SDL_tty

SDL_tty is a simple library that tries to simulate a primitive terminal that allows you to print to the screen in much the same way that you would print to stdout. The usage is like this:

// Create the fixed width font
SDL_Surface* temp = IMG_Load("fontfile.png");
TTY_Font* font = TTY_CreateFont(temp, 16, 16,
                                "\x7f !\"#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ"
                                "[\\]^_`abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~");
// Create the terminal
TTY* tty = TTY_Create(40, 30, font);

// Your mainloop
while(1)
{
   // print text via
   TTY_printf(tty, "Hello World\n");

   // renderer the terminal to the screen
   TTY_Blit(tty, screen, 80, 60);

   SDL_Flip(screen);
}

TTY_Free(tty);
TTY_FreeFont(font);

fontdump

The fontdump utility can be used to generate header files that can be included straight into the source code so that there are no external dependencies:

Usage: fontdump FONTNAME IMAGEFILE GLYPHWIDTH GLYPHHEIGHT GLYPHS

Example:

fontdump font8x8 font8x8.png 8 8 \
  "\x7f !\\"#$$%&\'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?@\
  ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_\`abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~" \
  > font8x8.h

c64lookalike

The c64lookalike programm demonstrates some more advanced usage of the library.

Features

• can create a primitive terminal for text output
• some primitve support for scrolling
• support for fixed-width fonts
• support for loading fonts from file as well as directly from code, a image to .h converter is provided
• small and meant to be included in your source, not meant to be compiled as a real .so/dll library

Webpage/Contact

The latest version is currently available at:

• https://github.com/Grumbel/SDL_tty

Question and suggestion should go to:

Ingo Ruhnke grumbel@gmail.com