I’ve been doing some blog posts on The Industrious Rabbit on how older computers manage their memory, and with some of the research I’ve been doing into the NES and the Amiga, I’ve wanted to mess around with a fantasy console platform. I decided to get into messing with TIC-80. I had wanted to experiment with PICO-8, but I also wanted Android export and wanted to support an open source project as well.
I decided for my first project to try a few things:
- Import an image
- Do scanline palette changing
- Write an audio track
- Do a stupid text thing
Here’s some things I learned:
- Image importing is
.gifonly. The colors in the image when you import them will match the built in game’s palette as best as possible. Which means that, if you have a 4 color GIF, color 0 in the GIF may not become color 0 in the imported sprite. - In the music editor, the tracks are the individual tunes, the rows dictate the length of each frame in the track, and a frame is a collection of notes, kind of like a group of measures.
- You’ll need to put rests inbetween notes to get notes to turn on and off.