Home » The PARIS Forums » PARIS: Main » A question for coders in the community.
A question for coders in the community. [message #104618] |
Sun, 17 January 2010 12:54 ![Go to next message Go to next message](/theme/PARIS_Forum_Template/images/down.png) |
|
Problems often melt away with enough sunlight on them, so here's a riddle for the community coders.
XN Resource Editor is the application we use to install the skins that Jim Drago, Mike Yanoska and others build for PARIS. A small issue blocks more complete skin work - certain images make PARIS crash if replaced or altered.
Whole sections can be freely altered, but It only takes a trivial alteration in certain areas to provoke a crash. Try this experiment yourself if you're curious:
1) Make a copy of your paris.exe.
2) Download and boot up XN Resource Editor.
3) From inside XN Resource Editor, navigate to the copy of the paris.exe you made and open it.
4) In "PICT" resources you'll find one called MIXER. Take the pencil tool and draw a visible mark in a specific place, shown below (it can be as little as a single pixel, but a bit larger is better for the purpose of visibility of the results).
5) Save the app. Quit XN Resource Editor.
6) Boot PARIS from the altered .exe. Open a Mixer window; you should see your "graffiti" mark displayed above the Auxes. Now - close the mixer window.
PARIS should now quit with ***ASSERTION FAILED: aPalettes.c:317 palette!=NULL.
![http://content.screencast.com/users/kerrygalloway/folders/Jing/media/8f5d9c94-d44a-49e4-be85-cbdcccf05452/00000003.png](http://content.screencast.com/users/kerrygalloway/folders/Jing/media/8f5d9c94-d44a-49e4-be85-cbdcccf05452/00000003.png)
Questions to those who are code-savvy (I am not, I'm just a layman who isn't afraid to ask stupid questions): why? What changes - palette? Header? File size? DPI (the 8-bit original is an unusual "86 DPI")?
Finding a solution to this will help people skinning PARIS take the work further. Perhaps it's a matter of opening the changed graphic in a hex editor and altering the header/palette to match the original in some way? There are some real talents here in the community; insights gratefully received.
Thanks!
"... being bitter is like swallowing poison and waiting for the other guy to die..." - anon
[Updated on: Mon, 18 January 2010 14:07] Report message to a moderator
|
|
|
|
Re: A question for coders in the community. [message #104622 is a reply to message #104619] |
Mon, 18 January 2010 14:01 ![Go to previous message Go to previous message](/theme/PARIS_Forum_Template/images/up.png) ![Go to next message Go to next message](/theme/PARIS_Forum_Template/images/down.png) |
|
Couldn't follow those instructions 100%, but close enough:
- opened the app in XN Resource Editor
- saved it under a different name
- found the graphic
- selected all, cut
- pasted it back in on top of itself
- saved
Sure enough - same error.
So - what have we learned? Maybe something important - maybe that this old problem might not necessarily lie in PARIS after all, but in something XN Resource Editor (or the clipboard itself) does to the 8 bit BMP?
If so, the reason this anomaly showed up when we were editing that particular graphic would be because it's one of the few areas in the app that necessitates editing one of the older 8-bit BMPs that remained in the app at time of discontinuation (the others had already been updated to 24-bit). After a while, folks just learned what to avoid touching - the ADAT, EDITOR, MIXER and ADAT bmps. Folks who have done skinning - does that sound about right?
If that's the case, that'd be a pretty cool realization, since we don't have the source code to PARIS but we do actually have access to the source code of XN Resource Editor; it's right here.
"... being bitter is like swallowing poison and waiting for the other guy to die..." - anon
[Updated on: Mon, 18 January 2010 14:21] Report message to a moderator
|
|
|
|
|
Goto Forum:
Current Time: Sat Feb 15 06:44:31 PST 2025
Total time taken to generate the page: 0.01518 seconds
|