Recently I took bocianu‘s SprEd tool for designing Hardware sprites (Player Missile Graphics driven) and created a derived product called SwSprEd… which is (quite surprisingly) software sprite editor.

Editor is running in web browser, it is available here: swspred-atari.sourceforge.io

Usage is basically almost same as in SprEd:

• everything can be controlled by mouse quite conveniently + lot of keyboard shortcuts available as well
• can be zoomed within browser w/o any issue – could be handy for anyone whos sight is not that sharp anymore
• your data is stored in local storage (you do not loose your work if your browser hangs or tab gets closed)
• flipping, shifting, copy/paste
• undo/redo
• animate

, however some changes are of course in place:

• ability to edit sprite of width from 4 up to 24 pixels (1 to 6 chars)
• ability to pick 3rd color and draw it freely (which is in case of HW sprites possible only in sprite overlapping areas)
• save/load to *.swspr binary file
• export in MADS format by columns – suitable for software sprites used in char mode 4