PX9 Cart Merge Util
A while back, I wanted to store multiple cart's worth of gfx into a single cart - so I had to use some compression... namely Zep's (PICO-8 creator) PX9 Library.
As this is a library I've used a couple of times before (and will probably use again) - I wanted to make my (and hopefully some other people's) life easier - so I made a "helper" cart to make compressing GFX from multiple carts really easy.
Say hello to the "PICO-8 PX9 Cart Merge Util"* 🤓
*(Not the snappiest of names, I'll admit!)
This util was created to make it simple to merge gfx/spritesheets from multiple carts to a single cart, using px9 compression. It also allows you to copy just a single cart's sprite data over to the target cart, which can be useful when needing to tweak some gfx.
- Put carts with gfx in same folder as this util cart (suggest creating a separate folder, per project)
- Choose "Compress" to merge all gfx together (if they can all fit)
- Merged output written to target cart file
There are then useful library routines (see UnDUNE II and CODE-8) that are called at runtime to decompress a single "page" (of cart sprite data) at a time to the running cart's sprite/gfx memory.
- If using compressed graphics with Map tiles also - suggest having the map data in the source carts while editing, as otherwise the map tile will be impossible to edit with compressed gfx.
I'll probably upload to the BBS at some point, but in the meantime - here's the download link, should anyone wish to use it. 🤓
