Okay, what was this used in, and where/how can we play with it? Preferably in test/debug mode so we can directly poke at the different features. (But source not necessary.)
Also - the ANSI graphics example... it honestly looks bitmapped, not like a bunch of colored character cells. But then the graphics example (link 2) also looks bitmapped, so I think I'm missing something.
Colors are a little off in retrospect, not sure whether I ever fixed that. The screen on the left shows the bitmap graphics mode with the alien from Alien: Covenant.
I should upload it somewhere for people to play with and give feedback. The UE4 project build is about 1GB, I have to search around on my hard drive to find where the hell I put the Z80 floppy/hard disk images to boot the Z80 VM's though. They contained some fun stuff, like a working port of Rogue, the Infocom Zork games, a C compiler etc.
> Ah, it was a bitmap image. But TIL about 16colo.rs, which is really cool.
No, it's not. That ANSI image on the right is rendered in-engine via the VT100 component of the Z80 computer, which I wrote from scratch. You can take the .ans file from the 16 colors website (which is what I did) and dump it to the terminal and that's how I got that screenshot.
Getting it to look right means not only emulating the ANSI color codes, but implementing the IBM CP437 character set. CP/M purists would attack me with a pointed stick, since only the IBM PC had that character set by default, and it would have only been available on CP/M-86, not CP/M-80. Otherwise, ANSI files like that would have only displayed correctly on MS-DOS with ANSI.SYS loaded. BTW the emulated graphics card supports loading different character glyphs, so it's totally possible to load a "ye olde" fancy character set and play Zork with it, as should be done.
> The screenshots you've posted definitely look interesting to poke around with. Do the keys press as you type? :D
Not really, the hand animations flail around as you type and it looks kind of funny. It's something I'd like to improve, maybe with three keyboard proficency levels, hunt-and-peck, touch typing, and something in between.
Also - the ANSI graphics example... it honestly looks bitmapped, not like a bunch of colored character cells. But then the graphics example (link 2) also looks bitmapped, so I think I'm missing something.