Character Bitmap Graphics on the PET 2001
I n 2022, Genesis Project (that is: Elder0010 and LRNZ) released a very impressive demo for the Commodore PET 2001 (the original machine and the upgraded PET 2001-N), “A Bright Shining Star”. Among a few other experiments, it showed high-res graphics (in animation) and static bitmap graphics in a vertical strip spanning over 10 characters or 80 pixels.
As readers of this blog may be aware of already, this is particularly impressive, because the graphics of the PET 2001 are strictly character-based, rendering hard-coded character shapes from ROM, and, most importantly, there is no bitmap plane, nor anything resembling sprites.
Genesis Project dubbed this display mode “PECBM Graphics” for “PET Extended Char BitMap”. Here is how Elder0010 described it in the accompanying note:
This demo is loaded between $02c0/$55e9. Each scene is crunched using Exomizer and gets decompressed in the remaining 16KB of ram.
