Sunday 22 March 2009

GIMP Plugin to export fonts and bitmaps for ks0108 LCDs

I wanted to display some cool pictures in my ks0108, GIMP was perfect because it allows me to edit pictures and convert them into 1bpp pictures, the only part that was missing was to have a way to export the picture in a format that I could easily embed in my firmwares and that I could send quickly to the LCD.

So voila voila! here is the missing part, a very cool plug-in that does exactly that, this plug-in saves the data into a C source code header file, and arranges the data in a way that can be uploaded to the LCD quickly and with minimal code.

Details about installing it, and loading the data are embedded in the python plug-in file that you can get here.

And now the pictures!

The artwork for this one was ripped form Knight Lore


This picture was taken for the 8bit game The Abbey of Crime


And this is the whole shebang, just ripped the KONAMI logo from a MSX game


You can also use your bitmap as a font if you arrange letters in the following way :



Hopefully with this script we'll start seeing new cool bitmaps/fonts in projects, besides from the usual suspects we are used to see :-)

If you use it you are welcome to drop me a line, that will probably encourage me to write more free software!

The next step is to export the bitmap in binary format so I can store it in an serial EPROM (rather than using the chips flash) , but I guess thats all for now, enjoy!

Notes:
I used M-A Loyer's exporter for NDS as a reference for mine, thanks!

3 comments:

  1. Is it possible to invoke it from the command line?

    Like convert...

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  2. It shoudl be possible but I dont know why would you want to do such a thing. Often 1bpp images need a lot of editing before they look fine.

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