BASIC graphics features? (in-house or 3rd party)
BASIC graphics features? (in-house or 3rd party)
Are there perhaps any plans that anyone, whether attached to the project or not, might have that are oriented toward implementing a full 320x240 graphic screen in BASIC instead of either being limited to a 320x200 screen with an unchangeable black bar at the bottom or POKEing the VERA directly? Even better, what about 640x480 mode?
And if I'm asking for the moon, why not the sun, too? So much of the functionality in the system already is very similar to Super Expander 64 and BASIC 7.0... what about sprite commands, like SPRDEF and SPRMOV and so on?
Maybe a SOUND command that handles simple sound commands to the PSG, and an FMSND command that can control the YM2151?
BASIC graphics features? (in-house or 3rd party)
It should be fairly possible to do 320x240 at least. The main barrier to it right now is that the tile data (or character data) for layer 1 is at $F800-$FFFF in video RAM, which gives you only $10000-$1F9C0 for layer 0, which is actually slightly less than what is needed for an 8bpp 320x200 bitmap (thus the PSG registers being overwritten in screen 128 mode). This leaves the space between $4000-$F800 totally unused, but not big enough for anything. If the tile data for layer 1 were to be moved to $4000, then we would have $04800-$1F9C0 for layer 0, which is more than enough space for a 8bpp 320x240 bitmap. I don't really see any way of easily doing 640x480 since that is way bigger than all of the VRAM available, unless you made it 1 or 2 bpp.
BASIC graphics features? (in-house or 3rd party)
8 hours ago, Ender said:
I don't really see any way of easily doing 640x480 since that is way bigger than all of the VRAM available, unless you made it 1 or 2 bpp.
That's just fine; limits of color depth balanced against resolution is something we Commodore-oriented retroheads are already used to, considering the VIC-20 and C64 multicolor modes.