Thankfully, the first part of the Frak! graphics recovery process – i.e. retrieving the raw data of the individual graphics and converting them into a usable modern file format – has gone basically OK. But there was a bit of a surprise…
Pixel Junk…?
From the newly-recovered set of graphics, here’s Trogg’s leg-less right-facing body graphic (note that, unlike Zalaga with its evil illegal opcodes, BBC Frak! doesn’t do any graphics mirroring), written out as a TGA file (a really simple uncompressed graphics format). And yes, the graphics in these old games really are that small:
The first question about this should be… what is all that pixel junk on the right hand side? Ahhh… yes. Ummm. Right. Oh.
OK, at this point, I have to put my hands up and say that it looks very much as though my clever-arse BBC Micro graphics editor ViewShape may just have had some kind of rounding bug to do with shapes’ width, because (ahem) fourteen of the Frak! individual images have exactly the same right-hand column pixel junk. Take off the extra junk pixels and you get this, which is how Trogg appears in the game:
All of which means that BBC Micro Frak! included a whopping 263 bytes of unnecessary junk pixel data. I say “whopping”, because it could have been used to fit a whole extra level into. (For reference, the game’s three levels took up 181, 179, and 195 bytes respectively. *sigh*)
Moreover, because I used ViewShape for the graphics on all my other BBC games, there’s a pretty good chance that they too suffered from the same marginal bloat. It’s not a lot, sure, but it’s annoying and it was certainly a surprise to me. 🙁
So, a somewhat humbling beginning, then. But never mind, we now have all the basic graphics, which is really great!