'' has semigraphical characters indicated for easy entry
Semigraphical characters are also characters in a font that are intended to give the impression that a system can support high resolution graphics, while in fact the system operates in text mode. Characters such as
box-drawing characters, circles and dots,
card symbols like ♠, ♣, ♥ and ♦, and "graphical building block"
geometric shapes such as triangles gave such systems that appearance. One of the first systems that used such characters, the canonical example that others followed, was the
Commodore PET, which had many of them within its
PETSCII font set. The original PET relied to such a degree on these characters that it printed them on its keyboard, as can be seen here, an example that other systems soon copied. Another good example of a system that relied on semigraphical characters is the venerable
Sharp MZ80K, which had no high-resolution graphics, nor reprogrammable characters, but relied fully on an extended font set with many pseudo graphical characters. With these it was still possible to generate games that looked like the system had high-resolution graphics. Some of the systems that had a programmable font set, but did not have a real high resolution raster graphics hardware, came with default character sets to be uploaded in character set RAM, and these sets often incorporated the ideas mentioned here, although it was often also the case that dedicated semigraphical characters were defined as needed.
Systems that relied on semigraphical characters Examples of systems that relied heavily on semigraphical characters for their graphics are: • The original
IBM PC with the
MDA offered no form of graphics other than the
box-drawing characters of its
default hardware code page 437. • The
Commodore PET was one of the first systems to rely heavily on semigraphical characters, to get any form of graphics on screen (see
PETSCII). • The
Sinclair ZX80 and
ZX81 relied on block graphics characters for a low-resolution graphics of 64×48 pixels black-and-white or 32×48 in black, white, and
dithered gray as seen in the
ZX80 character set and
ZX81 character set. • The
Mattel Aquarius relied completely on its character set for games, even though it was marketed through toy-shops. It never became a commercial success partly because of this limitation, which was outdated at the time (see
Mattel Aquarius character set). • The
Panasonic JR-200 also used semigraphical characters in combination with block graphics (see
Matsushita JR series character set). • The
Sharp MZ series of computers offered no high resolution or programmable characters, but did have a very complete set of semigraphical characters (see
Sharp MZ character set), and so still offered many visually nice games. • The
Matra Alice 32 and 90; and the
Philips VG5000 (see
Thomson EF9345 character set). • The
Compukit UK101 (clone of the popular Ohio Scientific superboard) also was a very early system that relied on its 256 characters set. • The text modes of later Apple II computers, beginning with the
Apple IIc and the enhanced version of the
Apple IIe, supported the
MouseText character set, which replaced flashing uppercase characters when enabled. Although these Apple systems did not rely on these character sets they did play a role in simulating GUI like graphics of their more advanced family members, while still in text mode. ==See also==