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Coloured Sugar

Once I’d finished writing a range of BBC Micro Python-Fu image filters for The GIMP, the Amstrad CPC series seemed the obvious next computer to tackle.

The graphics capabilities of the CPC were very similar to those of the BBC Micro, but the CPCs benefitted greatly from having many more colours available. Everything you could ever want to know about the video capabilities of the Amstrad CPC range is explained here.

The graphics capabilities are so similar, in fact, that to create a graphics filter for Amstrad CPC in Mode 0 all I had to do was change the palette data in my BBC Micro Mode 5 filter. Instead of picking 4 colours from a range of 8 the filter simply needs to pick 16 colours from a range of 27.

So, here is a picture of Baron Sugar‘s beloved Hackney Empire (formerly the ATV Television Theatre):

ATV, Rediffusion and ABC all made programmes here

And here it is put through my Amstrad CPC Mode 0 image filter for The GIMP with no dithering:

Amstrad CPC, Mode 0, No Dither

Oh dear. Even the BBC Micro Mode 2 filter seemed to be able to do better:

BBC Micro, Mode 2, No Dither

Here’s the Amstrad CPC Mode 0 filter with 2×2 threshold matrix:

Amstrad CPC, Mode 0, Ordered Dither 2×2 threshold matrix

The BBC Micro Mode 2 version with a 2×2 threshold matix seems much flatter and less detailed:

BBC Micro, Mode 2, Ordered Dither 2×2 threshold matrix

So what went wrong with no dithering? Well, the method I’m using to choose a palette is very crude – it picks the sixteen most used colours from the Amstrad CPC palette to go into the final image. If my method is applied an image with lots of dark areas and a few highlights the highlights will be completely missing as the light colours will not be used enough to feature in the final table of 16 colours. I obviously need to find a method that takes into account the range of luminance used on an image.

The situation gets even worse when dealing with the Amstrad CPC Mode 1. Amstrad CPC Mode 1 is very similar to the BBC Micro’s Mode 1. But whereas Mode 1 on the BBC Micro can pick 4 colours from a selection of 8, Mode 1 on the Amstrad CPC can pick 4 colours from a selection of 27.

Here’s a picture of Polly parrot:

Pining for the fjords

Here’s the same picture put through the Amstrad CPC Mode 1 filter with no dithering:

Amstrad CPC, Mode 1, No Dither

Here’s the same picture of a parrot put through the BBC Micro Mode 1 filter with no dithering.

BBC Micro, Mode 1, No Dither

Even Sierra3 error diffusion won’t help the Amstrad CPC Mode 1 image:

Amstrad CPC, Mode 1, Sierra 3 Error Diffusion

Whereas the BBC Micro filter produces excellent results:

BBC Micro, Mode 1, Sierra 3 Error Diffusion

Needless to say, the Amstrad CPC filters should be producing better results than the BBC Micro filters!

So, I’m going off to find a better way to pick an Amstrad palette! In the meantime, if you want to play with the Amstrad CPC filters they can be downloaded from here. Microsoft Windows users can find out how to install and use the filters with The GIMP by following the very nice set of instructions with pictures I’ve found here.

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A la Mode

Time for another chapter in the continuing story of producing Python-Fu retro computing image filters for The GIMP from some original programs in sdlBasic by nitrofurano.

In my last post I talked about ordered dithering, and how it compared to the error diffusion technique I had implemented previously. After successfully implementing ordered dithering the natural next step was to incorporate the ordered dithering into my BBC Micro Mode 2 image filter so that all the image processing techniques were available in one filter.

Finished filter interface

Whilst doing this, I also made the Strength slider in my BBC Micro filter act upon Ordered Dithering as well as Error Diffusion. This allows for some quite interesting effects.

Here is John Liven’s Somerset cottage picture. I’ve applied Ordered Dithering with a 2×2 threshold matrix set to 100% strength:

Mode 2, 2×2 Ordered Dither, 100% Strength

And here is the same picture with the same dithering applied at just 50% strength:

Mode 2, 2×2 Ordered Dither, 50% Strength

Once this was done the BBC Micro Mode 2 filter was finally finished off. I then turned my attention to writing a BBC Micro Mode 5 filter. Mode 5 is very similar to Mode 2, but you can only use 4 colours from a selection of 8.

This means the image filter needs an additional step in which the palette to use for the image is selected. The way I approached this was to scan the entire image pixel by pixel tallying which of the 8 possible BBC Micro colours each pixel was closest to. Then, I simply used the four most commonly found colours.

Incidentally, the way you work out how close one colour is to another is quite simple once it’s explained to you: I found the answer here.

After a coding a bit of Python I loaded an image of some parrots into The GIMP:

Norwegian Blue is on the left

And tried out the filter with no dithering. It worked first time:

Mode 5, No Dithering

And when some Sierra3 error diffusion was added too, the results were incredibly good:

Mode 5, Sierra 3 Error Diffusion 100% Serpentine

I still can’t get over the fact that there are just four colours (black, white, red and green) in this image.

With a Mode 5 filter under my belt it was very easy to produce a Mode 1 filter. Mode 1 is the same as Mode 5, but has square pixels:

Mode 1, Sierra 3 Error Diffusion 100% Serpentine

And a Mode 4 filter. Mode 4 is like Mode 1, but is restricted to just two colours:

Mode 4, Sierra 3 Error Diffusion 100% Serpentine

So, I have got a pretty nice suite of BBC Micro image filters, with only Mode 0 to add. As always, you can download them from here. Microsoft Windows users can find out how to install and use the filters with The GIMP by following the very nice set of instructions with pictures I’ve found here.

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What A Ditherer

I’ve spent a lot of time recently converting nitrofurano‘s sdlBasic retro computing picture converter programs into Python-Fu image filters for The GIMP. I’ve also been adding a few ideas of my own – particularly in the area of half-toning techniques.

After successfully getting Error Diffusion working, I decided to see if I could get Ordered Dithering working. Ordered Dithering is a technique akin to the half-toning you see on images in newspapers. From an image made up of many colours you can create an image made up of only a handful of colours stippled such a way as to give the illusion of many colours.

There are several excellent explanations of Ordered Dither on the web for the curious written by people who actually know what they are talking about – I would recommend this one and this one.

Ordered Dithering is much simpler than Error Diffusion (which is probably why it took me longer to get it working!). As it’s a much simpler process it’s lightning fast in comparison, even when coded in Python.

As a test, I took John Liven’s picture of a Somerset cottage. 

Photo: John Livens

Then I converted the image to the BBC Micro‘s MODE 2 (which has just eight colours) using an ordered dither with a 2 x 2 threshold matrix.

BBC MODE2, Ordered Dither, 2×2 matrix

As you can see above, it produces a very pleasing regular patterning on the colours – to allow you to compare, here is the same image with Floyd-Steinberg Error Diffusion:

BBC MODE2, Floyd-Steinberg Error Diffusion

On a small image such as this, larger grids don’t really add much. Here is an ordered dither using a 4 x 4 threshold matrix:

BBC Micro MODE2, Ordered dither, 4×4 matrix

But, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. If you have The GIMP installed on your computer you might like to try the ordered dither filter for yourself – it’s available from here.

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BBC on the BBC

Over the past few days I’ve been converting nitrofurano‘s image filters from stand-alone sdlBasic programs to Python-Fu image filters for The GIMP. But, so far, there has been a particularly noticeable absence – the BBC Micro.

Partly that was because the BBC Micro world has already been utterly spoilt in the image conversion department by Francis G. Loch‘s incredible BBC Micro Image Converter. It’s a highly professional piece of software and does it all. I’ve posted about it many times here and the work I’ve done for Retro Software would have been utterly impossible without it.

BBC Micro Image Converter by Francis G. Loch

But partly it was because Francis’ program had inspired me to try and find out more about the mind-boggling array of dither options he had included in his program. It boasted a host of exotic sounding names like “Floyd-Steinberg”, “Sierra”, “Jarvis, Judice and Ninke” and “Stucki”.

Paulo had used a technique called Bayer ordered dither in his filters, which is similar to the traditional half-toning used in print. It’s very powerful, very fast and gives you a lovely regular patterned effect on the images, which is sometimes just what you’re after.

Naturally, Francis’ BBC Micro Image Converter does this as well. But these exotic sounding names were the inventors of various flavours of another technique: error diffusion.

Error diffusion works by trying to compensate for the colour information lost by turning a pixel into a value from a restricted palette by sharing it out amongst the surrounding pixels.

After looking at the Wikipedia entry for Floyd-Steinberg, it looked like even I could understand how to program it and then after finding an excellent article here I realised that all the other filters did exactly the same thing. They just shared out the lost information (or quantisation error) to different pixels in different proportions.

And, after a couple of hours messing about in Python, I managed to get out a servicable MODE 2 image (click on the images to enlarge):

Floyd-Steinberg error diffusion, 100% strength

You can see just how effective error diffusion is when you compare the results to the same image processed with no error diffusion:

The same image with no error diffusion

Here’s the original image for comparison:

I’m the one on the right

I excitedly added a range of different filters into my BBC Micro image filter:

Take your pick!

There was a problem though. Sierra3 was taking well over 70 seconds. This sluggishness was caused by the inefficient way in which I was checking that a pixel was within a certain range in Python.

Sierra3, 100% Strength – and very slow!

An error message I had been getting during development rather ironically proved to be the key to solving the speed problem. Instead of using time consuming range() functions to see if pixels were inside a particular range, I could use exception handling and check for an IndexError instead. This was very fast – it sped the filter up by a factor of at least four. Mind you, it still crawls along compared to Francis’ version!

The next thing I needed to add to the filter was something called “Serpentine parsing“. This means that instead of processing the image from left to right as it moves down, the computer processes the image backwards and forwards. This helps to stop all the error diffusion going in just one direction – smearing all the errors to the right.

Finally, pinching another one of Francis’ excellent ideas, I added a strength control to the filter to allow you to control how strongly the error diffusion works.

Finished interface

Here is Test Card F with 50% Floyd-Steinberg error diffusion strength:

Floyd-Steinberg error diffusion, 50% strength

And here it is with 25% Floyd-Steinberg error diffusion strength:

Floyd-Steinberg error diffusion, 25% strength

So, a BBC Micro Mode 2 image filter for The GIMP, that can be downloaded from here. However there are numerous refinements that need to be added to it. But they will have to wait for another day.

Test Card F Copyright © 1967 BBC, ITA and BREMA.

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If you see SID, tell him…

I’ve converted nitrofurano‘s sdlBasic Commodore 64 Low Resolution mode picture converter into a Python-Fu image filter for The GIMP.

In Commodore 64 Low Resolution mode, each block of 4 x 8 2:1 aspect ratio pixels can contain four colours from a choice of 16.  Only, it’s a bit more complicated than that! Fortunately, this article explains how it is supposed to behave very nicely. Paulo’s algorithm has to go through eight separate stages to create the finished image.

The main novelty for me in this filter was that in order to avoid having to use a three dimensional list (which would have entailed syntax to boggle the mind) I used a Python new-style class. That meant I could use a one dimensional list and let the class take care of getting and setting the right bit of it when required through method calls.

Here’s an example image before:

Original scan

And after conversion in The GIMP using the filter:

Commodore 64 Low Res Filter

As usual this plug-in, along with ones for the ZX Spectrum, Apple II and MSX1 can be downloaded from here.

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Appley Within

As I had enjoyed converting nitrofurano‘s sdlBasic MSX and ZX Spectrum picture converters to The GIMP, I thought I’d tackle the Apple II colour picture filter next.

Mind you, saying that the Apple II had a colour mode is a bit like saying that Steve Wozniak was a professional ballroom dancer. Whilst technically correct, it really is wide of the mark.

Apple II colour is a strange world in which “red or yellow” becomes orange and “blue or cyan” becomes blue. Because of this Paulo’s filter was rather more complicated than the ones I’ve tackled previously. In all, it took me about three days to understand what was going on and finally iron out all the bugs (mine, not Paulo’s!).

Because of the complexity of the filter, I decided to implement some functions to emulate the ink(), dot(), point() and line() commands of sdlBasic. This made the Python much more readable (and eaiser to debug), even if it did mean I lost a bit of speed.

In order to make up some of the lost speed, I used tuples instead of lists for the look-up tables. I should have done this in my other filters too.

Once I finished the filter I dug out my usual cottage picture as a test:

Photo: John Livens

The resulting image had me crying into my coffee:

Soundtrack from the film More?

It looked like something out of “The Lost World of Friese-Greene“! Having picked out some bugs I got something a bit closer, but the white stripes were a real pain to get rid of:

It took ages to fix…

Finally, after I had remembered how to count to six, I got a successful image:

…but the result was worth it.

The filter runs in two modes, a halftone mode or a posterised mode. The posterise mode doesn’t stipple the colours. Here is the posterised output:

Posterised, it’s very striking

I added a little dialogue box to the filter to allow users to pick which mode they want:

The filter’s complex user interface

My overall impression is that the Apple II produced orangey mush – a bit like the NTSC pictures put through the IBA‘s DICE standards convertor we used to see on British television in the 70s. But, I must admit, it does have a certain kind of charm. And, above all, Paulo did an incredible job in coming up with an Apple II filter – it’s an ingenious bit of coding.

If you want to try it out for yourself, the filter is available to download from here. Bear in mind that the filter is pretty slow, so it’s best to stick to small images unless you have a fast computer.

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Who needs Jimmy Savile?

The R3PLAY Arcade, Retro and Video Gaming Expo was held on the 6-7 November in Blackpool and, as I said a few days ago, it saw the official launch of Repton: The Lost Realms.

The visitors to the show had the poster I designed inflicted on them as they were queuing to get in:

Photo: Michael S. Repton

The Retro Software team were ready and waiting to sell millions of copies:

(Back L-R) Peter, Greg, Steve, Tom, Michael, Jonathan, (Front) Martin, Dave. Photo: Martin Barr.

Needless to say, the game completely sold out. And no wonder, the finished article looked gorgeous – in spite of the fact that I did all the artwork:

Kecske Bak, after Ellis Ives Sprowell

We were honoured that Repton took time out from running his HSE-free diamond mining conglomerate to attend in person:

Photo: Michael S. Repton

The Beeb performed masterfully:

Photo: Martin Barr

And so did its half brother by the milkman, the Acorn Electron:

The most impressive Acorn Electron Repton yet

Contributing to a real Repton release was a childhood ambition of mine – and one that, somehow, I’ve now managed to fulfil.

Paras Sidapara, Tom Walker, Michael S. Repton, Jonathan Parkin, Richard Barnard, Dave Moore, Peter Edwards, Andrew Weston, Richard Hanson, Matthew Atkinson, John Chesney and of course the durian munching genius polymath that is Tim Tyler all put a huge amount of work but most of all love into Repton: The Lost Realms and I think that really shows.

I’m really honoured I got to be a part of the team.

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MSX Picture Filter for The GIMP

Now that Paulo Silva’s (nitrofurano) ZX Spectrum filter for The GIMP was working nicely, I thought I’d like to try converting one of his other sdlBasic picture filters into a Python GIMP plug-in.

I chose the MSX1 Screen 2 filter, as it looked quite similar to the ZX Spectrum filter. I’d never actually seen an MSX computer working (I saw some switched off in a shop once) so I didn’t really know what to expect until I read up on Wikipedia.

Whereas the ZX Spectrum suffered from attribute clash on the character square level, MSX1 suffered from attribute clash on the character row level so I was expecting the resulting images to look like slightly better ZX Spectrum images. And so it turned out.

To compare, here is John Liven’s photograph of a cottage:

Cottage – Photo: John Livens

And here it is processed by the ZX Spectrum filter:

Cottage – ZX Spectrum

And finally by the MSX1 filter:

Cottage – MSX1

Converting the filter was straightforward, and I managed to find and fix a small bug in the sdlBasic original whilst I was going along.

As always, the finished MSX1 filter can be downloaded from here.

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Unweaving the Rainbow

As I promised a couple of days ago, I’ve tweaked nitrofurano‘s ZX Spectrum filter for The GIMP so that you can now undo (and redo!) the effects of the filter properly.

Not a favourite album, but a nice cover

To get undo to work I needed to create a duplicate of the current layer to work on, and then merge that down into the original layer when the filter has finished its work.

From XOR to AOR

That way, The GIMP seemed to remember the original layer and could go back to it when you used undo.

So now, hopefully, it’s all finished. The final version of the filter is available to download from here. People with Windows or Macs wanting to try the plug-in need to follow the instructions here. GNU/Linux users can just copy it into their ~/.gimp2.6/plug-ins folder and set the Execute permission.

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Designing Repton’s Lost Realms

If you’ve been here before, you’ll probably already know that this year is Repton‘s 25th anniversary. And, as part of the celebrations, Retro Software is releasing Repton: The Lost Realms for the BBC Micro and Acorn Electron.

I’ve already blogged about creating the cover artwork and the loading screen for the game. However today is the 6th November and Repton: The Lost Realms is being officially launched at R3PLAY in Blackpool. That means I can at last talk about creating the graphics for the game itself.

My cover artwork

I was first approached by Dave Moore about contributing to Repton: The Lost Realms in mid 2008. Peter Edwards had just recovered a load of my old Repton 3 and Repton Infinity screens from some of my 5.25″ floppies and the graphics in them had impressed Peter and Dave enough for them to ask if I would be interested in creating some screens and graphics for Repton: The Lost Realms.

Like Repton 3 before it, Repton: The Lost Realms is a game that allows you to not only edit its levels, but also redefine its graphics. That means that it’s possible to provide a selection of different screens and graphics for players to load into the game.

Lost Realms as I first received it

At this stage, the Repton: The Lost Realms came with only one set of screens. As you can see above, it used the Repton 3 graphics with a few additional graphics for the game’s new elements designed by the game’s original programmer Paras Sidapara.

As there were to be four sets of six screens included in the game, my first idea was to theme each set of graphics around the existing Repton releases. In other words, have a Repton 1 set…

Repton 1 Lost Realm

…a Repton 2 set…

Repton 2 Lost Realm

…a Repton 3 set…

Repton 3 Lost Realm

…and a new set for the final set of screens.

I quickly hacked about and transferred the graphics from these games into Repton: The Lost Realms. At this stage I was designing new characters in the Repton Infinity graphics editor (Film Strip) and then transferring them over to Repton: The Lost Realms by transferring blocks of data between files using the BBC BASIC command line.

Film Strip – An excellent graphics editor

The reason why I preferred Film Strip was that it was designed for use with a keyboard. I didn’t have a real BBC Micro to use so I was using these programs via the excellent emulator BeebEm. In fact, as at that stage there wasn’t a native GNU/Linux emulator for the BBC Micro at the time, I was using BeebEm via WINE.

The Repton 3 and Repton: The Lost Realms editors had adopted the then very fashionable WIMP paradigm. However, using a WIMP interface with a keyboard is very hard going and I found the AMX Mouse option tricky to get working in BeebEm. That meant I couldn’t use these editors with my mouse.

Another problem I had with Repton: The Lost Realms’ editor was the awful yellow and black colour scheme used for the editor’s pointer. It was probably the worst colour scheme you could have picked if you want to design graphics precisely – the outline of the pointer gets lost against black, but most of the graphics have black backgrounds or outlines!

Repton: The Lost Realms’ Editor

After I had designed Repton 1 and Repton 2 themed graphics it soon became obvious that this approach would not work. There were various new elements in Repton: The Lost Realms that were not present in previous Repton games. I wanted to redesign these in each set to match the style of previous Repton releases. However Dave wanted to keep the new game elements that Paras had designed looking the way Paras had designed them. However this would have looked out of place, particularly in Repton 1 which is quite abstract and geometrical in design.

Therefore, after talking it over with Dave and Paras we decided it would be best if I design four completely new sets of graphics for the game, bearing in mind the need to keep the original design of Paras’ new game elements in each set. We would also only vary the game characters that varied in the sets of screens supplied with Repton 3: namely the walls, eggs, monsters and crowns.

I had a few ideas for the graphics having got used to playing the game. I didn’t think that the inverted cage colour scheme for the anti-clockwise spirits worked at all. I needed to find a way to make these cages look a little less incongruous. I wanted to make the graphics look 1988-ish – so I used the style of later BBC games like Richochet and Star Port as inspiration. And I wanted to use stippled colours as much as possible to make the apparent colour palette seem more than the four colours that the game was limited to.

I designed the set of graphics for the final set of levels (PRESTO) first. My inspiration for these were the full-page adverts for Repton 2 and Repton 3 that Superior Software used to run in Acorn magazines at the time. In particular, I wanted to design a set with light mortar between distressed bricks. I’m very proud of this set and I think it’s actually my favourite.

Presto – not for the faint hearted

I got a bit carried away, and I also redesigned Repton to look like he did in Superior’s adverts – this was very quickly and firmly rejected, and rightly so!

My Redrawn Repton went down like a cup of cold sick

I had one set down, three more in front of me and even using FilmStrip on a BBC Micro emulator seemed like very hard going. I really wanted to use The GIMP to design the graphics and suddenly it dawned on me that I could.

I could design the graphics in The GIMP and then transfer them to the BBC Micro emulator using the BBC Micro Image Convertor by Francis G Loch. This is an application written in PureBasic that takes image files (bmp, jpg, etc.) and downconverts them into the native screen display formats of the BBC Micro.

The process has a few stages. First I design all the graphics as separate files in The GIMP:

Completed graphics designed in The GIMP

Then I use the GIMP to slice them up and put them in rows:

Sliced and Diced in The GIMP

And finally I convert the graphic into BBC Micro format using the BBC Micro Image Convertor:

And converted to BBC Micro format

So, I fired up The GIMP and the next set I designed was for the LARGO set. This is the default set that loads when the game or editor loads, and the levels in this set were the original six levels designed by Paras Sidapara back in 1988.

Largo – the Realm of the Exile

Because I knew Paras was a huge fan of the game Exile, I decided to base the design of the walls on the walls found in Exile. This set looked very nice and thanks to The GIMP I was able to design them very quickly.

Adagio – Exile crossed with Repton 2

The third set I designed was a set for the ADAGIO screens. This set was a kind of cross between the walls found in Exile and the walls found in Repton 2 (my favourite Repton release). It didn’t work as well as I would have liked and I wish I’d done something a bit different.

Allegro – juicy, apparently…

The final set I designed was the ALLEGRO set. It was loosely based on the graphics for the game XOR, which my children were madly into playing at the time. This set has been described as looking “juicy”, whatever that means! Dave Moore accused me of taking a little more care over these graphics than some of the others because I knew I was designing all six levels to go with them. How very dare he!

The work on the graphics Repton: The Lost Realms was very straightforward. I did very little rework once we decided on what we were doing and there were only two real debates about the game characters. The first concerned earth, the second concerned fungus.

As far as the earth is concerned, I wanted to experiment with some dense Ravenskull style earth, whereas Dave Moore preferred the very sparse earth used in the Toccata level set of Repton 3. Dave got his way on that one!

Now that’s what I call fungus!

The fungus debate concerned my preference for fungus that looked like a toadstool rather than the amorphous mould that was presented in Repton 3. In the end, I redesigned the fungus to look slimy rather than mouldy but it’s probably the graphic I am least happy with.

Now that’s what I call fun, Gus!

We also had a discussion about the “freeze pill”. This was a green pill that froze monsters temporarily. What with absorbalene pills and time pills I thought Repton’s drug habit had gone far enough.

Freeze pills – just say no.

 
I wanted to replace it with a Citadel style snowflake. Everyone agreed, and that also involved making changes to the editor and game map graphics which I did by hacking the code about. But, although my snowflake was a good idea, I think the graphic I designed was horrible.

Snow flake – just say yuck.

Once I’d designed all four sets, I thought that that was that – only it wasn’t. By this stage Tom Walker (someone for whom the word genius seems utterly inadequate) had joined the project, and had started work coding an Acorn Electron version.

The Acorn Electron is cruelly afflicted in many ways, but one of the worst is that it has no hardware scrolling. That is terrible news for a game like Repton which relies on scrolling. Acorn Electron scrolling has to be done in software, which eats up the memory available for the game – and its graphics. The graphics in Acorn Electron Repton: The Lost Realms are 12 x 24 instead of 16 x 32 for the BBC Micro version.

Skull (Acorn Electron)

This meant I had to create cut down versions of all of the games’ graphics for the Acorn Electron version, and doing this took as long as it took to create the original graphics. In fact, I put in so much effort I actually prefer some of the Acorn Electron graphics.

Largo – All ready to transfer to Elkulator

Probably the most interesting thing about doing this was the lack of an Acorn Electron editor – or indeed an Acorn Electron version of the game itself! I had actually finished the graphics and put them in game files before Tom had finished coding the Acorn Electron version of the game.

It was quite some time after I had finished the graphics that I was actually able to play with the graphics in the game itself via Tom’s excellent Acorn Electron emulator Elkulator.

 Acorn Electron version

Keen eyed Repton fans will notice that Acorn Electron Repton: The Lost Realms reintroduces Tim Tyler‘s Repton sprite from Repton 2. I think this has much more personality than the one used in Repton 3.

I knew that there was a keen interest in the Repton: The Lost Realms from Acorn Electron enthusiasts so I put an enormous amount of effort in the graphics for the Electron version – I just hope they like them!

And finally –  a word about the design of the crowns. I spent many years living in my wife’s home-town of Mélykút, the birthplace and home of the legendary restorer Szvetnik Joachim. He was famous for supervising the return of the Holy Crown of Hungary from the USA in 1977. I went to his workshop in Mélykút to translate for some tourists from New York State, and enjoyed my visit so much I decided to make the crown in ALLEGRO look like the Holy Crown.

Allegro Crown (BBC Micro version)

The other crowns in Repton: The Lost Realms are also based upon real crowns – I wonder if you can work out which ones?