Okay, I got about half of the Plan 13 code ported to C++. It’s a fresh port of the original BASIC code, but modularized into objects better, and with a few bits of tidiness that C++ provides over basic. I estimate another hour or so to finish the code, if I work carefully and efficiently.

I wasn’t feeling up to working carefully and efficiently this evening, so I thought I’d try to figure out a few mostly cosmetic issues. I had the idea that I wanted to change the map to color, which was easy enough to achieve. Then, I thought a large time display at the bottom. I had an 8×8 character font already in memory, so using it to generate huge characters at the bottom didn’t seem to be that hard. The problem is that the screen is only 50 characters wide, so that makes just six characters. I dummied it up to display six digits of time and the bottom, and it’s simply too big. Check it:

Clearly, the 8×8 character set isn’t quite what I need. I have a 3×5 charset which might do the trick, but I’ll have to get that formatted and loaded into flash. I’ll try that tomorrow.