You have to have played with Commodore BASIC's PETSCII graphics abilities "back in the day" to really appreciate them. With no starting skill you could do animations, rudimentary video games and what have you, all in BASIC with just character graphics.
The reason it worked so well was the cursor control characters. Just by printing a string, for example, you could draw an outline box with text in it, or a little man, or whatever, in an instant.
The speed of BASIC was still an issue. I animated a train driving across the screen, about 10 characters high, and it worked fairly well but you could see a bit of a ripple. I don't remember how exactly, but, for example, each 1-character wide "slice" of the train could be a string, then you just print your 40 "slice" strings in a row and there's your train; pick your starting offset in a larger array to draw it in different phases of motion.
A faster CPU totally solves this. Now you have a machine where non-programmers can do really cool graphic stuff and smoothly too, without ever leaving BASIC.
The next step, generally, was about reprogramming the character set. Now your BASIC, character cell based graphics could have custom pixels, not just the preformed PETSCII characters.
I once saw a cute little character based platform jumper game on someone's VIC20 and went home and implemented it, from scratch, on the C64 in an afternoon. In BASIC, with a few custom characters.
But what may be missing in this retro scene is being able to show off your creations to everyone else who has the same computer. Without that, kids may not get interested.
The reason it worked so well was the cursor control characters. Just by printing a string, for example, you could draw an outline box with text in it, or a little man, or whatever, in an instant.
The speed of BASIC was still an issue. I animated a train driving across the screen, about 10 characters high, and it worked fairly well but you could see a bit of a ripple. I don't remember how exactly, but, for example, each 1-character wide "slice" of the train could be a string, then you just print your 40 "slice" strings in a row and there's your train; pick your starting offset in a larger array to draw it in different phases of motion.
A faster CPU totally solves this. Now you have a machine where non-programmers can do really cool graphic stuff and smoothly too, without ever leaving BASIC.
The next step, generally, was about reprogramming the character set. Now your BASIC, character cell based graphics could have custom pixels, not just the preformed PETSCII characters.
I once saw a cute little character based platform jumper game on someone's VIC20 and went home and implemented it, from scratch, on the C64 in an afternoon. In BASIC, with a few custom characters.
But what may be missing in this retro scene is being able to show off your creations to everyone else who has the same computer. Without that, kids may not get interested.