Hacker News Reader

Comment by rwmj | Hacker News Reader

The title led me to think it might be a single file, but still this is good stuff.

You could probably make it a single file if you used the wonderfully obscure XPM image format for your sprites and assets. It is both a C source fragment and an image format in one! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_PixMap

View on HN

What are upsides of using this format instead of a more generic array of pixels (something like output of imagemagick to .h files or PPM files)?

BTW I know one can use resource files (.rc) on Windows to embed various resources, but is there an analogous mechanism for linux binaries?

The examples in the wiki article show the difference pretty well. XPM lets you sort-of see what the image is just by looking at the source file.

E.G. compare this

  static char blarg_bits[] = {
  0x13, 0x00, 0x15, 0x00, 0x93, 0xcd, 0x55, 0xa5, 0x93, 0xc5, 0x00, 0x80,
  0x00, 0x60 };

with this

  static char * blarg_xpm[] = {
  "16 7 2 1",
  "* c #000000",
  ". c #ffffff",
  "**..*...........",
  "*.*.*...........",
  "**..*..**.**..**",
  "*.*.*.*.*.*..*.*",
  "**..*..**.*...**",
  "...............*",
  ".............**."
  };

On Linux you can use "ld -o myobj.o -r -b binary myfile.dat" and it will generate a linkable object file that contains your file data as a byte array. However, other platforms do it other ways, so it's generally easier to use "xxd" from the vim package to generate a C source file with a literal array, similar to the way that XPM works. That will work on all platforms.

That's an interesting idea. Probably won't change the format for this project, but something I might consider in future ones. Thanks for the tip!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com