How the hell is it done?

I've tried Pixen and Paintbrush, and something always seems to go wrong. The colors get changed, the sprites get saved blurry, or the file isn't saved with the right extension. It's always something. I even once managed to get CC to recognize and use my sprites, but they ended up as big scrambled boxes. Sometimes my sprites will be saved as .bmp BUT IT'S NOT THE RIGHT KIND of .bmp. WTF? BMP is BMP.

Does anyone have a solution?

get GIMP.
complex, powerful, works.

Gimp is crap. You use it once and it develops an error. The error is different every time, but it always happens after one use on a mac.

yeah, sure. that or your computer is broken. my friend has a mac, i've used gimp at his place multiple times. it was installed in 2006, has been updated god knows how many times since then, and hasnt crashed once.
srsly; gimp.org

GIMP is great, but hard to learn at first. I remember having trouble with all the options and stuff.

How does he sprite without a pixel art application? It's hard to sprite if all you've got is a paintbrush tool.

Downloading Gimp!
Can't wait to see how it works. Even if Flammable is right and I can't make sprites with it, I'll hopefully at least be able to copy what I've made in Pixen and save them properly.

Maybe. But Pixen will still make the sprite suck.

i went on my friends mac awhile ago and used photoshop for sprites. it takes a little getting used to but is worth it.

No has the moneys
Not very keen on pirating, either.


Gimp is actually pretty good. It has this weird browser of its own thing which uses Windows-style hot keys and even its own special clipboard. I have to go into the menu and click "paste clipboard" to paste from anywhere outside of the program.

But it seems to save files the right way! My actor's head is now 70% more functional. The colors are right and you can actually see the sprite a good 60% of the time. The other 40% of the time it is a block of brown lines. Whatever. I'll figure it out.

Thanks for the recommendation!

You need to grab the palette file for Cortex Command. Assign that and save it without the filesize thing for bmp and it should work fine.
Mini tutorial, smallified.
If you can start it up, it's pretty easy to put a sprite in palette. You'll need this Gimp palette file and the location where Gimp stores its palettes on your computer. Place the palette file within that location, restart Gimp, and open up the sprite you want to put in palette.
Go to Image, Mode, Indexed (you may need to go to RGB if Photoshop put it in it's own palette already), and the radio button "Use Custom Palette". Click on the little gradient button below the name of the palette, and select the Cortex Command palette (should be the first at the top). Make sure the check box "Remove unused colors from colormap" is unchecked, then hit ok. Your colors might be modified a little as Gimp moves them to the closest color in the palette. Save it, then try it in Cortex again.

I'm sorry, I don't quite get where Gimp stores palettes. Where do I open the Gimp Palette File?

You need to find where Macs store them. Instructions to do so are smallified.
With Gimp open, click on edit and preferences. Scroll down the list and click on Palettes and look at the folder listed in the box at the right. Go to this folder and drop the palette file in, then restart Gimp. Your palette should be enabled now.

I understand everything else now - truly - I just have one final little thing.



What do I do with that?
Thank you SO much. Really.

Save it to desktop, that's the palette file you stick in said folder.