FabGL/MBASIC Easy 8x8 monochrome sprites

[Eightbitswide]

I've been playing with some ideas for generating simple monochrome sprites in BASIC for FabGL.   There is probably a better way to handle this, but I wanted to be able to see the sprite in binary in the code for easy editing.   BASIC has a nice HEX$ command, but no BINARY$ command, so I wrote one.

I'll probably migrate to PASCAL going forward just for the better editor. ;)

8b

[Fred Weigel]

8b

I was interested in simple graphics... but tried to go as "portable" as I could. I noted that UTF-8 has 4x4 cell graphics, and that every terminal

supporting UTF-8 should support this. Effectively gives an 80x24 terminal 160x48 graphics... or so. I was hoping for 3x2 cell graphics, but

that isn't in. I do wonder what the UTF-8 mapping for petsci is! Then, I could display petsci on xterm, gnome terminal, etc.

Back to the 2x2 cell mapping -- back in the day, an article was published which was a circuit that allowed drawing characters on an oscilloscope.  Just one line..  This was published in August 1974 by Popular Electronics. That had a ROM based font -- I call it the "Scopewriter font".  I wote the Scopewriter emulator in MBASIC, and then translated to XYBasic (XYBasic has binary constants!)

https://github.com/ratboy666/halfg

Its called halfg for "half cell graphics". Its known to work on xterm (of course), gnome terminal,  Also runs on cool-retro-term.

I wrote it as a teaching exercise for BASIC beginners -- so I left a bug (or three) in the code. Just good fun!

You may find that code of interest!

FredW