Q: Could you get hi-res graphics on a ZX81?
A: Yes. There were a number of ways.
1. The Z80's i register pointed to a font table. You could move this
around in the ROM to create swirly graphics effects. The game
Astral Convoy did this. Unfortunately, the design of the ZX81 made
it impossible for the character set to be anywhere in the 16K
range, so you couldn't have a user defined set without extra
hardware. With a 64K RAM pack you could disable the ROM shadow
between 8K and 16K and design your own UDGs.
2. CRL released a Hi-Res graphics toolkit. This contained an
extremely hairy interrupt routine that replaced the ZX81's usual
display update routine. Basically, it pointed the i register to
a strategic ROM location, and tried to 'best fit' the HRG display
to what it could find in those locations. It also used a feature
of the ZX81's hardware that allowed you to have 1 pixel height
characters to improve it's chances.
You still could, at best, only have 128 different combinations out
of the 256 possible ones. These were the 64 'characters' and their
inverses. So this is really pseudo-HRG.
A number of games by Software Farm, including Hi-Res Invaders and
Rocket Man, used this technique.
With a 64K RAM pack you could also, alter the font, allowing an
even better chance of getting the characters you need. Some
people made an alteration to their ZX81's internal wiring, so that
the i register can point to the 16K RAM area, allowing them to do
the same.
3. There were a number of hardware add-ons that worked with software
similar to the above routines to allow UDG's and true-HRG.
DK'Tronics and Quicksilva produced devices that worked with some
of their games.
¿Podrá ser esto posible en un ZX81?
No pueden ser UDFs porque los octetos que apuntan al comienzo del mapa de caracteres se encuentran en ROM (a diferencia del Spectrum que se encuentran en RAM).
Tendría que verlo... esto me parece sinceramente increíble.
Saludos,
Para responderle al comodorero acérrimo de The_WOZ, en los '80 había también cargadores de Spectrum con juegosWink Por ejemplo el Pac-Man del Joe Blade 2, no conseguí video pero si una captura en WOS.
Como hace la ZX81 para generar los graficos de "alta resolucion" (64x48), usa caracteres graficos o tiene acceso directo a cada pixel?