During this time I've been working on ADGE, just a little app still in development, but I need some assistance.
ADGE stands for "Atari Dungeonmaster Graphics.dat Editor", it is designed to read atari CSB/DM graphics.dat files (the ones used by CSB4win), modify graphics, adjust values of the RAW files 558-562, and basically edit all 'aspects of the file. I'd say 95% of graphics.dat is editable at this point (5% being a few bytes from files 558,559, and 560, and all of files 561 and 562). I've been using Charlatan (sp?)'s notes on file 558 and doing my best to interpret them But I do not know how to read french (if it is french?). I've interpreted most of the notes but theres a few things I'd like to know:
Charlatans Note files:
_0558 - octets 0595-0650.txt: bytes 619 to 650. Can someone translate this?
_0558 - octets 1559-1642.txt: description of octet 2
_0558 - octets 1643-2152.txt: description of octet 2
_0558 - octets 3035-3206.txt: pretty much everything here
Files 561 and 562, if anyone knows anything about them feel free to post any scraps of knowledge, anything will help! As far as I know though, its mostly RectPos's which is just a matter of spending the time to track down each ones' features (I can do most of it).
If your curious about ADGE heres a few screenshots of what it is now (I'm still working on it daily trying to translate every single byte of the graphics.dat file !=])
old link: http://www.qwplayers.org/~rain/adgepics/
I changed the custom palette for monsters special colors to make a 'grey' just to see a grey worm and the effects it has when mixed in with a dragon's graphic (It modifies the image's colors during runtime, allowing you to see what happens without having to save, load up CSB4win, find the monster, etc). It was built on top of CSBEdit, a previous tool I created so you will find alot of similarities.full donwloads page: :
http://dmweb.free.fr/?q=node/906 - newest version
http://www.resonantedge.com/downloads/rain/ - older versions
(This download link added to first post -b.)
Also: I'm having a LOT of trouble with LZW decompression using Visual Basic. I actually tried copying ChristopheF's LZW decompression code from his VB script to decompress graphics.dat files but I got an error with the dictionary object (something about a key with the value already existing). I changed a few things and now It hacks up the content but matches the size correctly. If anyone wants to help me out and write me a VB function to decompress LZW compressed data feel free! =]
-rain`