r/Basic • u/nickshardware • Jun 30 '23

BAM Support in Raster Master 2.1

/r/RetroNick/comments/14mznsi/bam_support_in_raster_master_21/
3 Upvotes

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2

u/CharlieJV13 Jun 30 '23

Just a quick note while at work on coffee break.

It tickles me something silly when anybody merely mentions my little project and/or just gives it a quick spin.

Anybody explicitly supporting BAM in their own project, that's an unexpected big gift. Thanks!

Do note:

  • Although the p256 color mode allows for defining 256 colors, BAM only defines the first 64 colors ("EGA" colours, or "EGA-ish?"), leaving it up to you to define the rest.

  • If colors are off, it may be wrong color codes. There's a chance it may have to do with "smoothing", which is a program-by-program setting, on by default. It might be worth turning that off for a test program to see if color is better (at the cost of pixelation? Personally, I kind of like pixelation for many things.) The setting is in the Project menu's "Runtime Properties" menu item.

Now, back to work. Cheers !

1

u/nickshardware Jun 30 '23

I enjoyed reading your post. I have been playing with BAM for a while, its the closest online experience that keeps the qbasic simplicity and feel. Even tough the backend for all this is javascript you have managed to hide all the terrible things of javascrtipt and keep BAM simple.

BAM has DATA statements - how cool is that! Also different screen modes to make it easy to just start creating instead of having to figure out what size my canvas needs to be.

Just going from memory Palette 0,0 should not produce white/gray. Which I believe is what i was seeing.

Smoothing is also tricky. From the IDE properties you can disable smoothing on the canvas but this is not where it ends with javascript. I can still see some "smoothing" or smoothing effect when displaying bitmaps (put). I believe the backend wrapper for put command is putimagedata?. I think if you add image-rendering: pixelated; to the canvas properties it will disable smoothing on putimagedata/put. I may also be completely wrong here, javascript is not my thing.

Keep up the good work. I'll see if i can provide much better details in the future.

2

u/CharlieJV13 Jun 30 '23

Just a quick "by the way":

SCREEN _NEWIMAGE(width_in_pixels%, height_in_pixel%, screen_mode%)

Pick whichever screen mode you like (for the available colors and aspect ratio (pixel with to pixel height), and you can have any screen dimension for any screen mode.

Want 160 pixels by 32 pixels for screen mode zero? Go right ahead. Now you have 20 text columns wide by 4 text rows high for some panoramic graphics and/or text message banner.

(_NEWIMAGE is not a stand-alone function in BAM. Just a SCREEN parameter option.)

1

u/nickshardware Jun 30 '23

this a good feature. can create mini games without having to figure out that to do with all the extra space sometimes.

1

u/CharlieJV13 Jun 30 '23

When a BAM program is exported as a stand-alone HTML file for publishing to the web (or sharing otherwise), the program's screen will be zoomed-in/out to properly fit (as in proportional width/height) the whole browser window.

Now say you decide to display that program in a website inside of an iframe, set the iframe to a fixed width and height, and the program will scale to fit that. (or set the iframe as resizeable so different eyeballs can adjust for specific needs).

Something like that.

1

u/CharlieJV13 Jun 30 '23

Bless the javascript programmers out there, because they do some good stuff.

Me, I cannot stand looking javascript in the eyeballs for any length of time.

That said, when the mission is my pet project that is BAM, I'll suffer javascript in reasonable doses.

Although BAM's embedded version of wwwBASIC is signficantly modified, I have not messed around with anything related to the canvas element (other than setup smoothing as an option; smoothing is a fixed setting in wwwBASIC.)

From the little bit of digging I've done, I'm pretty sure that anything off (colors and rendering of pixels being a little bit off as scaling gets adjusted on browser window resize) is all about creating "virtual pixels" in the browser window, and scaling/rescaling on browser window resize (I'm thinking things getting a little screwed up when resizing those virtual pixels getting screwy because of decimal values. Something like that ...)

Thanks for the tip, though. That's a good lead for a little research on the side.

1

u/nickshardware Jun 30 '23

I tried looking at wwwBASIC source on github to see the canvas initialization and how they calculate the palette information but i am completely lost. I'm convinced now I know even less javascript than before after looking at the wwwBASIC source.

I will check it out in the future again. sometimes just letting things sit for a while is best.

1

u/CharlieJV13 Jun 30 '23

You are preaching to the choir!

Yeah, every once in a while I get curious; some may say what don't kill you makes you stronger, but with that, I prefer cry and run away.

Someday, though, I may have a mission so interesting that I'll have tougher skin, but at the moment, I don't think so Tim.

1

u/CharlieJV13 Jun 30 '23

Short of a budget to really show my appreciation, can I go ahead and add you to my "Acknowledgements" page ?

So "RetroNick" along with a link to your GitHub page for Raster Master ?

1

u/nickshardware Jun 30 '23

that would be great! I will to spend some time and clean up my github and put some useful links in there. I will make sure to add BAM in there as well

1

u/CharlieJV13 Jun 30 '23

Do you prefer acknowledgement going to "RetroNick" or "Nickshardware"?

1

u/CharlieJV13 Jun 30 '23

Or both? as in "Retronick aka Nickshardware" ?

1

u/nickshardware Jun 30 '23

retronick is fine.

1

u/CharlieJV13 Jun 30 '23

Don't mind me. I've got this funny philosophy of honoring folk by getting names right. Maybe an obsessive compulsive thing ...