Making a splash (screen)!

A diversion today - adding a splash screen to the Neo Geo target.

One of the reasons I want to add a splash screen - aside from advertising - was to display some sort of software version. After the first beta gets out into the wild, I want people to know exactly which version they're running. The plan is for the ultimate version to be released as v1.0.

The first task was rendering the Xevious foreground character set as Neo Geo FIX layer tiles. That was relatively straightforward, but I realised the character set as-is wasn't very convenient for rendering generic text. So I rendered a 2nd set with the alphanumeric and punctuation characters with their correct ASCII ordinals so I could simply use ASCII text in the source code.

Being 1 bit-per-pixel characters, they are nominally rendered with a transparent background. That may come in handy, but I also wanted the option for setting the background colour on a per-character basis. So I rendered a 3rd set - again in ASCII order - with non-transparent background pixels.

That's the beauty of the Neo Geo - oodles of characters/tiles/sprites to go around!

I've done up a quick splash screen. I'm not entirely happy with the aesthetics of it, and I actually can't reconcile the colours with the ones I thought I chose from the Xevious foreground palette, but it's a start.

Crude but conveys what I need to convey...

Back to the audit next session.