ASM: Utilising the full ASCII table, is it viable?

colonthree · Post by **colonthree** » Thu Jan 27, 2011 7:38 pm

Hi people,

So after reading through lots of docs for some months I finally was able to print patterns to screen, now I'm wanting to do a proper Hello World using the pattern space for text (we're talking about fixed width font for now!

)

So I will be able to update my ROM so that hardcoded strings can be looked up in the pattern table and print appropriately to screen, my question is; can I somehow use extended-ascii, including the alternative versions of the control characters (0x01~0x31) in my text editor (notepad++) and have them looked up correctly from the pattern table in the ROM?

I'm not too clued up on encodings. It seems when I have notepad++ set to UTF-8 encoding ☺ is possible, but in reality saves as 6 bytes (ï»¿â˜º), since it's not the standard encoding or whatever.

I'm using SNASM68K, what does it understand? Is it able to fix this problem by using a specific argument / do I have to code some intermediary application to convert this on-the-fly before compiling / can I change some option in notepad++ / or is there no easy solution?

Reason I want to be able to do this is so that I can draw out windows/boxes and such and be able to view them as ASCII in notepad++ files rather than blocks of numbers.

Maybe I'm approaching this entirely the wrong way?
Thanks for any input

TmEE co.(TM) · Post by **TmEE co.(TM)** » Thu Jan 27, 2011 9:21 pm

SNASM68K does only ASCII for the strings. for 0...31 chars I use DC.B $00...$1F, but all others I do regular text... I do use MS-DOS editor for text though...

colonthree · Post by **colonthree** » Fri Jan 28, 2011 1:52 am

Ah well that's good to know at least, just need to find a way to have n++ save the ascii values rather than translating to unicode or whatever format it tends to use. I'm probably overlooking something.

I suppose I could switch between msdos editor and n++ in the mean time, the file should hold up ok between saves. I could msdos editor primarily but of course it doesn't have a lot of the convenience features of a windows gui app

edit: In fact, how do you get characters above ASCII 7E in msdos editor? or do you have to dc.b?
Then I have the same problem as in n++ >_<

TmEE co.(TM) · Post by **TmEE co.(TM)** » Fri Jan 28, 2011 9:53 am

ALT+xxx where xxx is the ASCII character ^^

colonthree · Post by **colonthree** » Fri Jan 28, 2011 1:05 pm

Haha I SWEAR that didn't work in edit last night.. but it did this morning

I can rely on that for now then thanks

Gigasoft · Post by **Gigasoft** » Fri Jan 28, 2011 9:51 pm

In Notepad, you could edit the file using the Terminal font (which uses the OEM/DOS character set) and select the ANSI encoding when saving. I don't know how it is in Notepad++.