Customized charset saved/loaded from tape

[allenhuffman]

I am trying to get my old 1982 VIC programs running in an emulator. I had some editor program that let me customize the character set (likely something I typed in from Gazette). There was some way to save it to tape so it loaded and was usable by the BASIC program. I cannot remember how this worked.

I have imported my tapes, and some of the .prg files load and have the graphics just fine, making me think it was embedded with the BASIC program somehow.

Can someone point me to an article or reference on how this worked? I bet I would understand it today -- back then, as my first computer, I just knew I could edit my graphics, and then use them in my program. I have forgotten how I embedded them, though.

Thanks... Here is an example of what I mean. My "Sky-Ape-Er" game (which I wrote after buying something called Krazy Kong that I thought I could do a better job at.)

[tonyrocks]

There were quote a few tools out there in Computes! Gazette, which I also did play around with back then. I think one of the programs created the data, then saved it out. Then, your basic program would read in the data file as a sequential file instead of basic DATA statements.

I still have my original collection of Gazette at home from the 1980s, but you can find PDF versions online here:

https://archive.org/details/compute-gaz ... ads&page=1

I would look in the 1983 years, I seem to recall that being the time that I was heavily into the custom character set creation. I think the November 1983 may have some vic-specific things.

[allenhuffman]

There were quote a few tools out there in Computes! Gazette, which I also did play around with back then. I think one of the programs created the data, then saved it out. Then, your basic program would read in the data file as a sequential file instead of basic DATA statements.

Thanks. I may have lost some of my tapes, since the only thing I can find is "8 BY 8 CREATE" (which I tracked down to a magazine) and it just displays the numbers for DATA statements. My Sky-Ape-Er game appears to load the fonts that way from the INSTRUCTIONS loader, so maybe that's how I did that one (seems unlikely).

But I am pretty sure I had a different one, and I also remember having one that would do the dual-color characters (I forget the name). You could have more than one color inside the character block. Do you know what mode I am talking about?

[tonyrocks]

Sure, that is the multicolor mode, however the dimensions are split, so you deal with 4X8 blocks. kind of ugly. hehe