Prime retro-gaming: trek!

[komame]

The beta version of the terminal is ready.

   

Most features are operational, including:

- text display with screen scrolling support (surprisingly, it works remarkably fast!)
- tab (\t) support (configurable size upon terminal creation)
- setting the cursor at any position on the screen (x,y)
- light and dark mode
- clearing the terminal
- input mode

Regarding the input mode, it currently works at a basic level, meaning it displays a prompt and allows entering text or numbers. It supports Backspace and Clear for erasing entered text. Currently, toggling the Alpha and Shift modifiers works in a somewhat limited manner, as the first press activates the modifier and the second deactivates it. There is no support yet for single-use. Of course, I intend to refine this.

While playing Trek, I realized that it would be useful to have a feature in 'input' that initially sets the Alpha and Shift modifiers according to the type of data being entered. For example, when a command is issued, the Alpha modifier should be active immediately, and when a numerical value is being entered, no modifiers should be active. This terminal has such a capability (as an optional parameter to the 'input' function).

I also plan to add support for diacritical characters and buffering so that the content of any part of the terminal can be read. I have other ideas, but more on that later...

I will prepare a short documentation and share the source code tomorrow.

(08-30-2024 12:58 AM)jte Wrote:  I have definite memories of playing a C64 port of the game [...]
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.)

I had exactly the same idea when I promised to write this terminal. I created a bitmap with a graphic presentation of each character in sequence (all in one line next to each other) and I copy rectangles depending on the given character (after converting it to its numerical value, which are then treated as indices for rightward shifting to select the correct rectangle). The font I used comes from an 8-bit Atari. That was my first computer back in the 80s...