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EZ-Writer

A topic by Josh Goebel created Sep 14, 2020 Views: 219 Replies: 1
Viewing posts 1 to 2
(1 edit) (+1)

Is there any documentation on this? I’m happy to RTFM, just I can’t find it. :)

I feel like I’m missing something. It’s a nice little utility for sure, and I get how I could copy and paste the font data and “program” data right into Octo… but is the CHIP-8 rendering code not available somewhere so I could just drop that into my project as well? Or is writing such code left as an exercise for the reader? ;-)

HostSubmitted (2 edits) (+1)

EZ-Writer was mainly written for my own use, so it deserves some explanation! I've used it for two games, each with their own slightly different needs and customizations to the rendering code. You could harvest either as a starting point.

An Evening To Die For uses both large and small fixed-width fonts, and uses the color toggle bytecode to switch between black text and red text (for a few particularly dramatic lines of dialog).

Business is Contagious uses only one font size, but it's variable-width. Since the game was written to conform to the aesthetic constraints of the Nokia 3310, it doesn't use the color toggle feature either. This is also why EZ-Writer has the "84x48 mode" setting.

The whole tool is self-contained in one `.html` file, so if you find you want to add or change features to suit the needs of your game, you can simply download the page and modify a local copy. Same deal for EZ-Pack, though it is more general-purpose already.

Edit: should you wish to see them in context, you can play the games here and here, respectively.