Bitmap 2 ASM is a simple utility created to make the lives of TI-86 Assembly programmers easier. All you have to do is draw your full screen (128x64) picture in MSPaint (or any bitmap editor), save it as a monochrome (1-bit) bitmap, and open it with bmp2asm to convert it to ASM! But that's not all, you can also compress your picture! And no, not RLE compression (removal of consecutive repeated data), but close... just rotate RLE compression 90 degrees and you get vertical compression which is more efficient because repetitions are much more likely. The only ways you will get better compression with RLE compression is if you (a) use the shading fills in paint, or (b) have a lot of lines running horizontally. Most everything else will compress around 40%-60% better with vertical compression.

      A full set of instructions and help is available inside the program, but I want to point out that for better results, you need to spend a little time reorganizing your picture so that the bytes line up better vertically. Be sure to read the Tips section of the Help to better understand this.

      First of all, it doesn't matter where you install bmp2asm, just be sure you have the help folder in the same directory. Contact me if you have any problems and I'll see what I can do.

     
Version 1.2-Fixed a stupid mistake in the decompression routine and added a routine to decompress an RLE pasted into the compressed data window.

Version 1.1- quite a few things have been added.
(1) The compression had a few bugs and would mess up every once in a while-now it's fixed.
(2) The pic preview window got a major overhaul. It now has a right-click menu that allows you to open the picture in ms paint or copy it into another program for editing. Then paste it back in or click "revert to changed" to put the new picture in the preview and click save in the preview menu to convert the picture into the data.
(3) 2 new functions added - Decompress will convert a compressed pictures data back into the regular picture data so you can save it as a picture again or edit it. Reformat will reformat the picture data to the standard ASM format if you have too many spaces or mess it up A LITTLE.
(4) New support for opening 256 color (8-bit) and 24-bit (16777216 colors) bitmaps (and using them in the pic prevew, but you can still only save bmp's in monochrome)
(5) New about dialog (similar to the last) because the old one got deleted on accident - oops.

Version 1.01- the only difference between it and 1.0 is that 1.0 have a few typos and other little things I doubt you would notice. I don't believe there are any bugs, but with the number of bugs I have removed, there's bound to be one or two left. PLEASE let me know if you find any!

Version 1.0- First release

If all goes well, I hope to incorporate a few important items into 1 final future version including, but not limited to:
  * Support for other TI calculators (with ASM capabilities)
  * The ability to compress any size Bitmap and decompress to any screen location

I cannot be held responsible if this program screws up something you think is important - though it shouldn't.