Corning Community College
CSCS2650 Computer Organization
Occasionally there is value reinventing certain wheels, either to establish specific use-case functionality better than the generic option, or to better understand how the generic option functions. This could well be a combination of the two.
Here we explore creating our own infrastructure for managing and displaying information: numbers.
In assembly.
Implement the needed functionality (functions/subroutines as needed) in assembly that uses a custom texture file (providing the numbers) and handles displaying them to the screen.
You will want to go here to edit and fill in the various sections of the document:
Creating a custom font is a very similar process to creating a Vircon32 texture sheet, simply scaled up depending on how many characters are being included.
After drawing up the font sheet .png file with every character, use Vircon32's functions of #define and define_region_matrix() to establish sequential IDs for each character. To keep the program code neat, the code regarding the font definitions and functions will be stored in a header file.
Note: Since our font texture sheet is in a separate file from our main texture file for the game, our .xml file will need to be updated to account for both files. When using select_texture(), the number that gets input directly correlates to the order of the files in the .xml. (ie, 0 = first file, 1 = second file, etc. )
In order to draw a given integer in any base, we'll need to make a function. Our function will be given the parameters of the input number, the base to convert to, and X/Y positional data.
First, we'll need to declare some local variables. A check integer will be used to test how many digits long the output number will be, and a print integer will show which number to print out at any given position.
Second, run through a loop so that the check variable is at the same order of magnitude as the number while still being less than or equal to. Now we're ready to print out our converted number.
Lastly, we run a while loop until check is zero. print gets assigned to the number divided by the check. Then, the number gets assigned to the remainder of that division. print is used to get the texture region ID for the number digit in our custom font, and that character gets printed at the given location. Lastly the positional data is updated so that the digits aren't all in the same position.
Vircon32 stores string values as an array of integers containing the ASCII value for the given character. Since our font sheet uses a different ID system to the ASCII standard, they'll need to be converted. This involves a new function to return an int with the proper value. (it involves too many if statements)
The main while loop for printing out strings is roughly the same as our function for printing integers. Once the proper texture region ID is selected, it prints out and the positional data is adjusted.
To be successful in this project, the following criteria (or their equivalent) must be met:
Let's say you have completed work on the project, and are ready to submit, you would do the following:
lab46:~/src/SEMESTER/DESIG/PROJECT$ submit DESIG PROJECT file1 file2 file3 ... fileN
You should get some sort of confirmation indicating successful submission if all went according to plan. If not, check for typos and or locational mismatches.
I'll be evaluating the project based on the following criteria:
52:yol0:final tally of results (52/52) *:yol0:functionality present and operational [13/13] *:yol0:code assembles with no warnings or errors [13/13] *:yol0:all game and build related files submitted [13/13] *:yol0:some significant project incorporates this [13/13]
The discrete version of yol0 will focus on a C version of this process.