WOW.
First get LaserBoy!
http://hacylon.case.edu/laser/LaserBoy/LaserBoy_11_01_2008.zip
Know that it is a work in progress and that your observations and comments are appreciated.
This is going to be a challenge to describe. There are SO MANY sets of "things" we need to know by name. It will take some understanding of the stuff of which we are working.
Probably the first set of things is the pixels in the display window when you open LaserBoy. That is a 24 bit bitmap. If you look at LaserBoy.bat in a text editor, you will see, and can change, the width and height, in pixels of this bitmap.
It is recommended that you set these to a (>=1.333):1 aspect ratio. The height you enter here will determine the size of the square that is your laser vector art view. So, if you make it
LaserBoy.exe 800 600
Your view will be a 600 pixel square.
You can open a bitmap file into the LaserBoy memory bitmap, as its background. When you open a bitmap it is shown at actual size. There is no size compensation, so a bitmap of 600 pixels square will fill the entire background of the vector view. A smaller bitmap will be aligned with the upper left corner of the screen and a larger bitmap will simply be cut off.
So, figure out a size for LaserBoy that looks good on your monitor. Something to be aware of is BOTH your screen's aspect ratio and your display resolution's aspect ratio. If these ratios are not the same, you do not have square pixels! Circles will be ellipses, cats and dogs will start living together. All hell will break loose.
Once you get LaserBoy sized to your display, then you know the size to make the bitmaps you are going to trace.
To open a bitmap into the background of the LaserBoy vector view...
From the main menu, choose 'i' to input a file. Choose option '5' bitmap.
Choose option '2' open into frame background.
OH! I probably should have already told you to save your bitmap in the folder called bmp inside the folder you got when you unzipped LaserBoy!
Now that you have a bitmap for a background, check out the ';' key! It makes it disappear and reappear.
Now from the main menu, tap the '9' key to make sure that you are on the first frame in the currently loaded set.
Now check out option 'j'.
In frame set transforms, you can '8' add empty frame to beginning.
Now, if you want to, you can hit the [Space] bar and select this frame. Now that this frame is selected, you can trim the loaded frame set to just this selected frame by hitting the '2' key. Now all you have loaded in the memory is the contents of this one frame! It looks like it's empty, but it's not.
James.