STOS-Yaroze sprite converter For those of you who have not heard of STOS it was a BASIC based game creation language for the Atari ST. It had commands like sprite, collide, screen copy, etc. to make writing games so much easier. It was great for beginners. Well it also had some great tools to go with it sprite editors, font editors, music editor etc. You also had a load of professionally drawn sprites to use in your games. It would seem such a waste for all these sprites to be left unused and since I am converting one of my games which uses STOS sprites I have written a converter. This converter takes a STOS sprite file and turns it into a format, which can be used on the Yaroze using my various sprite-handling routines, or ones you write yourself. I have made a few improvements. Since the ST could only display 16 colours all STOS sprites would have to be drawn with the same palette. The sprite file merger (another tool I coded) gives the possibility for each sprite to have its own 16 colour palette. Using the sprite converter The sprite converter is a 32 bit DOS program. Which means you can only run it under Windows 95 and you will not be able to use the mouse. The command has the following format sprconv So at the DOS prompt type the following. We will assume the STOS sprite file is called SPRITE.MBK and our converted file we will call YAROZE.SPR. sprconv sprite.mbk yaroze.spr The STOS sprites will then be converted into the correct format to be used on the Yaroze (4 bit CLUT data). Using the sprite file merger This tool allows multiple converted sprite files to be merged into one. The command format is shown below. mergespr … Say we want to merge the files SPRITE1.SPR, SPRITE2.SPR and SPRITE3.SPR into the file NEW.SPR. Type the following at the DOS prompt. mergespr new.spr sprite1.spr sprite2.spr sprite3.spr The file NEW.SPR will contain all the sprites and palettes of the files SPRITE1.MBK, SPRITE2.MBK and SPRITE3.MBK.