----------------------- PAL © 1991 by Robert D'Asto ----------------------- PAL is a Basic programmer's utility, a tool for designing palettes used in AmigaBASIC, AC/BASIC and HiSoft Basic programs. It provides for the editing of the full 32-color Basic palette plus the extended colors of HalfBrite Mode if desired. Palettes created with PAL can be saved as either Basic source code for inclusion in your own programs or as "PAL files" that can be reloaded into PAL for future editing. USING PAL I suggest running the program by double-clicking the PAL icon and playing with it a bit before reading all of this documentation file. Much of it should be self-explanatory. Just don't do any saving of palettes yet, as you might overwrite an existing file. PAL displays the full 32-color palette to the right of the screen along with each color register number. These numbers correspond to those used in the COLOR and PALETTE statements. The currently selected color is indicated by an arrow next to it and by a text/color display at the bottom of the screen. Selecting a new color is done by clicking on it with the mouse in the palette display area. On the left of the screen is a sketch pad which can be drawn on with the mouse in the currently selected color. Choose "Clear Sketch Pad" from the Project menu to erase it. The purpose of the sketch pad is to provide an area for doodling and rough sketching in the various palette colors so you can get a better idea of how they will look in your program. PAL is not a paint program, however, and only a single drawing tool is provided. Neither is there a provision for saving sketches. CREATING PALETTES Various tools are provided in the Edit menu for manipulating one or more palette colors. A single color can be changed by selecting "Adjust Selected Color". This pops up a color-adjustment window providing red, green and blue slider gadgets that can be adjusted with the mouse, which changes the selected color accordingly. The window itself can be moved around the screen by dragging it by its title bar and then clicking in it to restore its display. When finished adjusting a color with the sliders, either click on the "OK" gadget to close the window or select another color for adjustment from the palette display. Two palette colors can be swapped by selecting "Swap Two Colors" from the Edit menu. This changes the appearance of the mouse pointer and produces a "CANCEL" gadget at the bottom of the screen. Pick the two colors you wish to swap by clicking on them in the palette display. Clicking the cancel gadget cancels the operation if you change your mind. Similarly, the sequence of two or more palette colors can be reversed by selecting "Reverse Order Of Colors" and then clicking on the first and last color in the sequence of colors you wish reversed. A cancel gadget is also provided. The Edit menu items "Scale Colors" and "Blend Colors" are used to create various color scaling effects which can best be learned by experimenting with them. Both provide submenus for selecting a portion of the whole palette to be scaled or blended. Pop-up menus then display the various options that are available and these selections are made by clicking on them with the mouse or pressing the appropriate number key on the keyboard. The colors of the entire palette can be shifted up or down one position by selecting "Shift Palette" and the appropriate submenu item. The "Restore Default Palette" option clears any changes you have made to the palette and restores the default palette that existed when PAL was first started. "Undo Last Change" is a one-level undo feature. PAL remembers the palette as it was just before each change is made and this option can be used to restore that previous palette if you make a mistake or change your mind. It will only undo the last change. The Extras menu contains several other features. Selecting "HalfBrite Mode" will display the extended colors of this mode providing your Amiga has the special HalfBrite chip installed. All but some early A1000 models have this chip. The HalfBrite colors are an extension of the 32 colors of the basic Amiga palette. Their color numbers range from 32 to 63 and each is a half-intensity version of the basic 32 colors. This is a toggle type feature, selecting it again removes the HalfBrite colors. The "Show Menu Colors" feature creates a simulated menu display in the sketch pad demonstrating what a Basic program's menu will look like with the existing palette on screens of different depths in both normal and highlighted states. The "Auto Cycle" feature automatically cycles the selected color's hue until the "STOP" gadget is clicked. It runs through 96 basic hues from red to blue and back to red again for quick approximation of colors. Fine adjustments can then be made with the "Adjust Selected Color" slider gadgets. SAVING YOUR WORK A palette created with PAL can be saved as either Basic source code that can be inserted into your own programs or as a PAL file that can be loaded back into PAL at a later time for further editing. The "Save As" item in the Project menu is used for this purpose and provides a submenu with the above two choices. If you choose to save your palette as source code, a pop-up menu will appear providing two more options. The source code can be written as either 32 PALETTE statements that define the entire palette you have created, or as a more compact FOR/NEXT loop with DATA statements. The first option produces a longer file but one that is easier to edit later within your program's code if you decide to make minor changes. Once this decision is made, PAL'S file requester will appear displaying the currently mounted disks. The file requester is similar to many such devices found on Amiga programs. The path to the destination file is defined by clicking on Disk/Directory/File names in the center display area or by clicking in the appropriate string gadgets and typing in your choices. Other gadgets can be clicked to manipulate the currently displayed directory. When the desired path is chosen click the "OK" gadget or, to cancel the save, click the "CANCEL" box. If no file name is entered on a save, the file will be named "NONAME" by default. All palettes saved as PAL files will have a ".pal" extension appended to their names unless you provide this extension yourself. If no file name at all is entered, the file will be named "NONAME.pal" by default. PAL files can later be loaded by selecting "Load PAL File" from the Project menu and the file requester will appear, SHOWING ONLY THE FILES WITH THIS EXTENSION TO THEIR NAMES. When the PAL file is loaded the displayed palette will be changed to that of the loaded file and can be further edited with PAL's tools or saved as Basic source code. USING PAL'S MENU Many of the menu items have keyboard shortcuts. These items can be chosen in either the conventional manner using the right mouse button or via the keyboard by holding down the Right Amiga key and pressing the character key that is displayed next to that menu item. THE PAL DISPLAY PAL allows manipulation of all the Amiga's color registers, including those used by PAL in its own display. PAL does its best to keep track of the colors used in its display and switches those colors when needed to provide sufficient contrast for viewing the various gadgets and text. It is still possible, however, to render the PAL display unreadable --- changing every color of the palette to black, for example. If this should happen you can solve the problem by selecting the "Undo Last Change" feature via the keyboard by holding down the Right Amiga key and pressing the "X" key. This will restore the palette as it was before the last change and should provide you with a readable display. In addition, the palette displayed when PAL first starts has one variation from the default palette: color 31 is changed to black to provide more readable menus. ABOUT PAL PAL was written entirely with HiSoft Basic Professional version 1.05. It contains several enhanced menu features that are not directly supported by HSB such as menu subitems, highlight control, keyboard shortcuts, and pop-up menus. It also provides a file requester, which is not the ARP version but one I wrote myself with HSB that employs 15 Intuition gadgets. PAL and this documentation file are copyright products and may not be distributed without permission from the author. PALETTE TIPS, TRICKS, AND TRIVIA Here are some terms related to color that you might find useful. Hue: a color of the visible spectrum, e.g., red, orange, yellow, blue Tint: a hue with white added Shade: a hue with black added Tone: a hue with gray (black and white) added The hues are the "colors of the rainbow". They represent different frequencies of light waves in the visible spectrum. Red is at the low frequency end and violet is at the high end. Below red is infrared and above violet is ultraviolet. The major hues are ROYGBIV: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. White is all hues of light combined and black is no hues (no light). The color brown, as an example, is not a hue. It is a shade or tone of a hue that is approximately orange. Pink is a tint of red. The term "color" is broad and can encompass any hue, tint, shade, or tone combination. An attractive palette for a program is not always one containing a maximum number and variety of different colors. Often a palette of subtle variations is the most pleasing choice. Professional-looking displays for utility programs, for example, usually contain what I call a "shade triplet" comprised of one color of medium brightness flanked by a lighter and darker shade of the same color. This is how those embossed-look displays are created. Call the medium color M and the lighter and darker shades L and D. Here is how to create an embossed box: LLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLD LMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMD LMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMD LMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMD LMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMD LMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMD LDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD This gives the illusion of a raised area in the center with the right and lower edges in shadow and the upper and left edges catching the light. Many variations of this theme are possible and more complex shadings can be done with a greater number of scaled colors. The color of the mouse pointer is defined by colors 16, 17, 18 and 19. Color 16 is always displayed as transparent so nothing will happen to the pointer if you change it. Changing colors 17-19 will change the pointer's colors. It doesn't matter if your program's screen has a depth that can display only 16 or fewer colors, you can still change the color of the pointer by using PALETTE statements that address color registers 17, 18, or 19. The menu colors displayed in Basic programs depend on the colors in use by the window's border and title text. The default colors for Basic windows are 0 and 1, the window borders are COLOR 1 and the text displayed in the title bar is done with COLOR 0. These are the same colors used for unhighlighted menu items: COLOR 0 text on a COLOR 1 background. Highlighted menu items are displayed in the "complements" of these colors. Complements work like this: The complement of the lowest COLOR number (always 0) is the highest COLOR number that can be displayed with the current screen depth. For example, a screen with a depth of 2 can display 4 possible colors numbered 0- 3. The complement of COLOR 0 on that screen would be the highest displayable color, which would be COLOR 3. The complement of the second color (1) is the second highest color number or COLOR 2 and so on. Increasing the screen's depth changes the resulting complements. For example, changing the depth to 3 means 8 colors can be displayed numbered 0-7. The complement of COLOR 0 becomes COLOR 7 and the complement of COLOR 1 becomes COLOR 6 and so on. This is why the colors used to highlight menu items change as the screen depth changes. It is possible to change the colors used for windows from the default 0 and 1, which would also change the colors used in the menus. Here is a sub that does this. Using the sub requires that the intuition library be opened first and that requires the intuition.bmap file in the LIBS directory of your Work-bench disk or in the same directory as the program that uses this sub. Here it is in AmigaBASIC: LIBRARY "intuition.library" 'needed at the top of your source SUB WindowColors(WindowNum%,border%,title%) STATIC WINDOW OUTPUT WindowNum% POKE WINDOW(7)+99,border% POKE WINDOW(7)+98,title% RefreshWindowFrame WINDOW(7) END SUB The first parameter is the number of the window you wish to change. The last two are the desired border color and text color respectively. Try it. It's nice to get away from the same old default window colors now and then. HalfBrite is a special 64-color Amiga display mode employing a screen with a depth of six. HalfBrite Mode screens are easily created with HiSoft BASIC and can be done with AC and AmigaBASIC with a bit more work. In HSB a Half-Brite screen is created with a single line of code, as follows: SCREEN 1,320,200,6,1,&H80 HSB HalfBrite screens defined with the SCREEN statement must be low-res, non-interlaced. Don't forget the "6" depth parameter and the "&H80" type parameter. Incidentally, a HAM Mode (4096-color) screen is done in nearly the same way, the only difference is the type parameter, which is &H800 rather than &H80, but that's another story. HAM screens are complex and space does not permit a full explanation of their use here. A HalfBrite screen can be created with AC and AmigaBASICs but a special subprogram is required. The sub uses an intuition library routine and a function from the graphics library, so both of these libraries must be opened before the sub can be called. This requires the files "intuition.bmap" and "graphics.bmap" in the LIBS directory of your Workbench disk or in the same directory as the program source. First open the libraries and declare the function like this: LIBRARY "intuition.library" LIBRARY "graphics.library" DECLARE FUNCTION AllocRaster&() LIBRARY Then set up a lo-res screen with a depth of 5 and open a window like this: SCREEN 1,320,200,5,1 WINDOW 1,,,16,1 The screen must have a width of 320 and a depth of 5. The window can be of any type, but you must open a window. Then call the following sub to convert the screen to HB mode: SUB HalfBriteMode STATIC IF WINDOW(7)=0 THEN EXIT SUB BitMap&=PEEKL(WINDOW(7)+46)+184 IF PEEK(BitMap&+5) <> 5 THEN PRINT "Must have depth 5 screen" EXIT SUB END IF plane6&=AllocRaster&(320,200) IF plane6&=0 THEN PRINT "Insufficient Memory For HB Mode" EXIT SUB END IF POKEL BitMap&+28,plane6& POKE BitMap&+5,6 ModeAddr&=PEEKL(WINDOW(7)+46)+76 POKEW ModeAddr&,2^7 CALL RemakeDisplay& END SUB The sub creates the sixth bitplane, attaches it to the 5-bitplane screen already opened with the SCREEN statement, and signals the system to operate in the HalfBrite display mode. It requires no parameters and a SCREEN CLOSE statement at the end of the program will close the screen. Drawing on an HB screen is done in the normal fashion except that you may now specify any COLOR from 0 to 63 in the Basic graphics statements. COLOR 32 will be a half-intensity version of COLOR 0, COLOR 33 will be half of COLOR 1 and so on. When designing an HB palette keep the basic colors 0-31 in the higher intensity ranges, otherwise there will be little or no noticeable difference between the basic colors and the HB colors. The HalfBrite colors (32-63) cannot be changed directly with the PALETTE statement. END OF TEXT