Misplaced Pages

#163836

26-727: Following the foundation in 1981 a number of game titles for the Panasonic JR-200 were produced. Later products for the Apple Macintosh included the debugger TMON and an application launching utility called OnCue . ICOM Simulations was formed as TMQ Software on March 4, 1981, by Tod Zipnick. With the MacVenture series, ICOM pioneered the point-and-click adventure interface and later multiplatform CD-ROM development with Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective . Zipnick died of Hodgkin's disease in 1991 just as

52-554: A centronics compatible printer port , (supported by BASIC with LPRINT , LLIST and HCOPY , a "screen dump" command) and an expansion interface port. The expansion port connector also had signal lines for an RS232 serial connection which BASIC supported with several commands, but its main use was to connect a 5¼-inch floppy disk drive. On its left side the JR-200 had two DB-9 joystick connectors which could be connected to standard (Atari style) joysticks, which could be read by

78-403: A font that are intended to give the impression that a system can support high resolution graphics, while in fact the system operates in text mode. Characters such as box-drawing characters , circles and dots, card symbols like ♠, ♣, ♥ and ♦, and "graphical building block" geometric shapes such as triangles gave such systems that appearance. One of the first systems that used such characters,

104-569: A small built-in speaker. On the back of the device there was a volume control potentiometer that controlled both the internal and external speaker. On the back of the device you could also find an eight-pin DIN connector for a cassette recorder with which you could load programs at 2400 bit/s. Then two connectors for video output, an RCA connector RF output and an eight-pins DIN connector that could output NTSC or RGB video . The JR-200UP variant outputs composite PAL and RGB. Two other connectors provided

130-462: A tone over a 5-octave range, and played them in the background while the BASIC program continued. Clever use of the three square wave voices could be used to generate a range of other sounds, such as explosions. A keystroke could be accompanied by an audible feedback signal. Audio was output from an RCA (Tulip) connector onto which an eight ohm speaker could be directly connected, but the JR-200 also had

156-407: Is a primitive method used in early text mode video hardware to emulate raster graphics without having to implement the logic for such a display mode. There are two different ways to accomplish the emulation of raster graphics. The first one is to create a low-resolution all points addressable mode using a set of special characters with all binary combinations of a certain subdivision matrix of

182-526: Is an example, although with a 4:5:4 scheme the distortion effect was minimal. The seminal use of this technology was in the TRS-80 where the only way to get discrete pixels on the screen that could be turned on and off individually, (all points addressable) was by the use of a 2×3 pixel matrix of block graphics. In the case of the TRS-80 these block graphics were not incorporated into a font ROM, as later became

208-762: Is used for I/O and contains 128 bytes of RAM plus four kilobytes of ROM. A version of the JR-200 called the Panasonic JR-200U was developed for the North American and European markets and was announced in January 1983. The JR-200 did not use Microsoft BASIC , but its own dialect, one that was designed to be mostly compatible with Microsoft BASIC. JR-BASIC was a greatly extended BASIC, with, (for example) graphical commands such as COLOR , (which selected character color, background color and display mode) and PLOT which permitted direct addressing of

234-826: The BIOS of any VGA compatible video card, so any PC can display these characters from the moment it is turned on, even when no operating system is yet loaded. Single and double lines are still often drawn with this method when the system uses text mode; for example when running the BIOS setup program. Many of these historical ideas have been adopted into Unicode , in, for example in the Symbols for Legacy Computing , Block Elements , Box Drawing and Geometric Shapes Unicode blocks . For example, an 8×12 pixel character could be divided vertically in two halves and horizontally in three parts, and then assigning "ink" and "background" values to

260-464: The 7F hex "byte" which was considered to be the "DEL" or "rub-out" character ). The assignment in ASCII of the rub-out character (to the code point 127) led designers of VDUs to use "rub-out" for a character square filled with "ink", which was often used to represent the cursor. Other examples of systems that relied on the use of block graphics are: Semigraphical characters are also characters in

286-526: The BASIC STICK command. In contrast to most other home computers of the time the JR-200 did not use an external transformer unit but had a built-in, completely contained, power supply. The computer received favorable reviews on its launch. Creative Computing wrote "The Panasonic JR-200 is one of the nicest new computers to make the scene in some time." Text semigraphics Text-based semigraphics , pseudographics , or character graphics

SECTION 10

#1732772907164

312-594: The JR-200 could display 32 characters per line and 24 lines. All relevant keys would auto-repeat when pressed continuously. The JR-200 used a very unusual 8-bit CPU , the MN1800A , which was compatible with the Motorola MC6802 , a slightly improved version of the Motorola 6800 . It ran at a slow 0.89 MHz (according to unconfirmed information). There is also a second processor, the 4-bit MN1544CJR, which

338-603: The MN1544CJR I/O chip, with three of the timer outputs being hooked up to generate square wave tones. The BASIC supported the sound capabilities with commands ranging from a simple BEEP command ( BEEP 1 producing an 880 Hz "middle octave A" sound), to the SOUND (f, d) command which took two numerical parameters for frequency and duration, and the PLAY and TEMPO commands which could take multiple commands to play

364-499: The Sinclair ZX81 ). Sometimes the text semigraphical characters are simply incorporated into the systems font-set, sometimes special video hardware is used to directly convert the bit-pattern from video memory into the pixels. In rare cases a character matrix was not dividable vertically by three, for example in an 8×8 matrix the mosaic is sometimes divided so that it uses a 3:2:3 scan line scheme. The Galaksija's graphics mode

390-620: The canonical example that others followed, was the Commodore PET , which had many of them within its PETSCII font set. The original PET relied to such a degree on these characters that it printed them on its keyboard, as can be seen here, an example that other systems soon copied. Another good example of a system that relied on semigraphical characters is the venerable Sharp MZ80K , which had no high-resolution graphics, nor reprogrammable characters, but relied fully on an extended font set with many pseudo graphical characters. With these it

416-466: The characters in a full block graphics font set are the logical inverse of the other half of the font set. Other tricks that were used to decrease the number of needed characters, was to use a space for the "all bits are zero" character, and to use character 7F hex for the "all bits are on" character, as character 7F hex (decimal 127) was often defined as an "all pixels on" character (this was because when using papertape punching out all seven holes, created

442-583: The company was beginning to take off. In the early-to-mid 1990s, ICOM Simulations was a major third-party developer for the TurboGrafx-16 (TG-16) platform in the US. They produced many games for the console, including the TG-16 exclusive Shadowgate sequel, Beyond Shadowgate . The company was acquired in 1993 by Viacom New Media which closed its operations in 1997. Renamed to Rabid Entertainment, VNM/ICOM

468-436: The elements of the matrix in a binary pattern, corresponding to the binary sequence of the position in the font table of a 2×3 block mosaic matrix of so-called squots (square dots) or sextants . Less often used versions use a 1×6 "matrix", in which case these six "pixels" are sometimes referred to as sixels . But dividing an 8×8 character in 2×2 "pixels" called quadrants was also common (it was, for example, used in

494-541: The graphic symbols of PETSCII ), and a BASIC keyword . Two keys, ALPHA and GRAPH , are used to switch back and forth between character and graphics modes. Holding down the CONTROL key while pressing any grey key produced a BASIC keyword. In total the JR-200 had 253 built-in characters. 96 letters, numbers and symbols, 5 Greek letters , 63 graphical symbols, 79 Japanese ( katakana ) symbols and 10 music and other symbols. All symbols formed in an 8x8 pixel matrix, and

520-495: The low resolution graphics mode (64×48, using text semigraphics characters, which represented pixel blocks that used one-quarter of each character). Eight colors were available for the background and foreground use: blue, red, magenta, green, cyan, yellow, white and black. By re-programming a part of the character-set a limited high resolution graphics mode was achievable with a resolution of 256×192. The BASIC also supported on-screen editing and direct execution of BASIC instructions.

546-419: The machine came with 32K of RAM, and had 30,716 bytes free for a Basic program. User memory could be expanded to 40K. JR-BASIC itself occupied 16K of ROM, while the character set video memory and I/O used another 6K. The JR-200 ROM also contained a machine code monitor to enter and execute machine code programs. The JR-200 was capable of producing a wide range of sounds. The JR-200 had a general purpose timer,

SECTION 20

#1732772907164

572-542: The norm, but were generated directly from the logic pattern of six bits from the video RAM using a dedicated circuit made from logic gates . An earlier system using the same pseudo-graphics array of a 2 by 3 matrix was the Video Terminal Interface (VTI) of the Poly-88 by polymorphic systems , an S-100 bus based system predating the TRS-80. If the system also supported color, the color resolution of

598-414: The resulting pixels was normally equal to the text resolution, often leading to attribute clash as the color of a pixel could not be changed on a per pixel basis, but only to one "ink", and one "background" color for all pixels within a character position. Sometimes the number of characters in the font, dedicated to block graphics, could be halved if the system also supported an "invert" attribute, as half

624-445: The text mode character size; this method is referred to as block graphics , or sometimes mosaic graphics . The second one is to use special shapes instead of glyphs (letters and figures) that appear as if drawn in raster graphics mode, sometimes referred to as semi- or pseudo-graphics ; an important example of this is box-drawing characters . Semigraphical characters (including some block elements) are still incorporated into

650-644: Was a simple, relatively early (1983), 8-bit home computer with a chiclet keyboard somewhat similar to the VTech Laser 200 . It's part of the JR Series . Made of silver grey plastic, it had a black matte area around the keyboard area. Most of the 63 rubber chiclet keys were grey, with some (the more important) keys in marine blue, and with white control and break keys. Each of the grey keys could produce any of five inputs: Upper and lower-case letters (or numbers and symbols), two graphic characters (similar to

676-591: Was dismantled in 1998. The rights to ICOM's game portfolio were held by the company Infinite Ventures, but they are now owned by David Marsh who obtained most of the rights in January 2012. On March 5, 2012, Dave Marsh and Karl Roelofs , both former developers at ICOM Simulations, formed a new game development company called Zojoi, LLC , and have begun releasing upgraded versions of previous ICOM Simulations titles, starting with Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective for iOS Tablets. Panasonic JR-200 The Panasonic JR-200 (Panasonic Personal Computer (PPC))

#163836