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Back in the mists of history, sometime around the 90s it was quite common for games and demos to display text on the screen. Since we’re talking about old computers with barely any usable RAM, the text was stored as images. A giant single image with every character placed within it. To display words programmers had to be a bit inventive. That’s the topic of today’s post.
Making a microcontroller produce graphics is very similar to making an old 8 or 16 bit computer draw images. They both have small screens, not much RAM and not enough CPU power to draw all the screen all the time.
The ODroid GO is a handheld console that sells itself as a device that will run emulators of all your favourite 8bit systems. And it does that job rather well, I spent at least five minutes with mine playing Tetris, and it was a good emulation. Then I installed the Arduino libraries for it, plugged in a USB cable and started trying things out.
A week that turns into two, after a trip to hospital following a fire drill. In between these excitements is some Pico 8 programming.
