TURACO
	The Ultimately Radical Arcade Changing Operator
	Development work on this version of Turaco has ended. I just put the final nail in the coffin. Be sure to check out the new program in development, Turaco CL.
	The Message Board has been taken down due to abuse. Sorry.

What is Turaco?

Turaco is the next generation of The Arcade Games Editor A.K.A. "AGE". After a year of development, and many modifications to the original core of AGE; and then modifications on those modifications, it was decided by myself (Scott "Jerry" Lawrence) and Ivan Mackintosh (the father of AGE) to do a full re-write. I headed up this effort, using the GUI interface that "ALLEGRO" uses, and writing new things where necessary to get us where we are today...

Turaco / Age is an editor of graphics and other things from those arcade games from ye olden days. You can load in the graphics of Pac-Man, Galaga, Commando, or your old favorite game, and give Pac-Man a mohawk, change the bugs in Galaga, or do whatever you like. You can then take those modified graphics, and load them in an emulator, or download them to a real arcade machine.

Here's what Turaco looks like...

The file selector...	Pac-Man graphics loaded in...

What's new?

Since I haven't really worked on Turaco for over three years now, I've decided to finally end it, and stop even thinking about doing any sort of development work on this code base. I haven't been able to build a new version of it for well over two years now, nor have I had the desire to do so. I attempted to port Turaco to Linux about a year ago, and had little to no success with doing so, due to poor coding on my part. MS-DOS is very forgiving with poor coding. heh. Oh well.

The code does live on though, in the form of Turaco CL. Turaco CL is a command-line based, and will let you extract and build graphics roms for all of the games that Turaco supports, letting you edit the graphics in your favorite image manipulations program!

This page will remain for those of you who wish to continue using and downloading this version of the program. If you can use it, go for it!

What's new in this experimental version of Turaco? (v1.1.3) (2000 October 12)

• You can setup a range of bitmaps to be animated!
• click for an animated screenshot

What's new in this experimental version of Turaco? (v1.1.2) (1999 March 7)

• Capcom CPS1 Games fixed
• Conway's Game Of Life added (hit F-12)
• The Bitmap editor GUI Gadget has been re-written. This should fix some odd size bugs seen before...

What's new in this version of Turaco? (v1.1) (1999 February 6)

• Now there are 847 drivers!
• Drivers can be (and are) stored in subdirectories below DRIVERS\
• [esc] handing for when driver selector is starting up (file-change game)
• User preferences screen for TURACO.INI features
• Display of moose position when the moose is over the sprite palette
• Removed the sprite palette popup menu;
  • Added the EDIT button to replace it
  • Added double-clicks with left/right to replace it as well
• Alike-sized banks will not clear the edit window on a bank change now
• display of cursor position in the sprite palette
• display of selected sprite in the sprite palette outlines the sprite now
• PCX save bank to file (F9) (edit menu)
• PCX load sprite from file (F10) (edit menu)
• Generic Gameboy game driver
• Single plane drivers fixed & then unfixed
• Image file palette loader - loads a palette from a TGA/BMP/PCX/LBM
• hopefully sped up encoding/decoding routines (load/save/bank switch)
• fixed bitmap grid display and sprite palette displays
• new font - a pretty sans-serif system font
• [esc] no longer exits the program
• More keyboard shortcuts added
• An "Are you sure" window pops up when you try to quit the editor
• save bank to C source file (EXPERIMENTAL! -- only works in some situations)
• README.TXT and WHATSNEW.TXT viewers added (help menu)
• Updated readme.txt file
• Added a well documented driver file: INIDRIV.TXT
• Squashed some old and some new crash-bugs, handle odd situations better

African birds in the hand are worth two in the bush.