Wow!, that was fast, Jon!. It's cleaner than the font I used for the demo.


I'm afraid that it's far away from the MSX1 posibilities. To fit 80 coumns you'll need a 2px wide font (I'm not counting the blank pixel to space the chars) and such font must be a little unreadable.

Anyway, to patch the BIOS for 64 columns, how many routines must be modified to cover all the uses of a text mode?

I think it would be very cool and perhaps even somewhat useful. Do you know what hooks needs implementing or where I can find info about it?

Using interlaced screen 1, I think its actually possible to do a width80 for MSX1. The characters will be 6 pixels wide as in MSX2 width 80, but of course interlaced. The question is I guess if its possible to do an interlaced font that will be readable. with 8 interlaced pixels I think its more likely to be readable but then it will only be width 64.

width64/80 would fit in an 8kb rom. There are many things I don't know how to do though, like how to hook these calls and make them start executing code in a rom.

Hmm.. My idea won't work. I was thinking of being clever and get some pixels being lit in both frames. This would increase readability quite a lot.
But to do that I need a new screen mode.To use the font I need two BG tiles blocks, each 1800h big like in screen 2, but no color table (since I wanted to use most of the VRAM for tiles. Thats unfortunate, so unless I find the screenmode I need I think I need to drop the idea of nice interlaced characters in width 80.

The original idea works fine though, but I think its hard to do width 80 with that technique. width64 works fine though.

and to handle different widths in a screen: H.WIDT (FF84)
if you want to add screen modes (like the Korean MSX'es have): H.SCRE (FFC0)