Loadstar 223/223.d81/t.tile stylist

Text File | 2003-01-01 | 4.8 KB | 188 lines

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       T I L E    S T Y L I S T

            by Brian Boese

    Let me begin with a confession.
I've been using a Macintosh lately.
Yes, I know it's wrong, but life is
not always fair. I have to. It's my
job.

    Forgive me for saying this, but
there are a few features of the Mac
that I really like, one of which is
its snazzy window screens with catchy
backgrounds. Why can't the same thing
be done on a C-64, without going into
those strange screen modes that Dave
Johannsen uses in QUADRILATION and
TRIANGULATION?

    Well, it CAN be done.

    My technique is so simple it's a
wonder that it hasn't been used
before. I mean, it is really obvious,
once you've seen it working before
your eyes.

    All I did was make a font and
edited the space character. That's it.
Now, wherever I want the pattern (or
tile) to appear, I put a space. To
tile the entire screen with the
pattern, I set the print colour to
what I want and clear the screen. When
a screen is cleared, it's actually
filled with a bunch of spaces. In
order to get a normal, blank-looking
space on the screen I used a
SHIFT-SPACE.

    That's it!

[DAVE'S NOTE:] And I thought Fender
and Jeff stayed up late into the early
morning manipulating screen pixels
with arcane and eldrich spells and
amulets. Silly me!


    To show off my artistic talent, I
edited all of the reverse characters
of a font to be decent-looking tile
patterns. The Run It program on the
disk is a simple demo to show you how
attractive these tiles can be when you
put a lot of them together as a
background.

    You can use this same technique to
make your window programs look more
professional. Use some of my patterns,
or make some of your own. I recommend
you only use a few in any one program,
as overdoing it can spoil the effect.
(And ruin reader's eye sight. -Ed.) If
you want, you can let the user of your
programs select a pre-made pattern
that you already have set up.

    Try it, programmers!  It's easy.

BB

[FENDER'S COMMENTS:] Brian is right
about tiling being easy, especially
when you use the SPACE character as
your tile. However, I can imagine that
it might get a little old having to
remember to use a SHIFT-SPACE every
time you wanted a regular space. In
this case, why not define some un-used
character (like the \) as the tile and
then define a string as

Q$="\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\
      \\\\\\\"

 and instead of clearing the screen,
just do something like

PRINT"[CLR]";:FORI=0TO23:PRINTQ$:NEXT

It's not too slow, and if you do as I
do, namely never print in the far
right column on the screen, you don't
have line link or scrolling problems.
Notice that Q$ is only 39 characters
long, not 40.

When the word got around a few years
back that I was a font-maniac, many
programs came in with oddball alphabet
fonts -- gothic, sanskrit, jagged
computer, double-serifed, you name it.
It took me a while to explain that the
alphabet and numbers shouldn't be
changed radically, it's the GRAPHIC
characters that can and should be
changed for special effects. Such as
making your $129 C-64 look like a
$4000 Mac.

There is another interesting line in
Brian's code. Line 30 has these
mysterious POKEs:

(1) POKE56576,4
(2) POKE53272,2
(3) POKE648,192
(4) POKE53265,27

(1) tells the VIC-II chip to change to
    BANK 3 (instead of the default
    BANK 0).

(2) tells the VIC-II chip that the
    font is at the second 1K offset
    from the start of BANK 3, or
    $C800.

(3) tells the operating system that
    the screen memory is in BANK 3, at
    page 192, or memory location
    $C000.

(4) turns the screen display on.

This is a pretty elegant way to use a
custom font without having to take
memory away from BASIC. Usually, if
my program is small (under 30 blocks
or so) I lower the top of BASIC to
page 56 and put the font at the top
of BANK 0 (at $3800). If my program
is too large for this then I raise
the start of BASIC (in a boot
program) to page 16 ($1000) and load
the font into place at page 8
($0800).

With these simple POKEs, Brian has
placed everything up in BANK 3 and
left BASIC unchanged.  You can tell
when something like this has been
done. When you press RUN/STOP-RESTORE
to break out of the program to LIST
it, you find a blue screen with no
cursor. Whaaaat? The thing to do is
to type blindly

POKE648,4    [RETURN]

and the cursor will appear.

And finally, I'm amazed at the
variety of patterns that can be made
with this technique of redefining ONE
character. I wonder what M. C.
Escher would have thought.

FT

P.S. Frank Vanaman, beta-tester
extraordinaire and our man in DC, has
a good suggestion.  Run FULLFONT
(from LOADSTAR #69) and load "tile
font" from this program. Then choose
FULLFONT's ITALICS feature and you'll
have a completely new set of 128
patterns, some of them very unusual.
As Frank says, "Double value for the
same price." That's the LOADSTAR
way.