this tool was only tested with TCL 8.6.*
basically a 'clone' of bmp2tile made by Maxim rewrote it as a TCL study and most importantly with portability in mind
its purpose is to convert 16 colors images files to a format suitable for inclusion in Sega Master System programs (written with wla-dx but other tools may work as well)
bmp2sms support PNG/GIF/PPM/PGM by default without the TkImg package and BMP/JPEG/PCX/XPM/TGA with TkImg images should have a width / height that are multiples of 8 otherwise padding will be added.
there is some things differing from bmp2tile:
- target system is the Sega Master System (no support for Game Gear altough adding it would be easy)
- the program perform 'smart' colours conversion if image colours does not match the SMS palette
- indexed images are loaded as normal images (the palette is ignored), a palette is instead automatically generated
- it load a complete directory instead of only one file at a time, there is planned support to save all files in one go
- some features from bmp2tile are missing like 8x16 mode and cl123 palette output mode
- palette order may be different so tiles value may be different on the same image (because bmp2tile will load indexed images while bmp2sms always generate it)
- allow negative tile start index (-1 = 0x3ff etc.) which may be useful for some effects
- no commandline mode
- no status bar
then there is some features:
- palette index picker (click somewhere on the image)
- palette editor (double click on a palette color square or drag around a color square to organize the palette)
if the package TkImg is found then these additional images format will be supported: BMP/JPEG/PCX/XPM/TGA
TkImg can be installed easily with a package manager, example : sudo apt install libtk-img
this program also support compression plugins made for bmp2tile, this feature require the Ffidl Tcl package
Note for .bmp images: The image should not include colour space information (see BMP export compatibility options for GIMP) otherwise the image will fail to load.
this is a first try at TCL, an interesting programming language with great libraries
tclsh8.6 bmp2sms.tcl
