Support for portable color character graphics

Requests for features
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Fabrizio
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Joined: Tue Jul 11, 2017 9:28 pm

Support for portable color character graphics

Post by Fabrizio »

One common use case when developing an 8-bit game was and still is the use
of hardware-assisted color text mode (real color text mode or graphics mode with fixed color attribute as for the Spectrum).

Most 8-bit computer had real color text modes or graphics modes with fixed color attributes.
One notable exception is the Amstrad CPC, which nevertheless has decent kernel routines to access software color text modes.
Such modes are fast because display is often implemented by accessing the video ram and/or color ram.

Having APIs to access uniformly such modes would make it possible to write portable games across multiple platforms.

My suggestion is to use conio.h because that is done elsewhere (DOS/Windows and other kits such as CC65 and CMOC)
but other solutions would also be OK.

In such use-case, the support for scrolling is not necessary and usually unwanted.
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