Xroar Lower Case

[megagarrym]

Hi All
I was looking at the lowercase daughter board on www.dragonplus-electronics.co.uk and noticed some Xroar screenshots showing it in action. How is this done in Xroar?
Cheers
Garry

[sixxie]

I was looking at the lowercase daughter board on www.dragonplus-electronics.co.uk and noticed some Xroar screenshots showing it in action. How is this done in Xroar?

You need a ROM formatted in the same way as the one in the Dragon 200-E, which is:

ROW 0 CHAR 0, ROW 0 CHAR 1, ... ROW 0 CHAR 255
ROW 1 CHAR 0, ROW 1 CHAR 1, ... ROW 1 CHAR 255
...
ROW 15 CHAR 0, ROW 15 CHAR 1, ... ROW 15 CHAR 255

So that's a 4K ROM containing data for each of 256 characters a row at a time.

Rows 12-15 won't be accessed, and chars 128-255 will be semigraphics anyway, so there's a bunch of wasted space.

Anyway, use it in XRoar using the option:

Code: Select all

-ext-charset FILENAME

[megagarrym]

Hi Sixxie
Thanks for that. I suspect that creating the ROM will be beyond my capabilities. I tried using the ROMs from the DragonPlus website with no success. I'll stick to upper case for now.
Cheers
Garry

[sixxie]

Your problem may be that the ROMs provided contain multiple fonts, and the first in each case is the stock 6847 font, so you'd never notice a difference.

I've broken them out into 4K ROMs here, you can try each in turn.

[megagarrym]

Thanks Sixxie, I'll give that a go and report back.

[megagarrym]

Success!!
Many thanks Sixxie, this is incredible.
My Xroar shortcut is something along the lines of C:\xroar\xroar.exe -ext-charset "C:\xroar\ext-charset-03.rom"
The next quest for any clever person out there is to make it so we can use the shift key normally rather than the old shift+0 switch.

Thanks again, I think that's at least 2 pints I owe you now.
Garry

[dublevay]

You can download the character ROM sets from the product support page on Dragonplus Electronics. https://www.dragonplus-electronics.co.u ... downloads/

You'll need to break these up into 4KB files, to create a file for each character set. I use a hex editor called FRHED to do this, set to 256 byte display width. The description is in the ASCII representation of the data to the right hand side.