CartographPC is a Windows application created to assist in designing tile-based datamaps. This devtool serves as a companion piece to our C64 native Cartograph devtool.

The original purpose of CartographPC was to enable us to take nice screenshots of our datamaps without having to take four or six screenshots of smaller windows and piece them together.

CartographPC has since grown into a full editor with the benefit of being able to load datamaps created on the C64 directly into memory and edit, save, and move them back to C64 without much hassle.

It works by creating datamaps using tilesets created on C64 with the old, but popular, ultrafont editor. Datamaps can have dimensions of 1 to 255 tiles horizontally and 1 to 127 tiles vertically. CartographPC allows the user to create a datamap as small as 40×25 tiles (one screen) and up to 255×127 tiles.

Currently CartographPC doesn’t support exported datamaps (RLE compressed or converted) from Cartograph but as noted above, standard datamaps are 100% supported.

This application was created as an internal devtool for Arkanix Labs. We’re using Cartograph and CartographPC extensively with our Crimson Twilight Trilogy (tile-based CRPG) and Damned: Out Of Hell (push scroller shooter/jump and run).

Version v2 – What’s new?

• New: Hires mode (8×8) 16 colors (0-F)
• New: Right mouse button deletes color while editing tile (sets to black-0)
• New: Selecting color changes whole tile color (black-0 not selectable, used as default background)
• New: CTRL+Left mouse button paste buffer into datamap.
• New: Edit/color individual tiles.
• New: Tile cut/paste into tileset.
• New: Left mouse button selects tile.
• New: Right mouse button and/or right mouse button drag selects tile.
• New: CTRL+Left mouse button paste tile into tileset.
• New: Tile rotated (+90 to 360)
• New: Tile inverted (current color to black-0 and black-0 to current color, hires only)
• New: Tile shift (up / down / left / right)
• New: Tile mirror X / mirror Y.
• New: Tile undo.
• New: Tiles used identifier CTRL+I.
• New: Load palette INI.
• New: Load palette VPL (LF).
• New: Load palette VPL (CR/LF).
• New: Save tileset BITMAP.
• New: Save tileset PRG & CMAP.
• New: Save tileset CHR & CMAP.
• New: Datamode – 255 user definable datamap objects.
• New: Clear tileset.
• New: Projects – manage complete project (datamap, datatype, tileset, colormap) with autoload. Completely redesigned menu system with right mouse button popup.
• New: Export to D64 – exports complete projects (datamap, datatype, tileset, colormap) to D64 file.
• New: MRU – most recently used files (datamap, datatype, tileset, colormap)(5 last items)
• New: Text – type text directly onto datamap.
• New: Hover mode – show tile / map buffer instead of box cursor during paint (CTRL+H to toggle)

• Updated: Load tileset BITMAP.
• Updated: Load tileset PRG with/without CMAP.
• Updated: Load tileset CHR with/without CMAP.
• Updated: Drag’n'drop tilesets and colormaps together in tileset window to load both at one time.
• Updated: datamap cut/paste.
• Updated: Left mouse button paste selected tie into datamap.
• Updated: Right mouse button and/or right mouse button drag selects map buffer.
• Updated: CTRL displays map buffer size.
• Updated: Left mouse button paints selected color while editing tile.

source: arkanixlabs.com noname.c64.org