PETSCIIBOTS

[+SpiceWare]

These cool PETSCII robots are periodically posted on Twitter. 
 

 

 

 

[carlsson]

See also all other PETSCII graphics of which the majority are mindblowing. I believe the PETSCIIBOTS account is handled by Cal "buzz_clik" Skuthorpe, who on his regular account posts PETSCII demakes of popular games, often so good looking that those scream "make a game out of me".

[+SpiceWare]

I hadn't looked into it before, but the PETSCIIBOTS account does link to buzz_clik.  After checking a few posts I've followed this account as well, thanks!

 

 

 

[carlsson]

Now if the C64 had a text mode that allowed you to freely choose foreground AND background for every character, combined with the fantastic PETSCII graphics set, it would be off the charts. I know very few (if any) systems have that flexibility but one can dream.

 

The Extended Color mode is kind of nice, letting you have four different background colours but then the character set is reduced to the first 64 characters which is a drawback. If one uses custom defined graphics it can be useful. Unfortunately Extended Color clashes hard with Multi Color, meaning you can't have lower res, 4 colour foreground graphics on top of 4 different backgrounds without going straight into bitmapped multicolor hires mode. Then again no video chip has it all.

[Pokeypy]

25 minutes ago, carlsson said:

Now if the C64 had a text mode that allowed you to freely choose foreground AND background for every character, combined with the fantastic PETSCII graphics set, it would be off the charts. I know very few (if any) systems have that flexibility but one can dream.

 

The Extended Color mode is kind of nice, letting you have four different background colours but then the character set is reduced to the first 64 characters which is a drawback. If one uses custom defined graphics it can be useful. Unfortunately Extended Color clashes hard with Multi Color, meaning you can't have lower res, 4 colour foreground graphics on top of 4 different backgrounds without going straight into bitmapped multicolor hires mode. Then again no video chip has it all.

True for the 1980s' systems. But today, you can have it all (and more) in Pygame, if you want.

For example, check out my "vintageinput.py". Technically, I easily could have made it look (100%) Commodore- or Atari-like (including PETSCII graphics in as many foreground and background colors as I liked), I just wasn't sure of the old systems' fonts' copyright.

And I use three times up-scaling there, so I could have three times the resolution of that, too.

 

You wouldn't mess with PETSCII by the way, you would just put the robot images onto a sprite sheet (example).

Edited June 23, 2021 by Pokeypy

[carlsson]

Yes, today I can have VR, 3D, 8K resolution and gazillions of colours at the same time too.

 

Regarding fonts, apparently the copyright rules depend on where you (or your customers) live. For instance in the USA, bitmapped fonts like these 8x8 ones have never fallen under copyright laws, while various vectorized and algorithmically defined fonts do count as computer programs and thus are copyrighted. In Europe (EU) however, also bitmap representations of fonts down to 8x8 pixels can be copyrighted as well as the more advanced ones. Now pretty much every emulator these days include ROM dumps of these files, even for systems that never made it to the US but it might not stop them from publishing the program as from an US address.