We are slowly moving ahead in the Directory Art process. I’ve seen a batch of tools/apps people have been using to help in the convoluted process of making DirArt.
I use PETMATE for most of my editing needs, sprinkle a bit of Marq’s Editor, javascript functions and cc1541.
One of the main reasons for Marq’s Editor was that it had a visual way to show the charset changes in the directory art versus standard PETSCII.
Don’t get me wrong, Marq’s is a great tool, but I prefer PETMATE as an all purpose PETSCII editor. PETMATE needs better DirArt support, but I figured out a way to make life a little easier in PETMATE for DirArt..
I took a copy of the uppercase rom for the c64 (c64_upperfont.bin) then :
printf '\x'92'\x'49'\x'24'\x'92'\x'49'\x'24'\x'92'\x'49 | dd bs=1 count=8 seek=$((0x110)) conv=notrunc status=none of=c64_upperfont.bin
printf '\x'92'\x'49'\x'24'\x'92'\x'49'\x'24'\x'92'\x'49 | dd bs=1 count=8 seek=$((0x400)) conv=notrunc status=none of=c64_upperfont.bin
printf '\x'92'\x'49'\x'24'\x'92'\x'49'\x'24'\x'92'\x'49 | dd bs=1 count=8 seek=$((0x468)) conv=notrunc status=none of=c64_upperfont.bin
printf '\x'92'\x'49'\x'24'\x'92'\x'49'\x'24'\x'92'\x'49 | dd bs=1 count=8 seek=$((0x4A0)) conv=notrunc status=none of=c64_upperfont.bin
... the rest of illegal PETSCII chars...and inserted a few magic bytes at the beginning 0x00,0x38 and renamed it DirArt.64c
So this file is compatible as a font file for PETMATE. Which lets you load it in and show you what chars are illegal in PETSCII for Directory Art 🙂
Here is font file, if you want to try it out: