[hseiken]

Disable the overlay and it just erases it all to not be restored.
Has this always been the case or am I crazy?

I'm probably crazy.

This post has been edited by hseiken: 30 May 2024 - 12:25 AM

[Lachesis]

Disabling the overlay has deleted the overlay entirely since 2.80 (released 20 years ago...), so it is possible you are misremembering.

[hseiken]

Continuing in this thread to avoid forum clutter from yours truly...

https://drive.google...ew?usp=drivesdk

This image shows screenshot comparison of megazeux rendering an imported ANSI block and PabloDraw showing the same ANSI. The ANSI file was made and exported from Megazeux.

I do want to add that while exporting the original ANSI, it wasn't the only one. I had Megazeux open for a while and was block exporting quite a few bits this way from multiple game files. In this process, I actually caused Megazeux to crash on said export at some point. However it wasn't until later I found out this export had been compromised.

I can offer no other details other than I considered that I had used 'technically' bad ansi...since in original dos, using bg 8-16 is blinking colors, not bright colors in this image, but I had another which was a 80x25 screen and used only color 0 for all characters and it had the same issue.

I didn't want to jump to reporting it as a bug as I don't know what said bug would be and I haven't been able to replicate it.

Please tell me it's operator error.

[Lachesis]

On the sign where MZX stops loading the file and PabloDraw skips a character; did you put a right arrow character (26) there? In ANSi that character is an EOF (end-of-file) character and it is not supposed to display. MegaZeux is supposed to filter it out on export—like escape (27) and a few others—but it currently doesn't. I don't know why ANSi export would ever crash, yet.

[Lachesis]

PabloDraw makes some unusual choices about loading characters. Several different sources I've found suggest these are off-specification.

PabloDraw treats all of the following as graphical characters (displays them, saves them, loads them):

• 7: bell. Non-display, plays a sound in a terminal. MegaZeux strips it from output but will load it (both the old implementation and the 2.93+ one).
  
• 8: backspace. Non-display, non-destructively moves the cursor back in a terminal. MegaZeux strips it from output but will load it.
  
• 9: tab. Inserts spaces until the next tab point (poorly defined). MegaZeux strips it from output but will load it.
  
• 12: form feed. Clears the screen and resets the cursor to 0,0. MegaZeux saves and loads this.
  
• 27: escape. It's not clear that this should ever be displayed, but if the character following it doesn't make a recognized escape sequence, I guess PabloDraw treats it like a display character. MegaZeux strips it from output but will display it if it's not part of a CSI.

PabloDraw saves these but ignores them on load:

• 13: carriage return. Moves the cursor back to column 0. Ignoring this one is particularly confusing, since it has a very well-defined function as part of the ANSi line end.
  
• 26: very inconsistently defined behavior between sources. Some claim it's a display character (right arrow), others act like it is an end-of-file marker. MegaZeux doesn't strip it, but the 2.93+ implementation treats it as an end-of-file marker unconditionally.

The one reserved character PabloDraw actually did refuse to save as ANSi when I put it in an image is 10 (line feed).

I've tried a few heuristics for determining when a char 26 is not intended to be an EOF, but something breaks every time, so I think I'll just make MegaZeux strip them from output for now (nothing actually tries to display them...). I'm also implementing zzo's request for "Doorway mode" support, which allows these characters to all be escaped, but PabloDraw seems to not support this mode at all and I'm not sure how many other things do.

[zzo38]

I found some information about PabloDraw that says that it supports the file formats "ANSI, ASCII, ANSI/24, ADF, Avatar, BIN, CG, IDF, Tundra, CtrlA, XBIN, Animated ANSI".

I wrote a program called "cbgconv" that convert between some of these formats and MZM (and also supports doorway mode and has other features too), and is included in the repository for Super ZZ Zero. You may be able to use PabloDraw to make XBIN and then use cbgconv to convert XBIN to MZM, and then you can import the MZM file into MegaZeux.

Additionally, PabloDraw appears to be FOSS, so it should be possible to add support for doorway mode into PabloDraw, and then once doorway mode is also implemented in MegaZeux (it looks like it is implemented in the git repository now, but might not be released yet), then it should be able to use the ANSI file from PabloDraw directly in MegaZeux.

[Lachesis]

Yeah, I think the way forward here is to add XBin support in 2.93e and make it the default text image export format, since ANSi as a format seems to contain a bunch of hidden landmines.

Quote

once doorway mode is also implemented in MegaZeux (it looks like it is implemented in the git repository now, but might not be released yet)

I added support for it last night. 2.93d release will probably be this weekend unless a blocking issue comes up.

[hseiken]

I noticed it still says ANSI on the menu...did it not get changed to XBIN or is XBIN silently supported?