Oh wow, this is going to make things so much easier.

For a while now I've been asking myself how I'm going to draw all the foreground people/enemies/items etc. in 4-color grayscale with transparency for this Link's Awakening thing. Quigibo's new routine would have worked wonders, if only LA was a 3-color grayscale game.

I decided I'd start with the basics, just getting Link displayed. I was starting the process of converting all his sprites to 8x8, and a bit through the first sprite I noticed it was kind of funny that there were no dark gray pixels in this sprite. And then the next sprite lacked dark gray too. And the next. And the next.

I said to myself, "Wait a second. Why is the area around Link in these sprites dark gray?" *Thinks for a moment...* HUZZAH!! EVERY SINGLE FOREGROUND SPRITE IN LINK'S AWAKENING USES DARK GRAY NOT AS A COLOR BUT AS TRANSPARENCY! It's amazing I never even noticed that during the hours I must have played it. I was thinking all sorts of crazy thoughts like a third foreground transparency buffer and weird stuff, but now this will be so much simpler. Well, at least if I can complete the momentous task of converting all the foreground sprites, which are much more specific and detailed than background sprites, to 8x8 from 16x16. I may want to add back dark gray as a color into the palette just so the sprites convert decently, but I'll try using the 3-color palette first. If any good spriters want to help me out a bit, I'd be eternally grateful.

Runer, are you trying to compete with Spencer or are you submitting that for the contest?

Who is Spencer? 

By the way, the reason I can't draw the circle or line to the backbuffer is that the routines are hardwired into the primary buffer and are not possible hijack like my other routines.  For instance, the sprite drawing routine defines what buffer it will draw to in the very beginning of the routine so all I have to do is define a different buffer before calling it and then call the routine a little further down than it's normally called, skipping the part about the regular buffer, to hijack it with the new buffer.  This isn't possible with the circle or line since the buffer is defined in the middle.  I would have to write entirely separate routines since they can't share and it would inflate the code.

Ah ha! I found it! I knew you posted something like this a while ago. It sounds like drawing sprites to an arbitrary buffer would be a pretty quick feature to implement 

So, any luck with my hexadecimal parsing problem Quigibo?

Quick question: can files like Y₀-Y₉ be reused in a program?

Not bad, amirite? I was waiting forever for reading from archive to come out to do this.

I'm having trouble with reading from archive... The following code, when the program I'm trying to read from is out of archive, verifies that the data is in fact in the program:

.A
"prgmZIMG"→Str1
Disp GetCalc(Str1)→θ▸Dec
Pause 2500
For(A,0,63)
Disp i
Disp A▸Dec
Disp {A+θ}▸Dec
Pause 500
End

However, when I archive the program I'm trying to read data from and run the following code, the first display is nonzero, suggesting that it successfully located the data, but every byte read equals 65 (decimal).

.A
"prgmZIMG"→Str1
Disp GetCalc(Str1,Y₁)▸Dec
Pause 2500
For(A,0,63)
Disp i
Disp A▸Dec
Disp {A+Y₁}▸Dec
Pause 500
End
Any ideas what's going on here? Am I doing something wrong or is Axe doing something wrong?