P1Xel Editor

Desktop tile editor and toolchain for Game Boy development, built with Lazarus/Free Pascal.

Features

• Tile Editor — 8x8 pixel art editor with draw, fill, and line tools
• Font Editor — manage character glyphs mapped to Game Boy VRAM tiles
• Screen Designer — place tiles, sprites, and text on 32x32 map grids
• VRAM Tile Viewer — browse the 384-tile VRAM layout (sprites, font, background)
• CHR Export — export 6144-byte 2bpp tileset files (384 tiles)
• TLM Export — export 1024-byte tilemap files with signed $8800 BG addressing
• OAM Export — export 160-byte sprite attribute tables
• RGBDS Integration — build ROMs directly (rgbasm + rgblink + rgbfix)
• BGB Emulator Launch — run and watch ROMs in BGB
• ROM Statistics — inspect GB ROM headers (title, cart type, sizes)
• DMG/CGB Toggle — default DMG mode with optional CGB flag
• Screen Proofer — preview tilemaps with DMG shading and sprite overlay
• GIF Import — import sprite sheets and tile sets from GIF images
• Undo/Redo — 20-level snapshot history

Prerequisites

• Lazarus 4.8 with Free Pascal Compiler 3.2.2
• Target: i386-win32 (32-bit Windows)
• The first-run wizard automatically downloads:
  • RGBDS v0.8.0 — assembler toolchain
  • BGB — Game Boy emulator
  • the-game-boy-engine — sample project

Build

C:\lazarus\lazbuild.exe --build-all main.lpi

The compiled binary lands in builds\P1XelEditor.exe. The project uses UPX compression in its post-build step (requires ..\upx\upx.exe relative to the project root).

Project Structure

p1xel-editor/
  main.lpr              # Program entry point
  main.lpi              # Lazarus project file
  main_window.pas       # TForm1 — main editor (5400+ lines)
  main_window.lfm       # Form layout
  wizard.pas            # First-run toolchain setup wizard
  downloader.pas        # HTTP download + ZIP extraction
  exporter.md           # CHR/TLM/OAM binary format specification
  tools/                # Runtime toolchain (auto-downloaded on first run)
    rgbds/
    bgb/
    toolchain.ini
  projects/             # Game Boy project directories

Architecture

The editor maintains an internal 384-tile data buffer (FRomData) organized as:

Zone	Source Tiles	CHR Position	VRAM Address
Font	0–80	128–208	$8800–$8D00
Background	81–255	209–383	$8D10–$97F0
Sprites	256–383	0–127	$8000–$87FF

The engine uses LCDCF_BG8800 (signed $8800 addressing), where TLM values are signed bytes added to base $9000. Font glyphs are referenced by TLM values 128–208, background tiles by 209–255 and 0–127.

License

See LICENSE.