Some question about E:

[576XE]

Hello, good old Atarians!

 

I'd like to ask is there any reasonable way to display 256 characters simultaneously while editing in E: device?

 

I hate inverse characters, but obviously need smth. like Curled braces, Cirillic signes etc.

May be 8-th (inverse) bit can be controlling flag for reading signes from custom charset?

[flashjazzcat]

No - 128 characters is a limitation of the hardware, AFAIK. The only way to do it would be to implement E: in bitmap mode (in which case you could have as many characters in a font as you liked), or use DLIs to change the character set base pointer.

 

Or you could try and get a VBXE, which allows you to use 256 character fonts in text mode.

[576XE]

No - 128 characters is a limitation of the hardware, AFAIK. The only way to do it would be to implement E: in bitmap mode (in which case you could have as many characters in a font as you liked), or use DLIs to change the character set base pointer.

 

Or you could try and get a VBXE, which allows you to use 256 character fonts in text mode.

 

At first, thank you flashjazzcat for your great efforts for making atari8 much more friendly then ever (I mean GUI of course.)

 

Please, advice me something to read about VBXE and it's charset capabilities. I heard only about 80 columns display and colored text. (It sounds fantastically.)

 

Thank you for earliest reply I ever had.

[flashjazzcat]

The full story starts here:

 

http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/142283-vbxe-2/

 

Manual and examples here:

 

http://www.spiflash.org/block/15.html

 

Now, I may get a punch in the face from Electron/Candle if I've got this wrong, but AFAIK, the 256 character fonts can only be accessed in 80 columns, since the VBXE has no native 40 column mode. It's hardly a drawback, though: if you're gonna use the FX modes, why run in 40 columns?