TI-99 Infocom Interpreter Dev

[hlabrand]

Yes, for sure, it's very exciting to see these glyphs supported

 

Btw Insane, do you have a screenshot in 40 col? Just to see?

[+InsaneMultitasker]

1 hour ago, hlabrand said:

Btw Insane, do you have a screenshot in 40 col? Just to see?

Hello - nothing in 40 columns at this time.  I have been identifying the changes needed to integrate 40 column mode into the same code base so that instead of 3 or 4 interpreters there will be one main interpreter plus the larger (i..e supercart style)  option.  I have identified key areas that require changes such as the status line output, scroll routine, and input routine.  For the short term I need to slow down the feature creep and keep my enthusiasm for code changes in check   Especially if I am going to push this to the native Z3 file support...

 

[wierd_w]

Alright--  The font will look a little inconsistent if I do that, but it should be doable.

 

Sadly, I traded having descender space for having ascender space. (more glyphs need the headroom than need to be below the line.) Bitmapped fonts like this dont have the same degrees of freedom one gets with a vector font. I am limited by the hard restrictions of the EM window size. (and 5x5 is the smallest I can make a glyph and have it still be readable.)

 

I have slept now; I will plug in the laptop and make some changes.

 

 

[hlabrand]

That's fair! I dont speak spanish but i imagine it's as readable as the Ç that sits a bit high on its cedille instead of having it drop down - looks perfectly readable regardless.

[+InsaneMultitasker]

3 hours ago, hlabrand said:

Btw Insane, do you have a screenshot in 40 col? Just to see?

Dawned on me that with Classic99 I could modify the video regs to at least show a sample of what things look like in 40 columns, even if the formatting is all wrong. 

[wierd_w]

Hey, the font looks pretty good in 40col mode.

 

Still needs prodding on the glyphs I mentioned.

[+InsaneMultitasker]

 

@hlabrand  are the extra characters used only for display in V3?   One of the documents I reviewed states the characters are allowed for both output and input.   The decoding process I modified has nothing to do with keyboard input, nor do I know if there is even any mechanism to enter such characters on a TI. 

[wierd_w]

Maybe CTRL+SHIFT and numeric input, using a buffer?

 

Similar to ALT+NUMBER used on IBM PC compatibles?

[wierd_w]

OK, I have prodded the font with the desired changes.

 

Font1Prodded.mag

 

Edited September 14, 2020 by wierd_w

[hlabrand]

Honestly, don't worry about accents in input. The way the input recognition works in Z-Machine v3 is that they take the first 6 units of each word and match it to a dictionary of 6-unit words. Everything is lowercased before, so a classic ascii character is one unit; an accented letter, however, is 4 units. So you can recognize a 6-letter word if it's all ascii, or a word with 1 accent and 2 letters; this is way too short (for instance, you can't distinguish "téléphone" or "télévision", because they cut at "tél").

 

In Z-Machine v5 the limit is 9 units, but even then we don't like accents in input; the code is really inefficient, because you want to recognize "téléphone", "teléphone", "telephone", "télephone" to be nice to the player. Standard practice is to remove the accents from letters in the input before processing; I'm not sure it's possible in v3, but personally I'll definitely make sure that players know they shouldn't put accents in input. So it can probably stay unimplemented

Edited September 14, 2020 by hlabrand

[+InsaneMultitasker]

Quick insertion and test, just in time to go to bed. Font1Prodded :

Edit (increased window size of the shot.. and right ratio, I think)

See post #65

 

[wierd_w]

The 1 needs to be bumped right at least 1px, it seems...

 

Otherwise it looks pretty good I think.  Always open to additional input on it.

(And the distortion imposed by classic 99's scaling of the window hurts my brain.)

Edited September 14, 2020 by wierd_w

[hlabrand]

This looks great! The only comment I have is that you switched the "a with circle" with its uppercase counterpart, and same with "o with a strike" ("Malmo" and "Orsted", "15 A (angstrom)").

[wierd_w]

Transposed letters fixed. (also, numeral 1 moved 1px to the right.)

 

Font1Prodded.mag

Edited September 14, 2020 by wierd_w

[+InsaneMultitasker]

I played with the classic99 window a bit more, does this look right now?  I'll apply the fixes from #64 tomorrow or later this week. 

[wierd_w]

yes, better. 

(A single pixel out of place can ruin how a glyph looks, so the mangling of the scaling routine makes it hard to judge if I have goofed up or not.)

 

Fonts are real easy for me to do, but getting them "Just right" needs an "in application" test or two. (or three.)

 

I also notice that the horizontal bar is missing from my font. (along the top of the status portion of the screen)-- is this an issue with the underline or hyphen character, or is there some other explanation?

 

 

[+InsaneMultitasker]

Good; that was a result of working on my laptop.  I'll check on the status line def as it is dynamically set based on video routine selection and that code is in the new (and not yet integrated) initialization routines.  Thank you wierd_w.

[hlabrand]

I just noticed: the ":" should be lowered by a pixel, it looks like it's "floating" in the status bar. And thanks for making the transpositions. (And thanks for all that work to you both, of course!)

[wierd_w]

Colon and semicolon prodded.

Font1Prodded.mag

[+OLD CS1]

42 minutes ago, wierd_w said:

(And the distortion imposed by classic 99's scaling of the window hurts my brain.)

Try stretch mode "DIB" and filter mode "none."  That allows you to set the screen size (mine is 3x) and keep blocky (un-smoothed) pixels.

[Tursi]

14 hours ago, InsaneMultitasker said:

I played with the classic99 window a bit more, does this look right now?  I'll apply the fixes from #64 tomorrow or later this week. 

You can use the fixed scales in the view menu to have it calculate an integer scaled size.  At least if 1-4x is acceptable.

 

[+InsaneMultitasker]

On 9/14/2020 at 12:39 AM, wierd_w said:

Colon and semicolon prodded.

Font1Prodded.mag 84.83 kB · 3 downloads

[wierd_w]

Looks good to me. If you have issues, name-drop me in the thread, and I will prod the font some more as needed.

 

 

[hlabrand]

Looks good to me!

[+OLD CS1]

I am generally snobby and pedantic about character fonts -- I want proper descenders, ascenders, acutes, graves, umlauts, &c.  Yours is a very nice compromise given the matrix restriction and pleasant on the eyes.  Nice, indeed!