I figured this is far enough along now, that I should announce this here:

For the last little while, I've been toying with this idea. And now that Celtic2 has some sprite displaying support, it's coming closer to a reality!

The idea for this project is to have a general database of presidents' pictures, names, dates, important facts, etc to have in a portable manner for students in history class!

Don't believe me? Well, here's what I've gotten done, after Kerm pointed out SC's abilities which was extremely helpful.

































Now, this is going to be as non-biased as I can make things, I'd like to stick to factual events that have been documented.

Right now, I'm using wiki for the pictures, found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Presidents_of_the_United_States

I'd love feedback for this project. Anything you'd like to contribute to facts on each president would be wonderful. Anyone that is a history buff and would like to contribute information for each president would be very helpful.

I'm currently working on each of the pictures, and hope to have them all completed later today.

And some new screenshots taken early this morning to show off the flash card system and the title screen:



I plan on adding bits of facts and data about each president that I get from wikipedia. I just have to figure out what specific bits of data I want to include, what's important, etc.

What do you all think?

Wow, sounds like they don't want much information displayed at once. :< Sadly, with how much data I'm eventually going to be putting in on this, 2 spaces between characters aren't going to be possible, since it's going to have a lot of history for each president posted.

As to the better sprites, you are right, however, you'd be doubling to tripling the size of my sprite data, which is already massive. I'm sitting at 261KB just in sprite data for those 44 presidents. I'm looking at roughly that much or a hair bit more for the information for all of them.

I appreciate the suggestions. Just neither of them will be easily done with how things are being put together.

I saw this on Cemetech before and liked it a lot. The layout is great and it isn't too fancy either. Picture conversion is very good too. (Although for some reasons, GIF compression is strange. Did you use MS Paint )

By the way I tried colorizing some faces with another software using a pic that had no Paint dithering, just to see how it would look like. Plain colors were too bright, while with dithering it was a bit too weird. So grayscale is better I think.

Ah I see about the pics. It seems Paint Tool SAI does a similar job as MS Paint for 256 color conversion  . Oh well, I got a good idea of your program already and you had posted pics with no such dithering afterward anyway so I got an even better idea of how it looks like.

Just remember one thing, though: A lot of those images were originally black and white because of how old they are, so adding colors would be hard without knowing the clothes colors and such stuff.

On a side note, tifreak8x now holds the distinction of having created the first flicker-less grayscale program ever in pure TI-BASIC.

Well in his case he's using pure BASIC, meaning he only has access to 15 colors (including 6 shades of grayscale including white and black)

There is xLIB CSE that makes use of a pallet and it might be possible to adapt the pallet to be customisable.

Also, how many colors do you have currently? If you are using 16 colors, then it would actually be pretty easy to compress the pics to half their size without any data loss. (1 nibble can hold a value from 0 to 15).

Oh wait I didn't realize that this used Celtic II lol. I guess this makes sense, since otherwise your program would be absolutely massive (if using like 40 pics that takes 21956 bytes each) and sending it with TI-Connect would be a major PITA (hacked pic vars). Is it limited to 15 BASIC colors or did you just decide to use these colors?

Also I wouldn't recommend xLIB for such program (not that it's even out yet anyway), because while it uses 256 colors, it uses a resolution of 160x120 (scaled up vertically, while the screen is set in 160x240 mode) and the way stuff is drawn with xLIB would make it a major pain to display pure BASIC stuff like text. (everytime you would update the LCD content using xLIB commands, the text would flicker, since xLIB alternates between the 1st and 2nd half of the GRAM when using commands to update the screen content), so in 320x240 mode (or in jsTIfied, which lacks 160x240 support), this is how an xLIB game would look like:



 xLIB CSE is aimed directly at game dev for BASIC programmers but tries to do some compromises to keep speed at a decent level. It also aims at making it easier to port older games I think.