Prime retro-gaming: trek!

[jte]

Seeing this certainly brightened my day. After seeing it, I had to show my daughter some other ports of trek. (I have definite memories of playing a C64 port of the game; I don't immediately remember playing it on my ZX81.)

In the past, for this sort of thing, and for other games from the 8-bit era of home computers / early consoles, I was thinking what could be nice would be to add a PPL graphics command to get a convenient / quick analog to "character graphics" of the 70s / 80s: the PPL command would take a two-dimensional array (matrix?) of character indices, a grob (of character graphics / a font / a "sprite sheet") + stride information, and a destination graphical anchor point. Running the command would blit a rectangle of the grob onto the destination for each entry in the array (the rectangle taken being determined by the character from the array and the stride information). (Of course, if the sprite sheet were a more typical font — "A" for 65 etc., a regularly spaced terminal could be drawn with one PPL command as well.)

Another possibility would be to have a grob being used for the "character framebuffer". (So a single pixel in that grob would determine the rectangle taken, rather than an integer.) A string is another possibility. (Each has advantages; perhaps they should all be allowed. A string as source would involve a slightly different rendering approach on the back end.)