BASIC competition

What a cool trick with Kanji-ROM fonts!!
I have never got the idea to use it in this way although I'm much more familiar to Kanji.

Actually I just updated the source to add a "game over"-screen. Now the game does not drop to BASIC anymore.

Although I say my self, I'm pretty proud of this entry... Considering how small program this is I think I collected quite remarkable list of little known and unusual tricks together... and this time I don't even mean that missusing of error handler...

Typically MSX-BASIC user functions are considered to be somewhere between ridiculous and useless, but this program actually does all of drawing and flipping of the cards using a single function! And how it that possible? Well, it uses VT-52 emulation that is found still sleeping under the hood... Yes that same VT-52 from 1975 who's emulation has somehow find it's way inside the MSX-BASIC screen handler... This is propably because MSX-DOS wanted to be able to run CP/M software and it would have been stupid to do two screen handlers. How ever I don't think this "ESC+"Y" feature is very well known among BASIC users as normally there is rather little use for it in BASIC programs.

And where do all these pictures come from? Yes, there is indeed a dusty corner in KANJI-font ROM that I tend to call "code page 236". That has a very special place in my heart as it is only place in Japanese MSX that contains also characters like "Ä" and "Ö" that are very important in Finnish language, that I speak natively... If I ie. ask "Näitkö opettajaa?" it means "Did you see the teacher?" but if I write "Naitko opettajaa?" it means "Did you fuck the teacher?"... great difference... anyway back to the point... That "code page" also has all these neat graphics that you can see here.

And how it plots them to screen? Well I POKE the undocumented internal parameters of KANJI PRINT-handler so that I can trick text commands and direct command handler to work on SCREEN 3 as well as in any other graphical screenmode... Please be warned that the experience might be not what you expect if you press CTRL+STOP I don't know if this feature is well known among Japanese users (ghost_jp?) but at least in English documentation I've not seen anything about it except what I've wrote my self. I consider it extremely interesting feature as that enables all this multicolor textmode stuff and executing of graphics commands such as CIRCLE or COPY from direct mode etc... To my eyes it practically changes the whole MSX-BASIC experience to something else, but in a positive way. As I have not seen it used in any program before I decited to put it in to use here.

At least I have never heard about that.
Till early 90s, an MSX magazine by a major publisher in Japan solicited a short program just like BASIC 10Liners. I don't clearly remember but I wonder a few Japanese MSXers with ripe skill showed his or her trick similar to yours.

What you call "code page 236" is not well-known among us either, I guess. These fonts; picture letters or Emoji, comes from specialized machines for Japanese word-processing in 1980s. Not a few venders competed in fullness of picture letters on their Kanji-ROM. Most of them were also the makers of Japanese MSX computers. Actually some Japanese MSX computer internally had word-processing extension, as you know.

On the one hand, I think Japanese MSXers in those days didn't like that MSX was confused with such specialized machine. Especially programming people hoped that MSX was considered as a pure computer, not a game machine, not a word-processor. Little wonder code page 236 was a stigma for such people. They might know these fonts. But ignored.

That's a funny example!
I will spread that to my colleagues who know little about Finland at the next lunch time, thank you.

I sent the program I recently made as example for the PUTSPRITE instruction of the wiki. I've improved it a bit for the contest.

Wow, nice piece of code and some amazing undocumented secrets.