Mark Simonson Posted April 19, 2021 Author Share Posted April 19, 2021 For at least part of the time, I had my tv set on its side, and had to rotate the joystick counterclockwise 90° to match the orientation. ? 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
OxC0FFEE Posted April 19, 2021 Share Posted April 19, 2021 (edited) 2 hours ago, Mark Simonson said: For at least part of the time, I had my tv set on its side, and had to rotate the joystick counterclockwise 90° to match the orientation. ? I’d been thinking about making a proportional text editor that rotates the screen 90 degrees to make the artifacting less of an issue for narrow characters (but then realized it would end up making the stroke contrast awful and unusable in the OTHER dimension). Turns out the Atari font designer really did pretty well given what he was working with for limitations! I’ve moved on to implementing the proportional text editor with the monitor in the default orientation using parts of the character widths and TurboBasic XL’s TEXT blitting statement. Maybe it’ll make it into next year’s Basic 10 Liner compo. In your interview with @Savetz you mentioned making use of GPRIOR to switch on the GTIA in text mode. Do you have the article or the code you wrote, experimenting with that idea? To refresh your memory or anyone else’s, here’s an article that mentions that trick from Compute’s 1st Book of Atari Graphics (basically, POKE 623 with 64, 128, or 192 for modes 9, 10, and 11). I also thought it might make an interesting technique for game character graphics but haven’t seen it used anywhere. Lastly, thanks for your fonts (both modern and retro). They have enriched my life. Edited April 19, 2021 by OxC0FFEE Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mark Simonson Posted April 20, 2021 Author Share Posted April 20, 2021 (edited) @OxC0FFEE I probably saw that Compute article and may have got the idea from it, although it only hints at what I figured out. I mentioned in the interview that the GTIA text article was published in the TAIG newsletter, but I'm not totally sure that was the case. The good news is that I still have a copy of it (or a draft if it was never published). I've formatted it (using the illustrations I made in MacPaint in 1985) and saved it as a PDF and attached it here. I've also attached an Atari BASIC demo. It creates a simple character set containing four characters with mode 9 grayscale gradients and then displays them randomly on a GTIA text mode field (graphics 0 + GPRIOR (623) set to 96). GTIA Text v2.pdf METAL2.LIS Edited April 20, 2021 by Mark Simonson 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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