[stella] DASM 'upgrade' in progress

[Andrew Davie]

>It's quite easy to visualize graphics using monospaced fonts when you use a 
>. to indicate a 0 (i.e. transparent) and a character like X to indicate a 1 
>(a visible sprite pixel). 1 and 0 are too similar in contrast that it makes 
>it considerably more difficult.
>
>In my comments in DD I wind up repeating my bit pattern using those 
>characters just so I can see what I'm doing.
>
>There was a thread on this a long time ago, must have been 2+ years ago and 
>the consensus then was that it was a good idea to add.


Yes, on reflection I think this is probably useful.
How about incorporating automatic playfield knowledge, too?  Perhaps allow the system to encode any quoted string with spaces as a bit-pattern, separated into groups of 8-bit wide bytes - and, in the case of a 40-bit wide string, producing 6 bytes (or 5 packed bytes, even) representing that playfield in correct PF0/PF1/PF2 format.

something like...

   PIC "X X XXXX"
   PIC "XXX X  X"
   PIC "  X X  X"
   PIC "  X X  X"
   PIC "XXX XXXX"

for sprites, and

   PIC "XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"
   PIC "XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX            XXXXXXXXXX"
   PIC "XXXXX         XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"
   PIC "XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"

for playfield?

X could be any non-space character (a 'solid' character comes to mind).  Quotes are necessary so that the width of the 'picture' can be determined.  I'd anticipate a few modifiers to the command (eg: allowing a bottom-up definition to be drawn right-side-up, but actually assembled upside-down, packing the PF0 half-bytes into a single byte, defining half a playfield (for mirrored use), etc).

Input welcome.

Cheers
A











----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Archives (includes files) at http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/archives/
Unsub & more at http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/