Microchess Video Support
Microchess for BMOW is now a full-fledged graphical program, instead of a text-mode program using ASCII art for the board. It was pretty easy to do, fortunately. I wrote a stand-alone routine to draw the board graphics using the existing Microchess board state in memory, and replaced the ASCII art code with a call to my new routine. It uses BMOW’s mixed-video mode capabilities, with a 208×208 board using 16 colors, a 4-line scrolling text area for move entry, and an empty 48×208 area to the right of the board. Maybe this area could be used to show a running list of moves?
Excellent!
As for sound. If you absolutely must have some output, you could pull a divider chip into the mix and throw it on vsync or the clock and just demux the outputs. Sure, you only get a few notes but at least it sings.
Haven’t fired up my SID in quite some time now. That would be quite a thing to put on a fpga or even logic (I’m betting it’d be quite a bit of logic)