CharPad C64 (Free Edition)
A downloadable tool for Windows
CharPad is a graphics data editing tool that facilitates the production of graphics data in a format compatible with the legendary Commodore 64 home computer.
The program accurately simulates the C64's video formats and allows you to comfortably design character sets, tiles, fonts and maps for 2D video games and demos.
You can start a project from scratch using the built-in freehand painting tools or import and convert any existing bitmap image into a C64 compatible tile map using various tile sizes from 1 x 1 up to 10 x 10 characters (100 different sizes).
CharPad has been in development since 2003 and has been widely considered an essential weapon in modern C64 game development ever since.
New for the 2.8.6 version...
- Tons of bug-fixes, maintenance and performance improvements.
- Brand new Win32 and Win64 executables now accompany the .NET version.
New for the 2.6 version...
- Export - One-click export of all essential binaries.
- Project - Conversion from per-char to per-tile colouring.
- General - Maximum tile size is now 10 x 10.
- General - Countless code optimizations and bug-fixes.
- Compressor - Sort characters by colour (ascending).
- Compressor - Sort tiles by colour (ascending).
- Image import - Increased capacity up to 500,000 character images.
- Image import - Much faster algorithm.
- Binary/Text export - Map data by selected area only.
- Text export - Char/Tile usage statistics.
- Map editor - Box highlighting of "current" cell.
- Map editor - Area fill (solid/incremental).
- Map editor - Delete row/column.
- Map editor - Insert blank row/column.
- Map editor - Dimensions of the selected area shown in status bar.
- Tile editor - Char "Picker" tool.
- Editors/sets - Next/Previous item with keyboard shortcuts.
- Editors/sets - Zoom level in status bar.
- Editors/sets - Zoom level shortcut (CTRL + mouse wheel).
- Sets - Mouse wheel for vertical scroll.
- Sets - Box highlighting of "current" items (left/right mouse buttons).
| Status | Released |
| Category | Tool |
| Platforms | Windows |
| Rating | Rated 5.0 out of 5 stars (6 total ratings) |
| Author | Subchrist Software |
| Tags | 2D,char-editor,Commodore 64,map-editor,subchrist,tile-editor |
Download
Install instructions
This software is portable, it requires no installation, you just need to unzip the package to a location on your computer and run the executable from this location or create a shortcut to the executable on your desktop.
Development log
Comments
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
It would be nice to have a (40x25) map with a corresponding same size (40x25) colour map, without tiles, or with single character (1x1) tiles.
This is different to the "colour per character" or "colour per tile" method since with 256 characters in a map with colour some characters could have multiple colours.
Hi Martin,
Thanks for your suggestion (+ apologies for the late reply), the next release will at least support 1x1 tiles, separate colour maps are kind of tricky to implement, a "per-map cell" colouring method has been requested several times by various people but it's kind of a deep rabbit-hole of complexity that I would prefer to avoid.
Hopefully 1x1 tiles will be sufficient!
Both apps can import PNG files and export to binary or ASCII text (both are directly useable by ie. cross-dev assemblers).
Exporting a C64 BASIC listing (ie. DATA statements) is not supported but you can load a PRG file from basic, which is easily made out of a binary, just add a 2-byte load address to the file using a hex editor, low byte first.
This will give you a lot more flexibility than using hard-coded DATA statements as the data can then be loaded by any program.
No I don't have any link to give you but I'm pretty sure you can just use the LOAD command in your BASIC programs to load PRG files to the addresses specified in their first two bytes with ie..
10 LOAD "BMDATA",8,1
20 LOAD "BMCOLRL1",8,1
30 LOAD "BMCOLRL2",8,1
I really don't want to get into the finer details of this here but using BASIC is likely to limit your freedom with where and how many images you could load, the data for one (full-screen) multi-colour mode bitmap is usually around 10KB and the BASIC and kernal ROMS occupy 8KB each, so that's 16KB gone before you even start.
