Beginner Questions

[cyrille de brébisson]

Hello,

ICON is an "old" keyword and although it still works, it is NOT the best solution to the problems of using graphics on Prime.

Use graphical files instead (jpg or png).
png is a looseness compression. This means that when you save an image as a png and then reload it, the reloaded image is exactly the same as when you saved it.
jpg DOES loose data upon compression. This means that if you look at a file that you saved, they are some differences with what you had originally. In theory, the differences are very small and barely detectable by human eye on "real world images" such as pictures (with shades of color and gentle gradians).
jpg files are smaller (in memory size) for a given image than png.

It is important to understand this to be choose the right storage format.
Pictures like images are best saved as jpg. pictures with sharp edges or small features (like sprites, which are small drawing used for animation in games and the like) are better saved as png.


Now, if you are ON the calculator and do NOT have a computer, you can, as Han pointed out, create and use such files.
G1 to G9 are "graphical" buffers that are in the calculator and that you can use for this purpose.
You can dimention them (DIMGROB_P) draw on them with all the drawing functions and SAVE Them to file (AFiles("screenshot.png"):=G1 to save G1 into screenshot.png). the file extention here indicate the file type; png or jpg.
you can reload them the other way around doing G1:=AFiles("screenshot.png")

Unfortunately, graphical buffers are LIMITED to 9 (G1 to G9), so if you create something like a game, you usually need MORE than 9 images. for example, you have a number of sprites for all the graphical elements of you game.
In this case, the "standard" sollution is to save ALL these elements in a single image and then use the BLIT_P function to draw selected parts of the source graphic corresponding to various images.

Hope that this helps your friend.

Cyrille