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 1.5 – What’s new?

• New: Complete re-write of CartographPC engine.
• New: Resizable main window.
• New: Tileset and datamap names shown in information window and titlebar.
• New: User selectable stamp size (mouse driven)
• New: Copy from datamap.
• New: Paste into datamap.
• New: Check size of copy buffer.
• New: Random fill – works as a fill area will not overwrite entire map.
• New: Undo feature completly re-written.
• New: Open .PRG (ultrafont charset)
• New: Open .CHR files (CharPad)

source: arkanixlabs.com