Sunday, October 29, 2006

RetroEdit: Back again...

After a short break - where I more or less did nothing but sleep, I've come back to RetroEdit and decided to shuffle things around yet again. While it's been going fairly well one thing thats been lurking at the back of my mind is that I'm going to have to do this all again - but this time with characters. The one thing I hate doing is repeating the same work, even if its cut and paste job, its just horrible. So, I'm about to move the rendering part (and probably the editing side) over to a user control. In VB and C# you can write your own controls that you can then drop into your windows form. This is pretty handy since on most retro machines the rendering for sprites is the same as the rendering for characters. i.e. The Spectrum is still HIRES, the C64 still has HIRES and MCM - as does the +4. So, I'll move all this code into its own display (RetroBitmap) and then I'll be able to use it for drawing/editing both sprites and characters (or chars+tiles on the spectrum).

It also means that once released, others can simply swipe the .DLL file and use it themselves inside their own C# or VB project - which is also nice.

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