The SNES has no built-in text rendering. Text is displayed the same way as any other graphics: font characters are stored as tiles in VRAM, and a tilemap references those tiles to spell out words on screen.

These examples teach the tile/tilemap fundamentals that underpin all SNES graphics.

Examples

A ladder of developer questions: how do I show text? → how do I move it?

Example	Rung	Description
print_string	1.1	Print a string with the built-in font (textModeInit + textPrintAt)
scroll_message	1.4	Move text – scroll the text BG layer for a marquee (bgSetScroll)

Under the hood — how a glyph is raw 2bpp bitplanes + a tilemap — lives in fundamentals/text_glyphs.

Key Concepts

How Text Works on SNES

Font Image (PNG) --> gfx4snes/font2snes --> Tile Data (VRAM)
                                        --> Tilemap (VRAM)
                                                |
                                        PPU renders screen

Each character is an 8x8 pixel tile. A font is a collection of tiles covering the ASCII range. The tilemap is a grid of tile numbers that defines which character appears at each screen position.

2BPP Tile Format

"2bpp" means 2 bits per pixel = 4 possible colors (indices 0-3). Each 8x8 tile is 16 bytes: 8 bytes for bitplane 0, 8 bytes for bitplane 1.

VRAM Layout for Text

$0000-$0FFF: Tile data (font graphics)

$1000-$17FF: BG1 tilemap (32x32 = 2KB)

Mode 0 Palette

In Mode 0, each background layer gets 4 colors:

BG1: Colors 0-3
BG2: Colors 4-7
BG3: Colors 8-11
BG4: Colors 12-15

Start with print_string to get your first ROM running, then scroll_message to make it move. To see what the text module hides, read fundamentals/text_glyphs.

Print a string Scroll a message