is how I approached it

I wish to store different scores for each difficulty so people can compete at different levels and probably about 10 scores per difficulty (though I don't mind going lower if I have to). I tried dset and dget but it didn't provide enough spaces for data, and so I was looking at peek and poke, I should be able to store it no problem then but then how do I make the data persistent? even though I saved to the persistent data area in memory, it is empty when I reload the game, do I need cstore? and if so, I read that that doesn't work with browser played games so it isn't really going to work for me either right?

[ Continue Reading.. ]

Is there any way of editing the spritesheet at runtime so that I can use the spritesheet as the save location for a game?

The game consists of a 32x32 grid but each grid can have many states so figured I could store that as binary, but that doesn't really work well with the cart data limitations. So I figured if I can store the information to the spritesheet, I'm just utilising the memory available there but I cant seem to find much documentation on the matter. I know there is sget/sset but when I used that the screen had alternating colour lines appear... (I think I was putting it on the lower half of the spritesheet if that might be part of the issue?)

Maybe a text file would be better?