Intellivision ASCII Font

[+Gemintronic]

I cobbled together a full IBM extended ASCII character set in Intellivision/Aquarius style. Not sure how useful it is. Just putting it out there for people I grew up with the DOS character set so some characters got the IBM version over Inty.

 

[+DZ-Jay]

Looks like more than 64 characters, which is the size of the character set that the Intellivision supports.

 

-dZ.

[+Gemintronic]

Looks like more than 64 characters, which is the size of the character set that the Intellivision supports.

 

-dZ.

 

Probably will have to devise some sort of tile management system if I make a ZZT clone then. Thanks for the heads up!

[+DZ-Jay]

 

Probably will have to devise some sort of tile management system if I make a ZZT clone then. Thanks for the heads up!

 

What I typically do is to have a pre-processor script that identifies the unique characters in the strings to be printed on the screen at one time, and prepare a block to load into GRAM for them. This works satisfactorily since the text is usually a few words or at most a couple of lines in my game, not entire paragraphs.

 

Be aware that this technique will consume a bit more memory since you need to store the GRAM character maps for each string set. Also, you will need to load the characters into GRAM on the VBLANK interrupt. In IntyBASIC parlance, this means a "WAIT" before printing to the screen.

 

-dZ.

[First Spear]

I'm working on a game and need a lot of text, and I found that one way to get fonts on the screen for the Intellivision is not to treat a font like a font - treat it like a bitmap. What you shared is great, to make words with it, I would create the words in a graphics editor, fit as many to the available cards I have, and then reference those blocks of graphics to refresh an area. There is "Inty Letterpress" out there that will take a TrueType font and write it as a bitmap you can use with IntyColor for passing into IntyBASIC (or other tooling), you might want to check that out.

 

 

I cobbled together a full IBM extended ASCII character set in Intellivision/Aquarius style. Not sure how useful it is. Just putting it out there for people I grew up with the DOS character set so some characters got the IBM version over Inty.

 

intyascii.png

[+DZ-Jay]

I'm working on a game and need a lot of text, and I found that one way to get fonts on the screen for the Intellivision is not to treat a font like a font - treat it like a bitmap. What you shared is great, to make words with it, I would create the words in a graphics editor, fit as many to the available cards I have, and then reference those blocks of graphics to refresh an area. There is "Inty Letterpress" out there that will take a TrueType font and write it as a bitmap you can use with IntyColor for passing into IntyBASIC (or other tooling), you might want to check that out.

 

 

 

I actually use a hybrid of both techniques: I have a full alphabet of fonts in ROM and then I use a macro to compose "strings" as a record of the specific font cards needed for each character. I also reserve a block of GRAM for my string messages.

 

To print a string, I first load the string record into GRAM, and then "write" them into the BACKTAB.

 

In a sense, I am treating the text as just a bunch of GRAM cards, like any other bitmap; but I am also loading them from a predefined font set. I have a pre-processor macro that converts strings of text into pointers to the individual cards in the font set.

 

-dZ.