XNA Blog

Well, almost. I did not implement lower case characters yet (never liked those on the original so i may never do that) and some of the character symbols are not printable yet. Anyway, the class is in a state that is perfectly usable for my ‘Pit’ project, so i think i will get back to that soon.

Here are some examples of the textscreen class at work: The first one shows how the screen of a standard VIC-20 looks like after the machine is powered on. Notice the ridiculously large amount of 3583 basic bytes free (the machine had a total of 5KB memory).

The second picture shows some of the printable characters (letters, numbers and symbols/special characters). The characters can be either printed normal or inverted.

The third one shows an exact replica of the instruction screen of ‘Pit’. Yes, it actually looks that ugly.

By the way, i made up my mind concering the aspect ratio and virtual pixel size i am going to use for ‘Pit’. Despite my desire to use as much of the 16:9 display as possible, i decided to go for the original 4:3 ratio (as depicted in the screenshots above). That of course means i have to redraw all sprites which isn’t too bad considering their whopping number of… 14.