MAIN MENU     INTRODUCTION THE PHOTO CASEBOOK GIG ARCHIVE DJ SETS ANCIENT REVIEWS PRE-OGG-CAST MIXTAPES ZX SPECTRUM PAGES       ASSOCIATED WEB PAGES     THE HAMMER OF RETRIBUTION OGG-CAST HAMMER OF RETRIBUTION PRODUCTIONS THE DIAMOND HAMMER: MINECRAFT CREATIONS RICK DANGEROUS RESURRECTED USER-DEFINED GRAPHICS AND CHARACTER SETS User-defined graphics are something every Spectrum owner learned very early in their programming days. Such 8×8 character squares that weren't the standard character set and used the graphics characters A to U were the mainstay of all sorts of games in 1982 and 1983, before the programmers became more sophisticated with their sprite designs. The entire character set was also redefinable, in a more elaborate way, but still accessible without needing to know any machine code... It was only much later that I found out how to save UDG sets as a separate file on tape, via the command SAVE "[filename]" CODE USR "a" (and, of course, load them back with the corresponding LOAD command. Character sets I only tried once I'd joined the World Of Spectrum forums and wanted to make my crap games look a bit less crap - and, indeed, one of those was only to showcase a character set and a load of UDGs, gameplay was an afterthought! Nevertheless, I found a redefined character set in a type-in I had, namely M.J. Levers' Defender, the only program I had in three issues of Sinclair Programs which was too much for the 16K Spectrum to handle. This defined a "futuristic" character set which was poked into memory when the program was run and could be accessed via POKE 23607,249. This is an address to be very careful when poking as specifying a value of anything other than the redefined or the standard character set (re-accessed via POKE 23607,60) caused the characters to be displayed as illegible garbage! Character sets defined at this address are saved with SAVE "[filename]" CODE 64000,768. It helps to CLEAR 64000 before loading the character set! THE ULTIMATE CHARACTER DEFINER PROGRAM / FILENAME / SIZE DESCRIPTION Graphics Control (v3.2a) gc32a.tzx - 12.2 KB This is a thumpingly powerful editor for user-defined graphics and character sets I made by combining two type-in listings with two further routines I wrote myself. Option 1 is David Elphick's excellent Spectrum Plotter, published in the June/July 1983 issue of ZX Computing. It allows eight user-defined graphics to be drawn in real-time on screen and then converted to the graphic characters A to H, with the very useful option to list their codes. Option 2 shows the complete UDG character set (A to S so that it runs on a 128K Spectrum!) and allows the definition of any UDG character by inputting the eight codes, and can save and load the UDG set to and from tape. It's a simple routine I wrote myself, although anyone could have done it, really! Option 3 takes a single-character input and enlarges it to 8×8 character squares, translating these to binary code - useful for finding out the codes, if they are unknown, of an existing character. This was heavily adapted from a type-in routine I have long since lost - all I know is it isn't the ZX81 Character Enlarger from Sinclair Programs; the chances are it was from a book I borrowed from the library in Great Dunmow all those years ago! Option 4 is similar to option 2, but allows the definition of an entirely new character set, code by code. Use option 1 to draw the character in the UDG space and list the codes, then input these codes into option 4 to define the set. The two character sets are displayed alongside each other; that which is pointed to by POKE 23607,249 starts out blank but the standard character set can be copied into this space beforehand; also, capital letters can be copied into the lower-case set. Character sets can be saved and loaded to and from tape. USER-DEFINED GRAPHICS AND CHARACTER SETS PROGRAM / FILENAME / SIZE DESCRIPTION Super Mario Bros. graphics (character set and UDGs) chars+udg_mario.tzx - 3.8 KB It's-a me, Mario, on A set of 16×16 graphics, that originally started with the mushroom, flower and star from Super Mario Bros. 3 (which were easy to plot because they're enlarged to most of the screen if Mario picks up three cards of the same type at the end of the normal levels) and then expanded to a Mario/Luigi figure (based on the hammer suit) - these use the UDG space. The tanooki, frog and hammer suits, super leaf, Judgem's cloud, music box, hammer and P-wing - all from Super Mario Bros. 3, and the 3-up moon and ! block from Super Mario World were added via redefining the character set, using the lower case letters and little-used symbols. Capital letters and numbers were redefined according to the font used in the original Super Mario Bros. with a few additions from The Legend Of Zelda. A short demonstration program is included to show where the characters are poked into - everything in the new character set is displayed alongside the regular characters the new graphics replace. But there's no princess, she's in another castle. ZX80 character set and ZX81 graphics chars+udg_zx8081.tzx - 1.8 KB The Spectrum wasn't missing much over the ZX81 - the UNPLOT and SCROLL commands were gone but could bd worked around - and six graphics characters were deleted, those defined at A-H on the ZX81 keyboard. These are restored in the Spectrum's UDG space to their original characters here. The ZX80, limited though it was, had a different, wider character set - which comes in two forms on the tape. The first has left all the Spectrum-only characters intact (e.g. !, #, % and those accessed via extended mode), while the second blanks them out so only what is seen on a ZX80 screen can be accessed! In both character sets, the capitals are repeated in lower case. The ZX80 also had the ZX81 graphics in the UDG package, albeit on different keys; load both the character set and the UDGs for the true ZX80 experience... right up to the time you switch on the sound and colour! Cyrillic character set chars_cyrillic.tzx - 1.8 KB With the Spectrum so popular in Russia to this day, I'm sure someone out there has long since defined a working Cyrillic character set that isn't the one seen in the Russian Dizzy games (and many, many others). It's based on the standard Spectrum character set as far as possible - glyphs such as H, P and C that represent different letters in Cyrillic have been poked into the position expected in that set (i.e. N, R, S) and Cyrillic-only glyphs (e.g. Д, Щ, Я) have been designed to resemble the Spectrum character set as closely as possible. As the Cyrillic alphabet has 33 characters, I've commandeered barely-used symbols to provide space for some of the 12 extra characters required, though I had to leave Ё and ё undefined as I ran right out of space - I've provided the umlaut separately to use with an OVER command. Ukrainians, Serbians and others further east may gripe at me for leaving out their special characters, but the UDG space I've left free for them... you may say срасибо to me later, comradres. Defender character set chars_defender.tzx - 835 B Defender, mentioned in the opening blurb to this section, was where I found the routine to poke a new character set from scratch, so it'd have been a terrible idea to not include that character set as a separate machine code file. So here it is. Lords Of Midnight character set (also Heretic and Hexen) chars_lords.tzx - 835 B Lords of Midnight is a game I find, to this day, is utterly impenetrable. But there were many at the time who thought that a screen-by-screen tactical fantasy wargame was brilliant beyond words - mainly because it had a map that was inconceivably huge for a 48K Spectrum. The RZX Archive's file for the complete playthrough of a full campaign takes 6 hours and 45 minutes and even then, the screens are flicked through at such a furious rate (with no indication of what action is being taken each time) that it is impossible to follow. Still, victory is achieved against Doomdark in the end. My main interest in this game is that it donated its font (well, the lower-case letters and numbers at least) to Heretic and Hexen, two of my all-time favourite first-person shooters! And if you use the chat mode and type in symbols such as #, % or $, you'll recognise the familiar Spectrum characters even on a couple of PC games made after the age of the good old Speccy. So, of course, I've recreated this brilliant character set - but I've also filled in the blanks, as it were - making Lords of Midnight-style symbols to go with the rest of the characters. Luxor the Moonprince would surely approve. Narrow character sets (left or right aligned) chars_narrow.tzx - 1.6 KB Even in the early days, programmers were trying to find ways to push the Spectrum beyond its perceived limits. As early as 1983, Melbourne House sneered at its ability to display 32 characters per line - and so their famous text adventure of The Hobbit crammed 42 characters onto a line in the section above the input area where Thorin would, yet again, sit down and start singing about gold like a broken jukebox. To cram it all in, some of the wider characters in the set had to be redefined... so I've gone all the way and come up with a mostly-new character set where no character is more than five pixels wide, for use in "42 characters to a line" routines. Most of the lower-case letters didn't need to be redefined, but the capitals, numbers and symbols did - though some were merely realigned. There are two versions of the same character set - a right-aligned set for routines which cut off the leftmost two columns of each character square, and a left-aligned set for of the rightmost two blocks are lost. Essentially the codes for the left-aligned set are four times the codes for the right-aligned set, due to the way binary works.