[Coco] : GIME text modes and font data

[John Kent]

On 4/09/2012 6:42 AM, jdaggett at gate.net wrote:
> On 3 Sep 2012 at 13:56, William Astle wrote:
>
>> My question was simple. Where does the font data come from when the GIME
>> is displaying a hardware text mode.
> If by font data you mean character generator ROM then in hardware that is in the GIME chip.
> In an emulator that would have to be some file that the emulator has to access whether
> included in the ROM file or another I do not know that.
>
> As for the actual COCO3 there is a block of 8K that stores the data that is used by the GIME
> to access and display. That is in RAM. In graphics mode to create text there is a table at:
>
> F09D F39C HIGH RESOLUTION SOFTWARE CHARACTER GERNERATOR 'ROM'.
>
> is this what you want?
>
> james

That's what I was wondering, if the character generator in the ROM was 
for displaying character fonts in graphics mode.

William was saying that the mess emulator appeared to be using the ROM 
character generator for it's emulation, which meant he couldn't use his 
own custom ROM.

I'm sorry William for waffling on about the hardware, but it was mainly 
for background information.

What you were really asking was what the Mess emulator did, and the only 
way you are going to work that out is by going through the code.

I tried compiling Mess or Mame yeahs ago under Cygwin, and it took 
forever and I ended up giving up.
I think the binaries had viruses and all sorts of nasties in them.
The situation might have improved, but I'm a bit suspicious of using the 
code.

John.

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