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Regarding a post that, I beleive, appeared in this forum, requesting a way of writing smaller text than normally available in SCREEN 13 - or any other valid screen - , I have finished writing a QuickBASIC program that writes text using 5 points high by 5 points wide, somewhat smaller than the normal 7x6 points.

EDITED 05-Mar-2006, 10:19 CT: Did some cleaning up. Now, the QuickBASIC editor reports it as having 512 lines of code, including DATA tables, empty lines and remarks. The text file shows 9,512 bytes in a DOS directory, and it is reported as 10KB in Windows.

I do think it is too large to post here, unless I am informed to the contrary.

However, if someone is interested, send me a PM, with your email address, and I will attach the program's text file to my reply.

If someone wants me to post it someplace on the Internet, I will gladly send him my program, and let him do the posting, as I am all thumbs in that respect.

[deleted]

I read chaOs's posting as a GO for me to post my code, so, I will. Mind, my solution only provides for upper-case letters, a comma, a period (dot), and a space, at this time. And, in all fairness, I think that using the DRAW statement might be much more code-size efficient. Anyway, here is my code:

I guess that a statement I made a short time ago, to the effect that I am not a programmer, is now clearly and loudly proven by Antoni's post, above! :oops: :oops: :oops:

Antoni, I did try to load your posted program, but, when I try to load it in QuickBASIC 4.5, I only get a "Division by zero" message. What do I have to do to correct this?

EDITED: Never mind, I now was able to load and run the program. Very good results visible on screen!

2nd Edit: For a newbie, how does one determing the segment and the offset? Or, are the values used in the PRINTC line always valid? I suppose not, since, if so, they would probalby have been included in the SUB as a given, right?

3RD (and final!) Edit: By the way, it seems that the font width is actually only 3 pixels! Perhaps the "5x4" includes an empty pixel, for spacing the characters? I did not consider spacing in my very long program, only actual height and width used by each character.

Segment is &hA000 and offset is 0 for graphics screen. The arguments are there to be able to print to a buffer, you can use VARSEG and VARPTR in that case.
And yes, the width is in this case the spacing between leftmost points of two consecutive chars. One of the features of this font is each char fits in an integer and you can design chars from the top of your head : if you use octal each pixel line is a figure.

i wouldnt say you aren't a programmer. everyone starts with the basics (no pun intended) and slowly factors in more and more information about structures, looping, etc...

the only way you "aren't a programmeR" is if you give up programming =p

here's mine

Antoni:

Just a small observation. The first character is SP, a space. The second character should be shown as an !, not as a 1. All else seems to be fine.

Antoni:
Would you please explain how to use

Quote:each char fits in an integer and you can design chars from the top of your head : if you use octal each pixel line is a figure.

to obtain, say, a 0 and an O as 11114? When I drew a 0 as:
010
101
101
101
010
and translated the binary value 010101101101010 into decimal, I got 11114. Does the program then translate 11114 into octal?

Thanks. And, by the way, I found a neat way to translate any of the characters in the program you posted from the drawn character, or sprite, to the decimal number you show, or to an octal number, if that is required. The method can easily be extended to any other size of character or sprite. The only thing is, the numbers obtained in this manner are based on zeros and ones, so only one color per sprite can be assigned by the program.


While it is true tht this is a QuickBASIC forum, my mehtod for this involves an Excel spreadsheet.

I start by highlighting columns A, B and C for the present case, doing a Format, Column, Width, and choosing 5, to give a reasonabl-looking sprite.

In cell A2, I write SPRITE; in cell D2, BINARY; in cell E2, BIN2DEC; in cell F2, DEC2OCT.

In cell D3, I enter =A3&B3&C3, and copy down to D7.

In cell E7, I enter =MID(D7,1,1)*2^2+MID(D7,2,1)*2+MID(D7,3,1)
In cell E6, I enter =MID(D6,1,1)*2^5+MID(D6,2,1)*2^4+MID(D6,3,1)*2^3
In cell E5, I enter =MID(D5,1,1)*2^8+MID(D5,2,1)*2^7+MID(D5,3,1)*2^6
In cell E4, I enter =MID(D4,1,1)*2^11+MID(D4,2,1)*2^10+MID(D4,3,1)*2^9
In cell E3, I enter =MID(D3,1,1)*2^14+MID(D3,2,1)*2^13+MID(D3,3,1)*2^12

In cell F3, if I want octal numbers, I enter, =DEC2OCT(E3), and copy down to F7.

Now, any sprite I enter in the range A3:C7 as 0s and 1s appears in column D as binary numbers, and in column D and E as decimals and octals for the whole binary number represented in the sprite as the range A3:C7, or the range D37.

Using the above is how I saw that the 11114 Antoni shows, for a 0 and for an O, is not an octal, but a decimal. And, the method can easily be expanded for larger sprites!

I can see that this kind of representation for sprites of one color can be a real memory and code saver, for those programmers that do graphics. I wonder if the numeric representation IS used in this manner?

Comments?