Help
As a first release, there are no actual FAQ yet. Instead, you can consider this to be a walkthrough
of some of the program's features.
Openning for the first time:
First of all, M5 needs to have a "menus" folder. That said, you
should put it M5 in the same folder you have HME in . . . This will make things much easier
later on.
You've probably seen that you can't do anything but "Create New" at
this point? Select that and type in a name for your menu . . . say, "null" for example. We'll delete
this menu later anyway, so it's not that crucial. For future reference though, all ranch menus need
to be started with "Ranch_", all town menus start with "Town_", and all mountain menus start with
"Mountain_" . . . A bit of a pain in the butt, but HME uses this naming scheme to identify its menus. You
can see the name of any menu just above it in HME.
Decompile a menu:
In the "File" menu, you'll see "Decompile". Select that and type
"Ranch_1" (or any other menu you have). If you mess up the name, then you'll get an "advertised error". Do this
at least once, because it's funny.
Assuming you typed the name correctly . . . Try to "Open" a file again and you should see "Ranch_1.m5m" listed.
Select that file and you should see the menu open up!
Image changing:
In the "Image" menu, choose "Change". Select any image to be shown in
the left side of the editor. This side of the editor is called the "Grab Window".
Move your mouse around the Grab Window until it's over a graphic you want to use in your menu. Now,
hold the Shift Key in, while moving the mouse around until the target of the "Menu Window"
is over the place you want to drop the graphic. (BTW- keep the mouse over the Grab Menu while doing all this).
Now click and the graphic gets pasted to the menu.
The menu's image is stored as "Ranch_1.bmp"
Tile Properties:
Click on any tile in the Menu Window. To the left you'll see a lot
of fun stuff to play with.
- Colors - Select the palette used for an object. Notice, M5 selects the palette
for the upper-left of the sprite only. Once in a while, you'll need to edit this by hand (explained later). Color changes
are only visible in an emulator, so you can take graphics from a screenshot to show them in your menu.
- Mirroring - Mirror an object with the arrows. The graphic will be changed in your menu, but
occasionally be off by a pixel. You can fix this by inserting different graphics later.
- Layer - The button with "Jack" on it . . . Choose whether an object goes in front of Jack or
behind him. Again, this is based on only the upper-left corner of the sprite.
- Object and graphic values - can be editing manually, if you need to. I'll explain this
in more detail when an actual FAQ comes out.
Clipboard:
You have 8 clipboards available to use. F1 to F8 will copy the
data from a tile to the corresponding clipboard. 1 to 8 will paste the data to a different tile.
To use a clipboard, simply hold the mouse over the tile (Menu Window) that you want to copy/paste and hit the
correct key. Notice, this transfers only the data . . . The graphic will remain the same.
Compile:
To see your changes in HME, simply choose compile and then open
HME. Note: You'll notice that the new menu (saved without a file extention), is around 160kb!
All the others are under 20kb?!! The difference is because M5 saves all images as bitmaps (though
it can open any image type . . . as long as its extention happens to be "bmp"). To shrink your menu back
to a reasonable size, use a graphics program to save your menus bitmap as a gif/jpg file (and then change
the extention back to "bmp"). M5 doesn't know that it's not really a bitmap and your menu size will go
down drastically!
If you send a menu to me or the HME's site, try to shrink the menu a little first.
I will be writing a FAQ soon, so please, if you have any questions and/or comments e-mail them
to me. Either that, or ask at the HME Forum.