************************************************************* Gumby's Palette Tool (C) 1991 V1.1 ************************************************************* Programmed by Andrew Kreibich with AMOS (C) 1990 Mandarin/Jawx. INSTRUCTIONS: ************ This procedure currently supports the following features. DRAGBAR: This is the message (Gumby's Palette) at the top of the screen. Hold left mouse button down while you are over this and drag the palette screen up and down your screen. ABOUT: Work this out for yourself! RGB sliders: These work in the usual way, just click on the slider with the left mouse button and drag it along, or just click on the spot you want it to go to. Up to 32 colours are displayed in little boxes on the right of the screen. You can select two of these at any time. If the screen is EHB then the lower half of each box shows the extra half bright colour. Left mouse button selects the CURRENT colour. This will be changed by moving the slider bars. Right mouse button selects the TO colour. This is used by COPY, SPREAD and CYCLE, to copy, spread or cycle from the current colour to the TO colour, and also by SWAP to swap the current colour with the TO colour. The TO and CURRENT colours are outlined in different colours so that you can see them. It is possible that the colours used by these outlines are impossible to see because they are the same or similar to the colour YOUR programme uses in register 18. This is used by the procedure to draw the background around the colour boxes. If this is the case you can fix this by changing GPBGCOL1 to some other number at the start of the procedure. Similarly the background colour of the lower boxes can be changed by changing GPBGCOL2 to some other number if you are having trouble seeing the buttons. COLOUR Buttons: There are 6 of these, GET, COPY, SWAP, CYCLE, SPREAD and SKIP. These are selected with the left (and sometimes right) mouse button. COPY and SWAP are explained above. CYCLE. Press Left mouse button to cycle forward and right mouse button to cycle backwards. SPREAD spreads the colour from the current colour to the TO colour and works in conjunction with the SKIP button. If SKIP is 1 then the spread will skip 1 colour in between each one it spreads. Best way is to try it! I put this in because I thought it might be useful in a Mandelbrot type programme. SKIP can be any number you like providing it is between 0 and 9. I don't think it would be a very good idea to set it to a number greater than the number of colours between the two colours you are spreading between. This could cause some unpredictable results. Usually you will leave this set to zero. GET brings up a window with a number of preset colours. You can pick any colour to be changed into one of the preset colours. Pick your CURRENT GET colour by clicking it with the Left mouse button. This will not disturb your CURRENT and TO settings although the outlines on these boxes may disappear while the get window is open. (They will return when you close this window.) When you open this window the CURRENT GET colour will be set to colour number 2 (third from the left on the top row). If you don't want to change this colour then select a different one. The up and down arrows on the left move the list of colours up and down. P picks the colour in the middle of the box and changes your CURRENT GET colour to this. R assigns a random colour to your CURRENT GET colour. Cancel CURRENT returns your CURRENT GET colour to what it was before you opened the GET window. Cancel ALL returns all of the colours to what they were before you opened the GET window. QUIT quits the GET window. If you wish to add preset colours you can do so by adding more DATA statements at the start of the programme. These take the form:- DATA colourname,$RGB The only restrictions on these are. (a) colourname must be <= 14 characters including spaces (b) you must set GPGTNUM to 1 less that the number of colours that you wish GET to use. (c) $RGB is the RGB value for the colour in hex. Don't forget the $. PALLETE BUTTONS. There are three of these in V1.1 They are SPR, ICON, and DEF. (ICON is new in v1.1) SPR performs a Get Sprite Palette when you click it. The procedure checks to see if there is anything in the sprite bank (bank 1) and if you have no sprites then this button will be inactive. ICON performs a Get Icon Palette when you click it. The procedure checks to see if there is anything in the icon bank (bank 2) and will render this button inactive if the bank is empty. DEF Left mouse returns all colours to your programme's default colours providing you have loaded them into the array GPDEFPAL and you have set DEFFLAG to 1 (see VERY IMPORTANT below). DEF Right mouse selects the AMOS default palette unless you have previously used the AMOS 'DEFAULT PALETTE ' command in your programme,in which case it will use these values instead. If GPDEFFLAG=0 then clicking DEFAULT with the left mouse button will give you the same result as DEFAULT Right mouse button. Naturally, if you are silly enough to set GPDEFFLAG to 1 without filling the GPDEFPAL array first then all colours will be set to ZERO, and you will not see very much! PROGRAMMERS BEWARE! Exit CANCEL cancels all changes and returns you to your programme. Exit ACCEPT keeps all changes and returns you to your programme. ############ BUGS ############ My software does not contain bugs! It has been thoroughly tested and it works! It does however contain one slightly undesirable feature (an extra outline box over the right side of the slider bars) which pops up from time to time when you change colour boxes. It will quickly disappear when you chose another box or two and does not seem to affect the running of the programme. You will probably not even notice it. I have been unable to track down the cause of this because it happens so rarely. If you can give me any feedback on when this happens, its cause, or even better, a fix, I will be grateful. If you do happen to find any other undesirable features let me know. Regards, Andrew.