The article you linked states that barred Z is acceptable for uppercase, which is important with as little leading as I have to work with. I'll move the slash on the L down a pixel.
There are other ASCII characters more likely to be unused than Latin letters, such as the backslash. But the same font is also used for game descriptions. So I do plan on expanding it as needed.
But while I'm adding support for UTF-8 titles in the builder, I might as well put in other improvements (Zapper responsiveness and screenshot color depth). Screenshots in particular would require 56 tiles of background space, and I don't have that in the first pattern table of the current VRAM layout. I'm also already using sprite 0 to time Zapper reading.
$0000-$019F Borders (26 tiles)
$01A0-$047F Unused (46 tiles)
$0480-$045F Tab titles (24 tiles)
$0600-$0FFF Text area (160 tiles; 320 with palette hackery)
$1000-$137F Screenshot (56 tiles)
$1380-$139F Tab arrow (2 tiles)
$13A0-$13FF Unused (198 tiles)
So I'd have to move the tab strip to the second pattern table, producing a map more like this:
$0000-$015F Borders excluding top (22 tiles)
$0160-$027F Unused (18 tiles)
$0280-$05FF Screenshot gray plane (56 tiles)
$0600-$0FFF Text area (160 tiles)
$1000-$17FF Top borders (8 tiles)
$1080-$11FF Tab titles (24 tiles)
$1200-$157F Screenshot colored plane (56 tiles)
$1580-$1FFF Unused (168 tiles)
This produces a new burn-down list:
Move controller detection before title screen, relying on Reset press rather than hot pluggingIf Zapper is connected, poll Zapper during 25% of frames even if display is updatingIf Zapper is connected, shooting offscreen should change pagesSplit Zapper polling loop into two: one for top 24 pixels and one for rest of screenRescale returned Zapper coordinates on PAL NESSplit border graphics into two filesMove top border and tab titles to second pattern table- Make a converter for 10-color screenshots
- Display 10-color screenshots
- Extend VWF routine glyph address calculation from 128 to 224 glyphs
Associate codepoints for additional glyphsAdd capital L with stroke, small z with dot, and arrows