I did a lot of digging and finally I think I found it...
I believe this document has all the necessary technical info (to the person
with enough smarts to translate analog measurements and timings into 2600
pixel coordinates and widths) to be able to generate a CC encoder program
for the VCS.
http://www.video-demystified.com/mm/tutor/ch08.pdf
CC is quite feature-rich these days. It's almost like a low-resolution
ANSI. It supports multiple colors and you can reposition the text around
the screen.
I read through the docs and I don't see anything that would disqualify the
2600 from being able to generate CC. As long as the 2600 can generate a
bitmap on one line either through playfield, sprites, or probably both, that
aligns itself properly, then it should work. That is also assuming that
TV's CC decoder cares or not that the data is duplicated through both fields
or that the signal technically isn't even interlaced....
If Christopher wants to be really innovative with his text adventure, he
should attempt to use CC, and if he succeeds, maybe even use a hybrid
CC/graphical display, although it would be really cool to have a game that
generates ONLY CC and an otherwise black screen. I'm not sure you could
port the Infocom parser to the 2600 if you still only have 128 bytes RAM,
and if you go with the Supercharger you're locked into 6K max for each game
module, but you could still do a lot. With a limited number of commands you
could store a pretty big game in 16 or 32K.
Who is going to be the first with a program demo that spits out HELLO WORLD
in CC??
GLENN SAUNDERS===============================
By Day - Web Developer - http://www.eUniverse.com
==============================================
By Night - Producer - Cyberpunks Entertainment
Personal homepage: http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/1698
Cyberpunks Entertainment: http://cyberpunks.uni.cc
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