Code Post: Dot Matrix Font Renderer (Patreon)

I've been thinking a lot about which vehicle I should use for my Starsword (not-40K) project. Ideally, I'd like to go 6mm tabletop, but it's beyond my capabilities. Next up is a TTRPG, but I'm not a writer. A comic is a whole lot of work.

My most realistic idea might be to take the print & play '70s style boardgame route (fully solo). The player is the equivalent of Kirk or a Rogue Trader, exploring different locations on a hex star map. Each location is a mini game... it could be strategical ship-to-ship or man-to-man, a maze adventure, or a paragraph text adventure. I think paragraph driven play is very effective narratively so I'd use that over a dice-math-engine type of system. The variety will serve to explore the setting at different scales and flesh it out.

Anyways, to get to the point, since the technology in Starsword is locked to '70s computing (<1Mhz expensive computers), floppies, and Dot Matrix printers, I thought I'd use a dot matrix font for the mission briefs. But, I wasn't pleased with existing fonts as I needed an exaggerated and messy dotty look to really emphasize the dot matrixness. 

The resolution of a dot matrix printer is sort of measured by the number of needles, with cheaper printers having 9 needles in a vertical arrangement. The needles (operating in parallel) strike an ink ribbon thus transferring a pattern to the paper. Theoretically you could have a 1 needle printer, but it would be much slower than a 9 needle, and I could imagine that characters would get a bit wobbly due to head-paper alignment issues.

While the vertical resolution of 9-pin characters is 9 (for text-data printouts), the horizontal head movement is analog. In practice, looking at my old source printouts, dots go on either full or half positions. This is enough for smoothing rounded characters and really quite liberating and many of the classic pixel-font dilemmas and struggles become mostly solvable in a fun way!

I'm attaching some dirty BlitzMax code I wrote for my fictional 6 needle printer, as well as my font bmp file that's converted into needle data. BlitzMax is commercially defunct, but since .bmx is just a text/source file it could probably be ported without much trouble. It's really just a small private utility I'll use for generating game assets.

More importantly, I'll see if I can clean up the test scenario that I wrote for my Starsword thing and post that next. It's a simple space skirmish, see last image above.