smaller font ?

[GiGaBiTe]

i was using the print command to print text on the screen. is there a way to make the font smaller or bigger?

[haroldoop]

Actually, due to the way Sega Genesis' VDP works, no.
Unless you coded some VWF routines.

[Tom Maneiro]

VWF?

Anyway, font chars are single 8*8 tiles

[haroldoop]

VWF stands for Variable Width Font.
It's done by modifying the tileset on the fly.

There's a VWF library available at shen.mansell.tripod.com/games/gameboy/truetext.zip. Although it's designed for GameBoy, it could be easily adapted to Sega Genesis, since its source code is in C.

[oompa loompa]

VWF requires a frame buffer, and that's what the genesis doesn't have, unless you allocate the tiles around to make it similiar to a frame buffer. for a 320x224 screen, (320*224/64)*16=35840 bytes, so there isn't a problem with memory requirements ;D

[haroldoop]

VWF requires a frame buffer, and that's what the genesis doesn't have, unless you allocate the tiles around to make it similiar to a frame buffer. for a 320x224 screen, (320*224/64)*16=35840 bytes, so there isn't a problem with memory requirements

Well, this is exactly what Shen Mansell's library (cited above) does. We would just have to adapt the hardware-specific routines from GBC to Genesis.

[MaskofDestiny]

On the Genesis you could probably cheat by using sprites as long as you don't need more than twenty characters across the screen (well 23 if you use both background layers and the window layer as well). You could use Raster F/X to change the sprite list address between lines of text to get around the 80 sprite limitation.

EDIT: It's also worth mentioning that making the text bigger is actually pretty easy as long as all of your characters are a multiple of 8*8.