Thanks for the big feedback, especially for the edit! Here is the update. The border is somewhat old fashioned, but the font is intended to be used with "dirty" background (see 2nd picture), so I thought a border would be of use. So, yes... somehow it is a 4x6 pixel font with border. You got me, the "M" and "W" are cheating here, because I did not manage to squeese them in the 4x6 raster. Especially the lower case characters. I have included my squeesing attempts here, but better do not look at them 


font in action (NPA warning) 

I like this one... (whatever it is) And it should twinkle!  (SCNR)

If someone could make it loop and repost it, I would be indebted to you. I need a new .gif animator.

Be my guest 

Quote from: AdamAtomic on February 28, 2008, 06:30:24 am

1 - Use this special bit that could signal when you'd finished one particular raster line...this is how games like castlevania kept the HUD in one place while the level scrolled.  Basically, the first X lines can scroll at one rate, and the rest can scroll at another.
2 - Keep the background relatively blank, set sprite priority to be behind the level.  Then you can have sprite clouds zip by at varying speeds.  However, you can not have any real background tiles, just the main background color, otherwise your main character will be drawn behind the tiles as well!
3 - Build the level out of sprites, and scroll the entire background plane.  However, the sprite limits (8 sprites per raster line before flickering kicks in) are such that this is only applicable in VERY special cases...

just curious, how did metal storm pull it off:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GED_RatIpwU

I have never done any NES coding, but the scrolling of NES metal storm looks like an old C64 trick which should work on NES too:

4 - You use a block of background-tiles - e.g. 4x4 tiles (total of 16) and rotate the content of the tiles themself (the pixel-bits) anytime they should scroll. Then you can put this 4x4-tileblock everywhere you want to have the parallax-effect. It does only work for small repeating areas as this eats up very much background tiles that cannot be used for other stuff.