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This might be a good moment to drop a thing I made last year but never shared the link for. It's a bitmap editor that outputs Apple ][ shape tables. https://ro
by robterrell 2y ago
This might be a good moment to drop a thing I made last year but never shared the link for. It's a bitmap editor that outputs Apple ][ shape tables.
https://robterrell.github.io/shape_table_maker/shape_draw.html https://robterrell.github.io/shape_table_maker/shape_draw.ht...
Apple ][ shape tables were a rarely-used vector drawing technique -- rarely used because they were fairly slow to render and there wasn't great tooling for making them. High level of difficulty plus poor results... it was almost as easy to write blitting code, even with the odd Apple ][ video memory layout, so most games ended up doing that instead.
Anyway, if you are curious about shape tables, here's a thing for you.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- rbanffy 2y agoI used them a lot for fonts. The Take-1 Programmer’s Toolkit was used extensively for animations in educational software back then.
- samf 2y agoOne thing I used shape tables for was for a fade-in effect. I would draw my spaceship one pixel at a time, choosing the next pixel at random. (I made a tool to help with this, or else it would have been too tedious!) The shape tables were rendered so slowly that it make the ship "materialize" in a cool effect. After this initial fade-in, I would render the ship more sensibly. Other than this, I never found much use for shape tables.
- alwillis 2y agoI remember making shape tables manually in high school. Talk about a trip down memory lane.
- dtgriscom 2y agoGoodness me. I wrote a simple 2D flying game using potentiometers for steering and shape tables to draw the little airplanes. It was indeed very slow, but still fun.