Double-width and 80 columns text modes
- smokku
CGIA now supports double-width text modes.
With the rewrite of text rendering modes, I’ve decided to implement support
for double-width non-multi-color text.
Multi-color text had the ability to make pixels doubled horizontally from
the beginning, to emulate familiar C64 rectangle pixels look.
It is also useful to have double-width text in normal text modes,
to emulate Atari8 style wide characters text modes, so I’ve added that.
All text modes support this.
While I was at it, I have created a demo of a neat possibility that non-double-width
multi-color modes offer - 80 columns text mode. In multi-color modes each pixel
takes 2 bits from data, so it creates 4 pixels per byte. This means that in text mode
we have 4x8 pixel cells - yielding exactly 80 columns on a 320 pixel wide screen.
With a proper font, the result looks quite readable:
This runs on multicolor text mode, with 4x8 text cells,
but uses only 00 and 11 colors with 4x8 font.
Each character is a proper cell, with 1 byte per character code,
and its own color attributes cells, working just like normal text modes.