To follow-up on my last week’s post on the Sharp PC-1500 I’ve fired-up my faithful sidekick and keyed in a small animation program. Surprisingly all came back in a blink. I almost forgot the quality of the keyboard and the ease of data and program entry & debug. Really a nice and smooth machine. However, since the “war” is over for a while now, I decided to create a small tool to design the graphic animation frames on my PC, instead of a notepad and mentally play with the powers of 2. Using Excel, it is trivial to set up a simple tool (see pics and videos).

Although it could be possible to transfer the graphics data onto the PC-1500, it is very easy to enter the hex digits. Keep in mind that for each column on data, two Hex digits are required. For the experts, yeah, I could have used DATA for the code, but it was faster to put together a quick and dirty player this way. Even though you can flip between sheets in the book, at the end of the day, we need to play the frames on the real stuff. The code snippet below shows this player. 

10 WAIT 2
20 DIM A$(frames_count)*frames_width
30 A$(0)=”….
40 A$(1)=”….
…
80 A$(frames_count)=”….
100 FOR X=0 TO 150 STEP frames_width
110 FOR I=0 TO frames_count
120 GCURSOR X+I+1
130 GPRINT A$(I)
140 NEXT I
150 NEXT X
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