AMOS TOME Series IV Manual

Because of the way the converter works, you can use a completely different palette for this screen from the one you used for your tiles, so you can make the grass light green, the water blue, the rocks grey and the trees dark green. Now you draw your map in rough form and save it to disk as an IFF file.

The converter will handle any IFF screen in 2-64 colours in low or medium resolution, although it can only handle areas up to 320 pixels wide and 256 (200 in NTSC) pixels high.

Before you select the converter, make sure that your map is set to the correct size, using the map re-size control in the General Options menu in required.

When selected from the utilities menu in TOME, the Pic-Map converter will put up a file selector so that you can choose what IFF picture file to load. Once chosen, it will load the file in and put up its settings page.

The settings page will show you the palette of colours used in the screen, and a tile selector. Basically, you just click on tiles in the selector and place them with the left button into the boxes to the right of the colours that you want the tile to be used for. In our example above, you could put several different grass tiles in the box by the Light Green colour. If you want to use the current brik as a brik fill for any colour, simply click on that colours tile box with the right mouse button.

Because the IFF screen can use different colours from those used for your Tiles, the Converter has a button which allows you to change between the palettes of the Tiles (Icon) and the Picture (Pict). When set to Icon, you will be able to see your tiles in their normal colours, when selected to Pict, you can see the colours of the IFF screen (You should set to PICT to see what colours are used and swap to ICON to choose the tiles). If you want view the picture simply click on the VIEW button.

Once you click on the O.K button you will be shown the screen, and (if the screen area is different from the size of the map) required to select which area of the screen to convert, by positioning a box which represents the map size.

The conversion is relatively simple. For each pixel on the map, TOME picks one of the tiles that you assigned to that colour and places it on the map. Where you assigned a brik, TOME will place the equivalent tile from that brik, using brik fill mode.

As you will no doubt find, this converter is incredibly handy when you need to design a large map in a hurry !