QuickBASIC BSAVE Graphics

[Ham62]

If you've ever done any game creation in QuickBASIC before you're probably familiar with QB's special GET/PUT compatible graphics format that you can easily save and load to the disk with a single BSAVE/BLOAD command.

This is a quick and easy image format to work with for your games but you could never really do anything super fancy with it because there were never any real graphics editors with support for it... until now!
 

This plugin adds support for Screen 13 QuickBASIC BSAVE'd graphics with the file extensions *.BSV and *.VGA. It currently can't load graphics from any of the other screen modes but I may add support for those in a future update.

 

Limitations:

Because of the memory limitations of real mode in DOS and the low resolution of Screen 13h these graphics files also have a set of limitations so you don't break your graphics trying to save back to this format from Paint.NET.

1) Dimensions of a graphic cannot exceed 320x200 pixels (the resolution of Screen 13h)

2) The graphic cannot exceed 64kb in size because of real mode memory segment limits (ties into the 320x200 limit)

3) All images are limited to 8bpp and have a fixed color palette (My plugin automatically rounds colors in your image to the nearest matching color on the standard VGA palette)

 

Installation:

Simply copy QuickBASIC BSAVE Graphics.dll into your FileTypes directory and it should start working out of the box.

 

I have already tested importing many existing graphics from QB into Paint.NET and exporting existing images to QB and have found no problems so far.

 

Any suggestions, comments and bug reports are welcome

QuickBASIC BSAVE Graphics.zip

[Ego Eram Reputo]

Pretty cool plugin! It's a very impressive debut. Welcome , and thanks.

 

Thank you for also including the source - I like to see how other plugins work.