MADrigal wrote:As for the name "in the tradition of the CreatiVision", it would be something like Crazy Cube, or Space Cube, or Jumping Cube. Not Q*somewhat. And the main character would NOT be Q*Bert, but some other character.
The question is... how much should be changed compared to the original? I think the Creativision is already known for having bad knock-offs of arcade games, not the original ones. And the knock-offs generally don't play as well as the originals. But if only the main character and the name gets changed, and it plays like the original in every other aspect, I'm fine with that. There's an Atari 7800 homebrew of Q*Bert, by the way, named B*nQ, which, apart of its name, looks and plays pretty exactly like Q*Bert (within the system's limitations).
MADrigal wrote:PS: question: how could they use the "bitmap mode" on the Colecovision version, and simultaneously put text/characters on screen, that's a feature of the text/graphics mode only?
First, you can put text/characters on screen by writing the correct patterns to the bitmap. The PC's we all use today create their display the same way and display text (for instance, the text you can read here) although they have no text mode. In fact, they do have a text mode (you can see it briefly on booting the PC), but Windows runs in graphics mode.
Second, the bitmap mode on the Creativision is still tiled. That is, it still has a pattern name table. If you fill that with 00-FF in every third of the screen as recommended by TI, you get the tiles in the order they appear in the pattern table and the color table. But you can jumble around the tiles of each screen by writing different values to the pattern name table. In fact, the bitmap mode is still character based, only each character consists of 8 bytes of pattern and 8 bytes of color data, and each third of the screen uses its own pattern and color table. You can also tell the VDP to use the same pattern and color table for two or all of the thirds, but I heard that in this case, the sprites act up somewhat since this mode wasn't officially supported.
Anyway, if you've got a rather repetitive display, not a full bitmap, you can define your numbers, characters and graphics individually for each third of the screen and then use each 8x8 block freely on every position that belongs to that third of the screen.
