Download the Image-to-GBA tools and the source code to those tools, for Mac OS X, by clicking here.
These are the image conversion tools (and the source code to those tools) I released in the dark days of 2003 to try to help anybody doing homebrew GBA development on Mac OS X; I’m posting these tools here as, although I stopped offering these tools for download long, long ago, I still receive requests for the source code to these tools every few months – if only those making that request knew the horror that awaited them… These tools convert an image into a C-language header containing either a one-dimensional array of 16bit pixels suitable for GBA screen modes three or five, or two one-dimensional arrays containing 8bit pixels/colour palette indices and 16bit colour palette suitable for GBA screen mode four.
To use the tools, run part1, and choose the image to convert; then in Terminal.app cd to the directory containing the image conversion tools, and run either ./part2-16bitConversionToHeader or ./part2-16bitPaletteConversionToHeader.
The source code to part1 is known to compile in METAL BASIC 1.7.3, whilst the source code to part2-16bitConversionToHeader and part2-16bitPaletteConversionToHeader is known to compile in Project Builder 1.1.1; beyond that, I’m afraid you are on your own…
I can’t claim that the tools are particularly well-conceived or well-coded; about all I can claim is that if compared to the source code to any of my more recent releases, the source code to the tools is a good example of how far I have come as a coder in the last three years.
If I manage to tweak the (unofficial) GBASDK to run on Mac OS X 10.3 (a denizen of the iDevGames.com forum reports that the (unofficial) GBASDK runs on Mac OS X 10.4 if sufficiently tweaked) I’ll likely return to GBA coding, and to updating these tools – in particular, I never considered that images might need to share a palette, so batch conversion, or conversion of images to match a previously converted palette, will likely be the major feature of any update to these tools I release.
Changes in version 0.2 of Image-to-GBA (4th July 2003):
- may now convert images for GBA screen mode four;
- slashed the size of temporary files;
- now appends “.h” suffix to the C-language header files produced;
- slashed the time taken to convert images.
Version 0.1 of Image-to-GBA released on 2nd July 2003.
