Taking a break from 68k

At least for a little while to write some tools. That's the beauty of crossdev - you can chew up relatively massive amounts of CPU time to distil your data into a form that is as close to being able to dump it straight into the hardware registers as possible. I prefer having my data this way because processing = time and time = limited. You could just go to google and look for native or crossdev tools that are out there already, but I couldn't find anything that did what I wanted (or in this case even work) so I ended up rolling my own. Maybe when it does everything I think it needs to do I might put it out there to save others the hassle.

First one up is the awe-inspiringly titled 'IFF Manager'.



Okay... maybe the least awe-inspiring screen shot ever, but it does actually work. I'm adding features as I need them but currently after unpacking an IFF picture file it can extract individual bitplanes in whole or rectangles for sprites (although at the moment the rectangles need to be byte-aligned) and output them as sequential bitplanes, interleaved to reduce Amiga blitter overhead or in ST screen format.

The code is factored nicely so I can wrap it up as a command line tool, build a GUI on top of it or maybe make the tool LUA scriptable to automate the cycle of modifying the graphics file and exporting the relevant data. Not sure what people would like for the best. I suppose I could combine the LUA and GUI options so if you start it from a prompt with a NOGUI parameter it'll just run as a (slightly bloated) commandline tool.