deʃhipuWhile most games will be simple enough to just use the individual pixels on the matrix, we still need a way to display text to the player — to show errors, to list the available games, to show the "game over" text, etc. So today I worked on that.
I designed my own 4×6 4-color font specially for this. The effect of using the 4 available colors for shading when they actually have very different hues is a bit strange, but you get used to it and I think it's actually quite readable:
I might add an option of displaying the text in just a single color — the font is designed so that it's still readable if you "round" the half tones.
The scrolling is actually quite slow on the SAMD feathers (the maximum speed is about twice as on the gif above), but I think it's quite sufficient for text.
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That's looking really good, but can't you dim the existing tones to get a 'rounding' effect, or is that not possible?
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It's not possible with PewPew Lite, which uses HT16K33 chip that only has "on" and "off" states for the pixels, and global brightness. But the initial board, PewPew, uses an IS31FL3733, which can do 256 levels for each pixel individually, giving me 65536 colors to use. For now I'm focusing on the Lite version, as it is considerably simpler, cheaper and easier to solder, and PewPew will get released later, with backward compatibility with Lite.
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