HiResTTX

  The new typeface is designed on a 16x20 grid (previously we had used 8x10),
  so it uses a screen resolution of 640x500 pixels (rather than 320x250).
  Since we have been unable to source a genuine teletext font, and since
  examination of a BBC Micro suggests that the genuine font may not have been
  a power-of-2 pixels wide, I have designed one specially, based upon the one
  supplied in Zap distributions (a 12x20 font). Rather than increase the
  amount of workspace that the kernel requires for cacheing graphic
  characters, it now generates them on the fly, as they are required; this
  should only add about 25% to their rendering time.
  
  The new VDU 23 sequences are as follows:
  
  VDU 23,18,0,mode,0,0,0,0,0,0
    Switch transparency mode
      mode = 0: "Text" mode: the whole display is set opaque
      mode = 1: "Mix" mode: foreground colours, and both foreground and
        background of boxed text are opaque; non-boxed background colours are
        all transparent
      mode = 2: "Box" mode: boxed regions are opaque, others are transparent
      mode = 3: "TV" mode: the whole display is set transparent
    Default is mode = 0.
  
  VDU 23,18,1,suspend,0,0,0,0,0,0
    Suspend or resume bitmap updates
    This call allows an application to request that the kernel suspends
    updates to the framebuffer bitmap. This allows for a significant speed
    increase in the rendering time for a large amount of text, for example
    when redrawing a complete teletext page, because each time you plot a
    single character, it can cause the whole of the rest of the line to be
    re-rendered. When you switch out of suspend mode, the whole screen is
    refreshed in a single pass. Note that the appearance of the display is
    undefined is you cause a hardware scroll while in suspend mode.
      suspend = 0: screen update is enabled
      suspend = 1: screen update is suspended
    Default is suspend = 0.
  
  VDU 23,18,2,reveal,0,0,0,0,0,0
    Reveal/conceal
      reveal = 0: characters between the Conceal control code and the next
        colour control code are replaced by spaces
      reveal = 1: all characters are displayed
    Default is reveal = 0.
  
  VDU 23,18,3,black_enable,0,0,0,0,0,0
    Enable/disable black foreground colour control codes
      black_enable = 0: control codes &80 and &90 do nothing
      black_enable = 1: control code &80 selects black text, control code
        &90 selects black graphics
    Default is black_enable = 0.
  
  I have performed some timing tests on the rendering of complete teletext
  pages grabbed from the teletext server. These show that the new code
  generally imposes a 2x speed hit. However, when using the VDU 23,18,1
  suspend function, this improves to a 20% speed increase when compared to
  the old low-resolution code. Better still, because the framebuffer is only
  being updated for the final stage of this process, the screen *appears* to
  be updated some 3x faster than with the old code!
  
  A comment on the VDU variable Log2BPC is in order: in previous kernels,
  this was able unambiguously to refer to both the framebuffer width of a
  character in bytes, and the framebuffer width of an "addressable pixel" in
  bits; this no longer works with the 16-pixel wide teletext font. Bearing
  in mind that future kernels may support Unicode system fonts where the
  width varies from character to character, I have chosen to fix Log2BPC to
  the "addressable pixel" definition.