Path: utzoo!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcsun!hp4nl!alchemy!rloon
From: rloon@praxis.cs.ruu.nl (Ronald van Loon)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.cbm
Subject: Re: New Stuf, ETC.
Message-ID: <1991Mar04.112548.27536@cs.ruu.nl>
Date: 4 Mar 91 11:25:48 GMT
References: <91055.133430PNNAGATA@MTUS5.BITNET> <1991Mar3.010903.14011@spool.cs.wisc.edu>
Sender: rloon@cs.ruu.nl (Ronald van Loon)
Organization: Utrecht University, Dept. of Computer Science
Lines: 50

In <1991Mar3.010903.14011@spool.cs.wisc.edu> kolstad@jomby.cs.wisc.edu (Joel Kolstad) writes:

||In article <91055.133430PNNAGATA@MTUS5.BITNET> PNNAGATA@MTUS5.BITNET writes:
||>Also, did anyone see my program SupraTechnic? (Published in COMPUTE!'s
||>Gazette, Nov 88, if I remember right.) It "bit-mapped" the top and bottom
||>borders on the C64.  It doesn't use sprites to pull it off either.
||
||Hmm... don't think I saw this.  Tell us how it's done!  As I recall, if you
||told VIC to switch from 24 row to 25 row mode on scan lines below 192, you
||got a borderless bottom.  If I recall, though, you had to keep the background
||color black because there was some "black garbage" down there. :-)

The black garbage is caused by the fact that the VIC repeatedly places the
value of $3fff (depends on videobank, of course) in the border ; by repeatedly 
changing the value you can achieve scrolling, bitmaps, patterns and the like.

||
||I haven't heard of getting a bitmap, though.  (With the above method, you
||could use sprites in the top/bottom border...)
||
||Interestingly enough, the same things happens for the side borders as for the
||top/bottom borders if you switch VIC from 38 to 40 column mode at the
||corresponding columns.  Unfortunately, this is almost impossible on a 
||1MHz 64, and even on a 4MHz 64 eats up too much CPU time to be real useful...
||(Since you need to interrupts twice every scan lines... :-( )  And of course,
||not many people have 4MHz 64's anyway!

You don't need a 4MHz 64 ! Actually, a few years back, a cracking group called
'1001' released a program called 'ESCOS' (Expanded Screen Construction Set)
which let you take a bitmap and display (part of it) full screen (and I mean
FULL SCREEN, including borders etc.) I don't think it worked on 'NTSC' 64's,
because of timing problems.

Personally, I used the 'trick' for displaying errormessages in the border. A
sample of that can be found in my Graphics Transformer II, a program which is
able to transform (or just plain show) pictures of about 44 different
graphicspackages (like Artstudio I & II, Doodle...) formats to eachother. It
will even let you display complete PrintMaster and PrintShop pictures. More
important, it's free ! It should be uploaded (or maybe already is) to
milton pretty soon (right, Scott ?).
-- 
Ronald van Loon (rloon@praxis.cs.ruu.nl)

There never seems to be enough time to do the things you want to do -
once you find them - Jimmy Croce "Time in a bottle"
-- 
Ronald van Loon (rloon@praxis.cs.ruu.nl)

There never seems to be enough time to do the things you want to do -
once you find them - Jimmy Croce "Time in a bottle"