CREATING A SPRITE... STEP BY STEP

To make this as easy as possible for you, we've put together this simple step by step guide to help you draw your own sprites.

STEP 1:

Write the spritemaking program shown here ON A PIECE OF PAPER... note that line 100 starts a special DATA section of your program which will contain the 63 numbers you need to create your sprite.

STEP 2:

Color in the pixels on the spritemaking grid on Page 162 (or use a piece of graph paper... remember, a sprite has 24 squares across and 21 squares down). We suggest you use a pencil and draw lightly so you can reuse this grid. You can create any image you like, but for our example we'll draw a simple box.

STEP 3:

Look at the first EIGHT pixels. Each column of pixels has a number (128, 64, 32, 16, 8, 4, 2, 1). The special type of addition we are going to show you is a type of BINARY ARITHMETIC which is used by most computers