FontEdit Version 1.0
By David Murray
03-22-2006

Font Edit is a specialty program written specifically for the DTV. However, it will run on a real C64 or an emulator, lacking certain features.  It creates fonts with a variable width (between 4 and 16 pixels wide) and stores them in an 8-bpp format.  Unfortunatly, this version will only allow you to work with 16 colors.  

When you start FontEdit you will be asked how many pixels you are going to be working with.  You cannot change this value unless you exit the program and restart it.  You also cannot convert fonts from one size to the other.  So make sure you know what size you want.  Regular C64 uses an 8 pixel font.  The height of the font is not adjustable.

Next you will be asked how many characters you are going to be working with.  This number also cannot change during program operation.  The number of characters can be anywhere from 1 to 255.  However, only 16K of RAM is allocated for the font, and since it is stored in 8-bpp it takes up a lot of RAM.  So if you choose a very large font, it may limit the max number of characters you can work with. The program will calculate this for you automatically and display the information when making the choice.

Once you are in the program you will have these commands:

'+' / '-' will change the current character you are editing.

'F' / 'B' will change the foreground and background colors

[SPACE] and [BkSP] will plot the foreground or background color

'C' Will clear your current character to whatever the selected background color is.

'P' is for preview.  This feature doesn't work properly.  I just needed a quick way to see if the characters would be readable on the screen.  At the time I didn't have the Machine Language routines created yet to display the font.  So it uses plain C64 2-bpp bit-mapped mode and draws out the characters on the screen.  It looks a little distorted and the program never returns you to the editor when you select this mode, so be warned.. save your work first.

'S' / 'L' are for loading and saving of fonts to disk.  (sorry, left them off the screen instructions for some reason)  Be warned, the disk routines are slow.  But at least you can see which character it is working on.

'z' is for convert.  It will allow you to pick a color (type in its decimal value) and then a color to replace it with.  This function will affect every character in memory, and it may take a while depending on how big your fonts are and how many characters you have.

'I' will import the 2-bpp font stored in the C64's kernal ROM.  It takes a little time to do the conversion.  This only works if you are using an 8-pixel font.  The function does nothing with other sizes.

'D' selects DMA transfer.  (Works on a real DTV only) Allows you to read or write your font anywhere in the 2 MB of RAM on the DTV.  Will also allow you to read a font from flashROM.  You will need to enter 3 addresses: High, Low, and Mid.  These are equivilant to the format of $00:00:00 in hex.  You need not worry about the upper bits which tells the DMA program if it is ROM or RAM, FontEdit will take care of that for you.  Just enter the addresses.  Maybe a future version will use Hex numbers.