Saturday, August 5, 2017

Something different

From another project I've been working on.  A cross platform library for old computers.
This shows off the code that lets you print text on a "hi-res" graphics screen.  The code prints 64 characters per line on a 256 pixel wide screen or 80 characters on a 320 pixel wide screen.  I have versions for several machines.  The video shows the regular 6502 Atari version, 6803 MC-10 version, 65816 enhanced Atari version, and Z80 VZ200 version. Some of the code has been ported to the 68hc11, 6809, and several other machines.  As you can see, it's pretty fast for being software based, so it shouldn't slow down projects that use it.

The original goal for this part of the library was to create portable text adventure engines for the Infocom (Zork) amd similar games in C.  Being able to print in upper and lower case with a reasonable number of characters per line seemed like a good idea where most 8 bit computers only print 32 or or 40 characters per line, and many only support upper case text.  After loosing a lot of code in a house fire, the original project took a major step back.  Since then I've changed goals for the cross platform library.  I'll discuss that at some point in the future.

Part of the reason this caught my interest is it's something I wrote for an embedded system years ago. Versions of the Z80, 6803 an 6502 source code are already posted on the internet, but it's not the most recent versions of the code..

No comments:

Post a Comment