[stella] Question about Chimera

[Glenn Saunders]

--- Ruffin Bailey <rufwork at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Is there something better than Dark Mage style   
> possible here?

Yes, in the sense that the font data itself can be
completely separate from the cart address-space.  To
generate text you would send command strings to
Chimera.  When entering VBLANK, you tell it where to
plot, and push in the ASCII characters.  When the ARM
gets the signal, it will start rendering the screen in
the background.  So you can do whatever you like
between then and the end of VBLANK.  By the time the
kernel starts up again, the new data will have already
been rendered to RAM by the ARM, so it will just
automatically show up.  You can have a larger font
with lowercase and other special characters.  We're
planning to support a slightly tweaked 7-bit version
of the Atari 8-bit character set.  While there is a
1-pixel gap between the characters, there will be no
required gap between rows of text.  So you can have
more rows per screen.  This is because the actual
kernel is highly simplified from Stellar Track since
all it does now is read data from fixed hotspot
addresses into the sprite registers on every single
line.  There is no blank text-rendering zones between
rows.


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