Need to recolour 1BPP spectrum sprites

[Joseman]

Hi pals

I have some big sprites ripped and converted from spectrum to cpc (192x128 for example), converted using the 1bpp data from spectrum.

and now i have a doubt...

What is the best way to put colors on this sprites on the cpc?

What program on PC is the best to recolour this graphics using the cpc data of 1bpp? like recolour for sections, something to not recolour pixel by pixel?

Thanks!!

[retro space]

I'm not very well informed about the precise differences between ZX and CPC sprites, but I do recommend you to look at Asprite as a tool. It supports non-square pixels, dithering, palettes and much more, a perfect pixel art design tool.

[andycadley]

What mode are you trying to colour them for? If it's Mode 0, you're going to end up pretty much doing it pixel by pixel anyway. If it's Mode 1 and the Speccy sprite has the mask information, then you can probably just use anything with a fill tool but you will get that kind of ugly "converted" look. If you want them to actually look like they were designed for the CPC you should expect to do a lot of re-pixelling (which is why nobody bothered back in the day and just used lazy methods)

[Joseman]

Hi

It's a conversion byte by byte with an asm program on winape.

It's for mode 1, and the conversion it's setting only 2 pens like the foreground and background on speccy, wasting the other 2 pens on cpc.

This "sprites" (they are logos) don't have attribute information on speccy as they didn't bother to colour it on the speccy itself.

But it will would be cool to put color in mode 1 on CPC.

I think that i can load it on RGAS for example, but i suspect that i have to recolour it pixel by pixel.

Only if any program can colour a selected area will be more easy, I don't know if RGAS allow to do it.

[lightforce6128]

This might be a bit of overkill, but GIMP allows to zoom to pixel level, show the pixel grid, can also work with non-square pixels, and can manage arbitrary palettes for fast selection of color. There are many tools available, especially for selection of groups of pixels, keyboard shortcuts can be used to avoid mouse movements, and separate views with different zoom-level for the same image can be used.

[Sykobee (Briggsy)]

Ah so you still want 2 colour sprites, but you want to hard-code whether it is colour 1+0, 2+0 or 3+0 into the sprite, converting it to a basic 2bpp? Will you also encode a separate 1bpp mask into this sprite?

If there isn't a mask you also want to inline, could you just write a 1bpp sprite renderer that does the conversion at render time, perhaps with sprite number as one argument, destination X,Y or address as another, and pen as a third? TBH this is what the CPC firmware text routines do except they set the pen via a separate call.

Doing it manually in asesprite in tiled mode might take a little time, but you could add dithering or spot colour effects.