Post by Alcilol in Chess10 (BBC Micro) by Alci comments

Viewing post in Chess10 (BBC Micro) by Alci comments

The pieces are indeed redefined characters with background swapping to make the board in text mode. Acorn computers like Amstrad ones use a real frame buffer. The character font is independant of the background color. With VDU5, you can put them anywhere on screen (no 8 pixels boundaries) and characters overwrite whatever is on screen.

Try this on the ELK :

10 MODE 5:GCOL 0,130:FOR N=1TO100:GCOL0,RND(2):DRAW RND(1200),RND(1000):NEXT:VDU5:MOVE12,510:GCOL0,3:PRINT "CHARACTERS ON TOP"

Iapetus236 days ago (4 edits)

Ah right, very interesting and useful, it is great to know that we can plot chars anywhere on the screen. thanks. I was asking because I have a friend who coded a game for the Amstrad CPC and as the BASIC also only allows to create monochrome user defined characters; he plots 3 chars on the same place to get as it were one char in four colours as there is a way to plot them with transparency. with VDU5 and GCOL we can do the same, awesome.

itch.io

Viewing post in Chess10 (BBC Micro) by Alci comments