gameboy writer

>gameboy writer is a word processor for the original
gameboy which i programmed for my m.a. thesis
in editorial design and publishing at isia urbino. writer
comes with one variable font, sans, its sans-serif
bitmap typeface which can be stretched both vertically
and horizontally, to the user liking. it also comes in
three styles: regular, italic, and bold, settable via menu.
it supports the gameboy pocket printer to print the
paragraph realised with the program onto thermal paper.
gameboy writer, or gbw, was written in c with gbdk.
graphics were designed inspired by the xerox alto and
star 8081 grahical user interface, which were also
part of my thesis research. i mostly acquired pictures
from bruce damer's digibarn which is an amazing
resource of data on old sytems, especially xerox ones.
          the graphics were at first sketched on paper,
or directly drawn on photoshop on a 8x8 pixels or more
canvas, then re-drawn with gameboy tile designer
and gameboy map builder, two amazingly helpful apps
which are free and run great on wine or crossover.
it was built as a companion program of gameboy painter,
which shares the same graphics elements but was
made to draw pixel based drawing, with printer support.
both gameboy writer and painter are part of project
8kb;4mb;dmg, in which i explored how much i could fit
into the original gameboy capabilities to be able to
make graphics with such a device in today's scenario.
it is the second iteration of the word processor apps
i was programming, you can read their history → here,
whilst the first version, which i called prototype_a, is
a tile-based word processor, where the typeface resulted
in it being monospaced, since each glyph is framed
into a 8x8 pixel tile. while it worked, i wasn't satisfied with
the limitation which implies, making a small interface
even more crammed and with just a few character per line.
         this led to coding protoype_c, now standalone
gameboy painter, which eventually got split in the program
you can see on the right. i wanted to test what was
possible to be fit in a gameboy text editor. eventually i also
implemented a fully variable typeface, with sliders to
let the user decide the amount of variation, pixel by pixel.
currenlty the rom does not fit on a standard controller,
but needs at least mbc1, with mbc5 currently implemented
to store all the font variations. on its release, probably
many variations will be cut, being of minimal difference, to
make space for more typefaces, e.g. serif and mono.

the current version of gameboy writer isn't finished yet,
and it is not stable enough to be released. i tested it
on both emulators, namely bgb, which i recommend for
testing since it's very strict, and the original gameboy.
when booted up, it greets the user with a splashscreen,
see [1], then jumps directly into writing mode, which
shows a keyboard and page. here the user can move the
cursor around using the dpad. pressing a types onto
the page. pressing start, the style menu opens up like so:



here the user can move around using the dpad + left
and right. currently the working parameters are styles [3],
[4] and [5], variable height and variable width. [6], [7].
the variable feature is the most space hungry, since i had
to code each variation by hand, splitting them in banks.
i will put on the right a demonstration of the functions that
are currently implemented and few on-hardware photos.




[1] gameboy writer splashscreen.

[2] gameboy writer on-screen keyboard. the dpad moves
     the key and typing is performed by pressing a.




[3] pressing start opens the stlye menu. press a to select
     a style, then b to resume writing. this is regular.

[4] pressing start opens the stlye menu. press a to select
     a style, then b to resume writing. this is italic.




[5] pressing start opens the stlye menu. press a to select
     a style, then b to resume writing. this is bold.

[6] the variable height slider. to move use dpad + left and
     right. a previews the parameter and b goes back.




[7] the variable width slider. to move use dpad + left and
     right. a previews the parameter and b goes back.