opal-rtl-display-frames
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@tsturm To be honest I don't remember. That particular image block is from a little mock up I made two or three years ago and I believe I used an Open Type font because painting that text pixel by pixel was not going to work, and I still didn't have a good Z80 routine to render proportional fonts at the time.
But I believe we discussed a few of these things before, in January 2025, a younger version of you was also interested in this particular aspect of what I was doing. 🙂
@haitchfive ...but it is a *very* nice 4x8 font.
@tsturm We did discuss this font that I was reproducing pixel by pixel myself.
You also already liked it, for similar reasons. Only reminding you so that you don't change your mind now, I can't allow you to unlike it after all this time. hahhaahah
🤣
@tsturm Anyway, the new thing and the reason I was showing that wasn't about the font, but this time these screens are not coming out of my emulator. These are static cards composed from fragments of ZX Opal screenshots, and they are not being rendered live by a Z80, they are coming out of the FPGA simulator in GHDL.
@tsturm The image is not being rendered from a RAM block of pixels, it's being rendered from the VGA output of the ZXMODE RTL.
@haitchfive So... wait, I might have been misunderstanding the general direction of your current project. So there is a FPGA design - so you are actually working on new hardware, some sort of advanced ZX design?
@tsturm Not too advanced. ZX Opal already runs just fine in a regular ZX Spectrum.
But it has been my intention from the very beginning to enable the platform to run real applications, not only toy things. I haven't really been hiding this, many of the mock ups over the years are rendered at a resolution higher than a regular ZX Spectrum can produce. Sometimes that resolution is 512 x 384.
I am not going to build a whole new Spectrum myself, I don't know how to do that (yet) and that would distract me too much from the software.
BUT I'm a fairly competent designer, and I have designed a new graphic system with a couple of graphic modes and a set of palettes that work pretty well, and better than the available alternatives for the declared purposes.
It's not a full Spectrum, it's the specification and the implementation of the graphic mode block that hardware implementors can use to attach it to their ZX Spectrum designs. In VHDL and Verilog.
@tsturm At the same time, working to implement the same graphic modes again in my emulator, and possibly sending patches to FUSE and ZesarUX to do the same.
@haitchfive 😂 OMG yes.
I'm clearly getting old. This is the second time in as many weeks that you are pointing me at an old thread of ours with me essentially repeating myself. 🤷♂️ 🤪
@haitchfive Bottom center screenshot - that text aboout Jet Set Willy: That is an amazing tiny font. 4x8?