[stella] Text cheating

Subject: [stella] Text cheating
From: Glenn Saunders <krishna@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 3 Aug 1997 14:13:28 -0700 (PDT)
On Sun, 3 Aug 1997, Piero Cavina wrote:
> Are you talking about what in Europe goes under the name of "Teletext"?
> What a funny idea! This could really be the way to do text-based games :-)

I agree.  I never thought of this, but here in the US I believe _ALL_
new televisions sold support closed captioning.  It's a part of my new
$159 Sharp 13" TV.  Those who don't have it can buy an external addon.

CC is pretty powerful.  You can tell it where to locate the text to a
certain extent.  It's an all-caps font but it support italics and has some
special characters available.  The size of the font seems pretty standard
from TV to TV so you could design your graphics around the text overlay
with relative certainty that it would be the same for all TVs.

I think this would be a great thing to try out for an Atari 2600 game. 
Using CC for text may cut the fat out of any 2600 game that called for
strips of text.  That is, if it would work.  I've taken a look at the VBI
patterns that make up closed captioning and it _looks_ like you may be
able to get away with using playfield graphics for it, but I'm not quite
sure whether sprites would be necessary.  It depends on how much
horizontal resolution is necessary.  If sprites are necessary, you can bet
that sprite sharing routines (i.e. flicker) would screw it up. 

> That would be a great challenge for emulator developers too..

Hey, CC is one advantage to using a real 2600 with a real TV.



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