Text printing using bitmap characters in C++ and SDL

Back in the mists of history, sometime around the 90s it was quite common for games and demos to display text on the screen. Since we’re talking about old computers with barely any usable RAM, the text was stored as images. A giant single image with every character placed within it. To display words programmers had to be a bit inventive. That’s the topic of today’s post. Back in ye olde times, parts of the image were copied to the screen in a way similar to the newspaper ransom notes you used to get in bad TV shows.

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