Editors

Editor Programs

The editor programs, PAINT, REPAINT, MAP and TILE, are designed to offer the user sufficient prompting. Here are some notes to help where things may not be so obvious.

General

• When a prompt shows the open or closed apple preceding a key, it usually means the apple key modifies the action in some way. So if you see both apple modifiers preceding some other key, it probably means this keystroke performs three different, but related, actions.
• The tab key is often used to cycle through prompts at the bottom of the screen.
• The dither pattern selector uses tab to cycle through the four color nibbles involved, arrows to select the color of that nibble, and space to commit the pattern
• The caret indicates the CTRL key, SPC means space bar, RET means return/enter key, ESC can cancel or simply exit depending on context

Painter

• This actually uses a "draw model", but the purpose is to achieve the look of a painting
• Drawing lines is subject to the well known pathologies of the Apple II screen, see here
• Trapezoids are more efficient than triangles: a triangle is composed to two degenerate trapezoids
• After you stroke a trapezoid, the handles are advanced so you can quickly extend it downward
• After you stroke a triangle, select the handle opposite the side where you wish to attach the next triangle, and move it into position

Mapper

• You can use the numeric keypad to move, including diagonally
• When tiles are loaded, they initially occupy the map workspace, before being stashed in bank 2. This is why the program will sometimes demand that it be restarted before re-loading tiles.
• There will be an "avatar" tile always displayed at the center of the map view. You can control which tile is used for this in settings.
• Denizens are (re)placed on the map using D, and removed using open-apple D. Using closed-apple D (re)places a denizen and also allows you to set the auxiliary data to a single-digit value. The program cannot stop you from using terrain as denizens or vice-versa. Mix-ups cannot be detected by eye, so an error checking program is likely important.
• If you are using some version of ProDOS that uses the area in bank 2 above $D400, there could be a problem. The Mapper saves this memory to disk before using it, and restores it upon exit, which hopefully mitigates any possible problems.

Tiler

• To edit a tile, select Modify from the main menu, then use the arrows to select a tile, and press RET
• Rearrange tiles by cutting and pasting in the Modify view.
• When cutting, the end of the selection range is chosen after pressing CTRL-X.

Repainter

• Selecting a range of commands is required before using the move command.
• When recoloring, you will be guided through each point in the command stream where the color is changed. After selecting one such command, a new 16 bit dither pattern is selected. The old color can be replaced with the new color either for this command, or for all commands.
• Recoloring will only affect portions of the screen where a color mask was actually used, i.e., colors created by individual pixel manipulations are not directly affected.