Originally Posted by newcoleco
You can use the screen mode 2 for your "bitmap" title screen. And you can use the screen mode 1 for your text adventure in 40 collumns.
You can use only one screen mode at a time.
I suggest you to exploit the screen mode 2 to do great graphics and color effects.
After some consideration, this is probably the best way. Originally, I had intended to use different colors for the text; your actions would be red, but enemy reactions would be in green, while basic descriptions would be in blue. But since the 40-column mode in the ColecoVision only allows one color at any one time, this is impossible.
Therefore, I have two choices...
1) If I want to make the text different colors, I must go with the 32 column mode. Since the Commodore version of this game uses 40 columns, the text would have to be arranged differently if it ever goes past 32 letters on a line.
2) Use the 40-column mode. This allows for a "straight" text translation, but all text must now be of one color.
Incidently, I can only use 30/38 characters in these modes. Why? Because on a television screen, often the far left and the far right columns cannot be seen; Dac-Man has this problem. Therefore, I'd have to leave a column on both sides to center everything better. This complicates matters a bit; losing those two spaces is more of a bother than you'd think.
But first, I must get a working Commodore 64 computer to get this game off of the ground. I can even program a fancy title screen for it; at least I can do that much. The crude prototype version I did just before the computer blew (December was an awful month) was actually pretty enjoyable, if a bit simple by today's standards. We'll see.
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