Home › Evil Mad Scientist Forums › Electronics › Nokia PCD8544 (5110 LCD display) is a little strange › Re: Nokia PCD8544 (5110 LCD display) is a little strange
Using 8×8-bit blocks for displaying is a method that dates back to at least the mid 80s – it makes writing text easier because you can write consecutive bytes from your character definition into consecutive bytes of “screen memory” to form a character.
I remember that some BBC micro display modes used 8-pixel rows stacked in 8s so that 8 bytes made a character. But then you are limited to 8-pixel wide characters. By using 8-bit columns you make it easy to write fonts 8-pixels high by any arbitrary width. I suppose that for less height you would still have one byte per column in the font definition and just mask off some of the bits when you display it.
I don’t imagine that this will help you at all but I would guess at this as the reason.