Overview

The screen is split into three main parts: a Character Editor, a Screen Editor and an Import/Export area. It’s designed to allow the character editor and screen editor to work in conjunction to create screen designs. The data can then be exported and used in your code.

The top of the screen contains three selector boxes used to set the three Vic global registers for background, border and auxiliary colours. Changing these will affect the entire display. Also shown are controls to adjust the screen geometry: Number of rows, number of cols and whether double height 16x8 mode is required. Be aware Adjustments to screen geometry will wipe the current data.It is possible to resize a screen by copying all the characters, adjusting the size and then pasting them back - see copy paste functions below.

Character View

The character view comprises a representation of a UDC (user defined character) which can be set by clicking on the table below it or the screen on the left. The character bits can be set by left clicking the mouse or cleared with a right click. (If toggle mode is enabled on the settings tab, the same button can be used to select/deselect a bit). The operations of the buttons should be fairly self explanatory.

The status line at the top shows the currenly selected character index and the number of times it has been used (on any screen).

The intended character attributes define what will happen when you draw the character to the screen (i.e. what colours and multicolour mode will be applied). These are stored transiently and get updated either intentionally or when clicking on a screen location using that character. The radio style buttons determine which colour to use to colour pixels in the character view and show either two or four available colours (depending on whether multicolour is on).

The ROM bank select control chooses between two sets of ROM characters for Column 2(original) of the table. This column defines, what happens when a character is 'reverted' to its original ROM version. "Revert all characters to ROM" - will as implied reset all character data from the currently selected ROM bank.

Rows on the table can be selected by shift/click. The buttons at the bottom of the table operate on the selection. Paste updates rows at the start of the selection, Swap pair will swap the first two selected rows. Select all, selects all rows in the table.

Screen View

The screen view represents the Vic Screen as you would expect. It has three display modes:

The "screen no:" dropdown control allows the selection of one of a number of screens (currently 5). Tip: this can be useful for testing animations by pasting different versions of a sprite/tile into the same position on consecutive screens and then cycling around them by clicking the drop down and using Ctrl + up/down arrow keys.

The screen has two modes currently (draw and select). Select allows marquee rectangle selection of character cells to perform operations on, select mode also allows typing (see below). Draw mode will apply the current character at the mouse location when the left mouse button is held down, whereas a right click of a cell in draw mode will clear it.

There are several buttons under the screen

Operation Mask

All operations use the mask (defined by the check boxes) to restrict what is updated on the screen. Using a comination of these, it is possible to for example recolour existing characters; remove multi-colour etc. Note, these are applied for draw and fill operations and don't affect pasting or typing. Typing always aplies the current "intended colour" and multicolor=off. Pasting applies the values in the paste buffer at the time the cells were copied. Please experiment!

Typing in Select Mode

Characters can be typed to the screen using the keyboard. The way characters are displayed is defined by a keyboard map in settings (see below). Typing supports line wrap, and cursor movement using the arrow keys, backspace and delete.Be careful with backspace, it will invoke the browser's back function and may result in loss of work. To avoid this possiblity open the editor from a destop shortcut so that there are no files in the browser session history.

Shortcut Keys

The following shortcut keys are supported but may not work properly in all browsers due to invoking native browser functions.

Data Import/Export

Loading and saving is achieved by choosing a file or pasting text into the text area and then clicking ‘Load Text’. Saving is the reverse i.e. click ‘Generate Text’ then the “Save Text” link to save to local storage.

Importing

First select the required file using the "Choose File" button, the file should be of type: ".txt". Then click "Load Text". The following options are available to control loading:

When loading a file, the character attributes in the table (colour/multi colour) are inferred from usage on the screen.

Exporting

To export simply set the required settings and click "Generate Text". This will populate the area with text representing the on-screen characters and the UDCs and then present a "Save Text.." link to allow the contents to be saved. The following options are available:

Empty screens (defined by containing only space[32] characters) are not saved when exporting

Settings Tab

General

The settings tab allows control of the toggle behaviour as described above.

Key mapping

This section allows the user to control how key presses are translated into displayed CBM characters

The format is keypress:CBMkeycode,[keycode:CBMChar] - repeated for each mapping required. To create keymappings, copy the current mapping to an external editor, edit as required and paste back into the text area and click 'Save'. To determine how to setup key mappings, you can observe browser keycodes as you type by opening the console window (Ctrl+Shift+I) in chrome/firefox where the key codes are logged as you type into the screen view

The "Default" button loads the default settings for this session, the "Mixed Case" button loads a mapping for handling the mixed case character set (ROM Bank 1) for the current session. In all cases the "Save" button will need to be used to make the changes permanent.

To use mixed case text perform the following actions

MINIPAINT IO tab

This tab allows the import/export of MINIPAINT (a native Vic-20 paint/drawing package) -(google MINIPAINT vic 20) - drawings. Load and save these with the apropriate buttons. The "New MINIPAINT Drawing" button sets, the geometry for MINIPAINT so that you can create a new compatible drawing. Please note that is a BITMAP mode where each character on the screen is a unique 16x8 character. All drawing should therefore be undertaken in the character editor window. [Undo/ReDo will not work in this mode as it is based upon updates to character/colour RAM which don't occur in this mode].

Please note: