About
A sprite editor from the first issue of Einstein User, November 1984, by Kevin Salt. Move a cursor over an enlarged 16x16 grid with the arrow keys, toggle pixels with SPACE, and read off the four SHAPE strings for your sprite as you draw. ESC exits.
The listing was printed across pages 26 to 28 of the magazine, which is on this site as Tatung Einstein User Vol 1.No.1. This disc saves you typing it in.
Running it
Boot the disc, type XBAS, then LOAD "SPRITEDM" and RUN.
Two copies are on the disc
SPRITED is the listing exactly as printed. SPRITEDM is the same with three lines changed, and it is the one to run.
As printed, only DOWN works. The program tests INCH for 4, 8, 10 and 11, which is what the magazine's own Hints and Tips table gives for the cursor keys, but the machine returns 93, 91, 10 and 94. SPRITEDM accepts both sets; nothing else differs. SPRITED is kept as the faithful copy of the listing.
What is in the download
A zip holding the disc image as a DSK, the same disc as an MFI for MAME to write to, both programs as BASIC text and as tokenised Xtal BASIC, and a README.
Verified
Transcribed from the scan and run on the Einstein in MAME 0.289 with Xtal BASIC 4.2 and MOS 1.2. The quadrant unfolding was checked by setting pixels in all four quadrants and reading the hex strings back: every value matched what the program's logic predicts, in the order the video chip uses for 16x16 sprites. Two glyph corrections were needed where the magazine's printer drew the at sign as a section mark and the caret as an up arrow. Not run on real hardware.
The program is Kevin Salt's, published in Einstein User in 1984.
Screenshots
