Date : Fri, 14 Dec 2001 02:52:54 -0800 (PST)
From : Thomas Harte <t.harte@...>
Subject: Re: International fonts & mode 7
> > 6x10...? weren't they all 8x8?
>
> Characters in Modes 0-6 are 8x8, Mode 7 ones are 6x10 - or is that 8x10?
They are 6x10. But the SAA5050 hardware has a smoothing function to make a
nice 12x20 (still 1bit) which it uses, I think, only if you have certain
interlace options set, which are not normally exposed. This information
comes from Marcel De Kogel, author of M2000, a P2000 emulator. His code is
GPL and anyway he has given me explicit permission to duplicate regions of
it and I've come up with the nicest Mode 7 I've seen in an emulator! See
http://electrem.emuunlim.com/shots.htm and look into the 'beta 10' section.
And I should point out that I haven't tried the recent Mode 7 leaps in
BeebEm. And I think I may be making the screen too wide (it fills the same
width as all the other modes right now). I need to double check my various
information sources on clock rates...
> Did the Electron ever have Mode 7?
The next release of my Electron emulator, ElectrEm, could well be subtitled
the 'jealousy' release due to its support for things not normal on the base
Electron hardware. Both a hardware Mode 7 solution (an approximate emulation
of that put together by John Wike and sold under his Jafa brand) and the
Slogger Master RAM Board (can be quickly summed up as 'shadow RAM & very
nearly constant 2Mhz operation for the CPU') are the newest things.
Plus the disc drive stuff has been rewritten to give, I fell perfectly
justified in claiming, the most accurate software disc drive emulation of
any Acorn emulator. Although the timing is currently slightly messed up with
respect to disc images encoded at a different to usual bit rate - the WD1770
should be able to load data that is encoed within about 20% of the rate it
expects - but I may fix this before the eventual release.
Anyway, I'm horribly off topic . . .
-Thomas
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