That's what I meant yeah, 256 colours based on a colour index table to convert them to 16-big BGR for the LCD driver My terminology probably isn't the best, as this is my first time finally tackling this kind of thing lol

My utility converts the .bmp to 256 colour binary data, and then I used Jimmy Mardell's Huffman compression tool. On the calculator I used slightly modified version of his decompression routine, which for each byte it decompresses, then looks it up on the colour table and sends the respective 16-bit colour to the LCD.

Yeah I'm thinking 16 colour nibble data too for sprites, tiles, etc. for any games I make. Well to clarify, 15 colours and one transparent, provided that it's workable. I may or may not use the half-res mode, depending on what the game is, and how practical it is.

How are your tests going?

Sorry DrDnar, I hadn't realised this. I'll correct the readme when I upload the updated version And thank you!

Here's where it's currently at. This is a 180x171 image, compressed in 8-bit colour. The program uncompresses it and converts back to 16-bit BGR on the fly.

An uncompressed 180x171 16-bit image would take up 61560 bytes, but the image data used in this program takes up only 6828 bytes, plus 512 bytes for the colour index table used to convert from 8-bit to 16-bit. Of course, the compression is fairly good on this image, as there aren't a lot of different colours being used..

I should note that I'm very new to working with 8-bit / 16-bit colour conversions, etc. so I wouldn't be surprised if this could be done better. I'll release the updated code in the next day or so once I've cleaned it up and tested it some more.

Apologies for my iPhone/hand reflection on the calculator when the screen goes dark

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v09rQ_bwF5U" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v09rQ_bwF5U</a>

I'm sure some kind of library will get coded up eventually. I have some ideas for it, but I don't have a lot of experience in creating ASM tools for BASIC programs. I'd love to give it a try (and maybe I will!), but no doubt someone else could do a better job.

I haven't done any animation testing yet, although tr1p1ea did a scrolling background test running in 160x240 mode, and it looked quite fast!

Thanks tr1p! I wrote a small C# Windows console utility, it's included in the zip file (on Cemetech, and ticalc.org once it's processed)

EDIT:
Tonight I've made some updates, so that it can now load images that are stored in 8-bit format, with a color index table. As long as your original 16-bit image used 1KB+ of space, then 8-bit with the color index table is more memory efficient, and still loads nice and fast. Of course, the only downside is that the colors aren't quite as smooth

I'll post another video showing this update tomorrow, and then start working on a compressed 8-bit image version

Yeah I was thinking about 8-bit color images today, which I'll try over the next few days, as well as some other cool ideas.

I do have a lot of ideas for different games I'd like to make on the 84+C, but I won't promise anything until I see what I'm capable of actually doing with it first lol. I'm thinking my first game will be something new that I haven't made before though

Thanks guys. Yeah the next step is I want to implement some compression, so we'll see how that goes.

This program isn't really intended to be particularly useful, it's more just me learning how to use the 84+C lcd. But I'm releasing the source with each version in case anyone wants to see how it works

After finally getting my 84+C last night, I decided to try and display a (small) splash screen. Here's the first working version. Currently it's an uncompressed 16-bit BGR image. The image is 82x42 pixels, thus 6888 bytes.

http://youtu.be/8vDO5Zvj6Ik

The next step I plan to take is compressing the image and then having the program decompress and display it.

Wow! I still vividly remember spending my early childhood years with friends running around the school yard pretending that we were piloting the Golden Condor!

This is a cool idea!

I've finally spent a few hours getting some more work on this done - slowly it will creep towards completion

It's great to see you coding again DJ_O! I look forward to seeing the development of this project

This looks great! Awesome work

Banchor on the 83+ is a possibility... I did write an article recently (on my site) about my childhood favourite RPG, Golvellius (which Banchor is partially based on), and mentioned possibly porting Banchor to the 83+. It's something I'm definitely interested in, but I should stress I haven't actually done anything about it at this stage lol. There are never enough hours in the day

I have however finally ventured into the world of 83+ flash apps (with the latest update to AB5), so at least I now finally know how to build a flash app hehe. That's a start..

I just had a proper look over my code (which I really should have done earlier but I was in a hurry) and discovered that the enemies/bullets/animations don't actually use masked sprites at the moment... But in any case, I'll go over the sprite routine that's used for them and see if it can be improved