Arcade-ish Proportional character set

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arkannoyed
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Re: Arcade-ish Proportional character set

Post by arkannoyed »

As a game name it opens up a multitude of possibilities, and Pandas fit well into the Speccys colour limitations!
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Ast A. Moore
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Re: Arcade-ish Proportional character set

Post by Ast A. Moore »

I, for one, welcome our new panda overlords.
Every man should plant a tree, build a house, and write a ZX Spectrum game.

Author of A Yankee in Iraq, a 50 fps shoot-’em-up—the first game to utilize the floating bus on the +2A/+3,
and zasm Z80 Assembler syntax highlighter.
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arkannoyed
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Re: Arcade-ish Proportional character set

Post by arkannoyed »

How about a name for the little angry fella? Any suggestions?
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Ast A. Moore
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Re: Arcade-ish Proportional character set

Post by Ast A. Moore »

Uh, Lee?
Every man should plant a tree, build a house, and write a ZX Spectrum game.

Author of A Yankee in Iraq, a 50 fps shoot-’em-up—the first game to utilize the floating bus on the +2A/+3,
and zasm Z80 Assembler syntax highlighter.
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arkannoyed
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Re: Arcade-ish Proportional character set

Post by arkannoyed »

I thought Bernard personally. Not enough Bernards around these days. Bernie Winters and Schnorbitz? Schnorbitz, although canine in origin, did have something of the Panda about him. Or how about a female Panda, Janice? Pam?

The Adventures of Pam the Panda :lol:
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Joefish
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Re: Arcade-ish Proportional character set

Post by Joefish »

Pam Panda sounds OK.
Andy Panda is too much like Watch-With-Mother's Andy Pandy from the 70s.
Alexander Panda?
Miranda Panda?
Melander Panda?
Stephander Panda?
Mandy Panda?
Swedish-P*n*s-Ex-Panda?
Last edited by Joefish on Thu Jun 13, 2019 2:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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arkannoyed
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Re: Arcade-ish Proportional character set

Post by arkannoyed »

Miranda the Angry Panda!
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Re: Arcade-ish Proportional character set

Post by Joefish »

'The Swedish-Made P*n*s-Ex-Panda-Pump And Me: (This Sort Of Thing Is My Bag Baby)', by Austin 'Danger' Powers? :lol:
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Ast A. Moore
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Re: Arcade-ish Proportional character set

Post by Ast A. Moore »

Matilda
Gwendolyn
Ezra
Brent
Alois
Thelonious
Every man should plant a tree, build a house, and write a ZX Spectrum game.

Author of A Yankee in Iraq, a 50 fps shoot-’em-up—the first game to utilize the floating bus on the +2A/+3,
and zasm Z80 Assembler syntax highlighter.
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Ast A. Moore
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Re: Arcade-ish Proportional character set

Post by Ast A. Moore »

Wanda the Angry Panda.
Every man should plant a tree, build a house, and write a ZX Spectrum game.

Author of A Yankee in Iraq, a 50 fps shoot-’em-up—the first game to utilize the floating bus on the +2A/+3,
and zasm Z80 Assembler syntax highlighter.
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Re: Arcade-ish Proportional character set

Post by Joefish »

Yolanda Panda.
The aim of the game is to grow Coriander and Oleander on your Verandah.
Out to stop you are Salamanders from Rwanda. Who get upset if you Slander their Commander. :lol:
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arkannoyed
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Re: Arcade-ish Proportional character set

Post by arkannoyed »

That’ll do now children, thank you!! :D
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Re: Arcade-ish Proportional character set

Post by Joefish »

Yes, I'm already getting tired of this Curséd Ursid! :lol:
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arkannoyed
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Re: Arcade-ish Proportional character set

Post by arkannoyed »

After lots of tinkering, I've set upon a decent encoding format that can be used for both scrolling and printing text. To overcome a few of the spacing issues, I've made a few special characters (glyphs I suppose) by combining some of the character pairs. Anyway, hopefully its not too jerky, but heres a GIF recording of some example text scrolling;

Image

The scroller routine is just 73 bytes
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Ast A. Moore
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Re: Arcade-ish Proportional character set

Post by Ast A. Moore »

Looks smooth enough to me. I’d increase the space by at least one pixel. Depending on the slant of some of the letters, the spacing between words look a bit on the tight side.
Every man should plant a tree, build a house, and write a ZX Spectrum game.

Author of A Yankee in Iraq, a 50 fps shoot-’em-up—the first game to utilize the floating bus on the +2A/+3,
and zasm Z80 Assembler syntax highlighter.
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Re: Arcade-ish Proportional character set

Post by arkannoyed »

Adjusting space now sir! I've added an extra pixel to the space width

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Pause on (c) message now implemented too. Better?
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Ast A. Moore
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Re: Arcade-ish Proportional character set

Post by Ast A. Moore »

Better, but use a single space after a period. :D
Every man should plant a tree, build a house, and write a ZX Spectrum game.

Author of A Yankee in Iraq, a 50 fps shoot-’em-up—the first game to utilize the floating bus on the +2A/+3,
and zasm Z80 Assembler syntax highlighter.
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Re: Arcade-ish Proportional character set

Post by Joefish »

I like that a lot.
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arkannoyed
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Re: Arcade-ish Proportional character set

Post by arkannoyed »

Simon Mann just said 'Pandamonium' on TMS!! (BBC Cricket) Haha!!!
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Re: Arcade-ish Proportional character set

Post by R-Tape »

arkannoyed wrote: Wed Jun 19, 2019 10:41 am Simon Mann just said 'Pandamonium' on TMS!! (BBC Cricket) Haha!!!
I like to think the TMS team are Specchums (and the rotters at SKY are not).
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arkannoyed
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Re: Arcade-ish Proportional character set

Post by arkannoyed »

Its just that SKY seem to have all the cash to get to televise it unfortunately. I bet they owned a BBC model B with a disk drive back in the day. Expensive and boring!!

I reckon Jeremy Coney or Aggers might be secret Miner Willy fans anyway. :D
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Re: Arcade-ish Proportional character set

Post by PQR »

[mention]arkannoyed[/mention] This looks pretty nice! It appears that the descenders (the extenders below the baseline such as in p) are three pixels tall whereas the ascenders (the extenders above the x-height such as in l) are only two pixels tall.

You are now compensating this difference by making the bowls in shapes such as b or d 1 pixel lower than the x-height. You can see this in the bo combination for example. As a result the p looks quite a lot bigger than d.

Perhaps it can be nice to try to make the x-height in all glyphs more consistent, and adjust the ascender/descender dimensions.
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Re: Arcade-ish Proportional character set

Post by arkannoyed »

I can't take credit for designing this Character Set fully, as its based heavily upon one called Grape Soda. However I have made quite a few changes. The look is supposed to be a bit uneven and all over the place, though I have tidied up some characters to make them work better. There is of course the possibility to add many many more character designs, so some of the letters could have variations. I'm working on improving the print routine and hoping that it can share a few parts with the scroller to reduce the size further.
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arkannoyed
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Re: Arcade-ish Proportional character set

Post by arkannoyed »

Stuff does stuff now. I'm enjoying the freedom of not being restricted by size constraints :lol:

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arkannoyed
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Re: Arcade-ish Proportional character set

Post by arkannoyed »

I just encoded a different Character set, which although perhaps looks little taller for some of the characters, is actually smaller in bytes terms.

Some aspects I like more, others not so much. The even scruffier appearance is more what I was after in the first place.

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