A downloadable tool

The C64 Graphics Maker is a graphics editor for Windows, that I wrote to help me create games for my favorite computer ever and now I have decided to publish it. If you find it useful (if you want), let me know in which project you used it (I'm just asking for curiosity, the software is completely free for any purpose, including commercial, released under the coolest license ever: the MIT license).

I recommend you to watch the video tutorials (I apologize in advance for my bad English, please activate the subtitles), even if they refer to a previous version, it allows you to understand the basic idea of the software, you can then discover by yourself the news of version 0.12.9b (the biggest news is the Blocksets, that are bitmap blocks that you can use instead of characters to have less limitations on colors with respect to characters).

Note that the software is still in beta, please report any bugs, thanks.

Features list of the v0.12.9b:

  • MDI Application;
  • Supported characters mode: Standard Character Mode (SCM), Multi Color Mode (MCM), Extended background Color Mode (ECM) with exporter for assembly and basic;
  • Supported sprites mode: monocolor, multicolor with exporter for assembly and basic;
  • Supported bitmap cells (named "Blockset") with mode: monocolor, multicolor (you can also use it to import a full screen bitmap, BUT be aware that there is no proper fullscreen bitmap editor inside the software, the blockset are treated just like characters);
  • Editing of multiple characters/sprites/blocks displaced in a grid (with ability to mix mono and multicolor characters);
  • Editing tool:
    • Up to 4 Layers;
    • transformation: shifting, rotation, resizing, invert, mirror, flip (you can restrict them to the selection);
    • drawing tool: freehand, line, ellipse, rectangle, floodfill (clipped to the selection, if any). Possibility to use two colors dithering.
    • selection: irregular shape, move selected area, copy & paste;
  • Import images to characters (SCM, MCM or ECM), sprites (mono or multi) or blocks (mono or multi) with automatic search of the best fitting colors and dithering support (import can take a while, please fix at least the background color to speedup the operation);
  • Import/Export of data and project items;
  • Animation editor for characters, sprites and blocks with "ghost" functionality;
  • Characters/sprites/blocks optimization: remove unused, empty and duplicates (with cascading update);
  • Unified clipboard between sprites, characters and blocks ('cut' also updated tiles, screens and animations);
  • Drag & Drop (between characters, tiles and blocks);
  • Possibility to add a background/foreground image (with adjustable position and size) useful to perform decaling;
  • Zoom/Pan;
  • 100 levels of undo/redo;
  • Tiles editor (characters or blocks based);
  • Screens editor (characters, blocks or tiles based);
  • VIC-II Calculator;

Tutorials:

Part I: 

Part II: 


Enjoy it.

Release notes of the version v0.12.9b (see README.txt for the previous versions):

 v0.12.9b:

  News:

  • Improved the UI rendering for high density monitor (2K and 4K);
  • Upgraded to VS2022 and QT 5.15.2;

  Bugs:

  • Fixed a bug in the settings of the image importer (they was stored in a wrong way);

Updated 24 days ago
StatusReleased
CategoryTool
Rating
Rated 4.0 out of 5 stars
(1 total ratings)
AuthorAGPX
TagsCharacters, Commodore 64, editor, graphic, Sprites

Download

Download
C64GraphicsMaker v0.12.9b.zip 40 MB

Install instructions

Please read the README file.

Development log

Comments

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(+1)

cool stuff!

Hello! Nice program! I was having one problem. I was creating an character in MCM, but Multi 1 and Multi 2 are shared for entier character set like Background color. What am I doing wrong here?

(2 edits) (+1)

Hi, thanks. Unfortunately it's a limit of the VIC-II: in the MCM you can only customize the foreground color per screen location, the other colors (background, Multi1 and Multi2) are the same for the whole set.

Yeah, I just realized that! Actually, the bitmap mode was one I was looking for and I found it in your progrma! Thanks!