This is nothing but a simple and barebones application (which I've quickly written in WinForms because I don't know any other application framework which allows me to get a project up and going like this) which lets me make graphics for games and applications running in the famous MCGA/VGA 256-color mode (aka Mode 13h).
It uses it's own format, which you read about in the SaveImage_Click
function in MainForm.cs. It has a header (TGRV
), followed by two 16-bit integers (ushort
) for width and height, finally the raw binary data.
You can use it for drawing true to platform limits artwork and export it into a PNG (but why would you do that when you have Photoshop, Paint.net and GIMP?)
It's not as feature complete as I'd like, but below is a wishlist of quality features I'd like to add.
- Import and export to and from PNG, JPEG and other common image formats;
- A simple to understand file format for loading images onto older systems;
- Limited, but customisable 256-color palette;
- Generic any-palette importer and a faster optimised HSV calculator for the VGA palette
- Refactoring (de-spaghetti-ing the code)
- Image importer plugin support
- More tools (flood fill is in, but rectangles and lines are not)