Hi, I'm Kenneth Lu, a 15-year-old Lowell High School student who's programming in THINK C on the Mac. (At least trying to, anyway.) I'm also a Star Wars and Babylon 5 fan, especially Star Wars.
RedLetters is my first (and, so far, only) attempt at using color table animation. Personally, I think it looks awesome (albeit utterly useless) considering all I had to rely on were the routines in Inside Macintosh Volume VI. Anyone who has used Inside Mac knows that although they make excelent references if you already know something that has just slipped your mind, it is virtually IMPOSSIBLE to learn anything from it. It took me hours and hours of reading and re-reading to finally understand the concepts, and several times that to make it work. (The same was true when I tried to figure out how to play sounds asynchronously.)
I admit that I am not an expert programmer, but hey, I'm only 15 and I'm NOT Raymond Lau (programmer of StuffIt who made a fortune at my age).
You can do anything you want with RedLetters. (I doubt that you can make any money off of it anyways.) In fact, I am urging you to fool around with it. If you never tried CLUT animation before, this might help clarify some things that IM VI doesn't explain clearly enough. I would be more than grateful if somebody would teach me a few tricks about CLUT animation.
I'm currently trying to make a game I call B.U.F.S.A.F.O.S. 2 (Big Ugly Fire Spitting Armadillos From Outer Space). I just started. I am considering using scaling to make certain spaceships fly off into the distance and I would appreciate it if someone would tell me if this is reasonable (fast enough) on my trusty old IIcx. Finally, I'm sure I can figure this out by myself, but I'm too lazy to: How do I switch CLUTs? I made some pictures in 32-bit which I reduced to a custom 8-bit palette using my friend's computer in Photoshop. I want to use them in my program, but I need to be able to switch from the system palette to a custom palette and back.
Thank you so very much for actually reading this, (Read my resumé, too if you're a BMUG member, please.)
