VPEEK(&H1800+X+Y*32) will return the character code at the specified position.
In MSX, the characters have color attributes and the position doesn't have color attributes. The color attributes of the characters are located at &H2000 of VRAM.
@jonesypeter it’s difficult to compare - zx-spectrum (from 16k/48k to +2) has no text display mode (text characters are usually drawn in 8 bytes in a kind of sequence) - and text on msx-basic is mostly written in text mode (and print#1 on screen2 is a totally different thing)
on the screen1, and screen2 poked as 1 (screen2 "cheated" to work as text mode), you have attributes associated to characters, not display area in a specific location - screen1 uses 1 attribute for each 8 characters (like from '@' to 'G'), and screen2 poked as 1 you have 1 attribute for each line of each character
if you want to somehow simulate zx-spectrum display on msx (like you might seen from some classic european zx-spectrum games for msx), using the whole screen2 as bitmap "graphic" area, you might want to create your own assembly/cm routines for that (i actually tried to make some experiences on Boriel’s ZX-Basic Compiler somewhere, i guess)
and see that screen$ is a kind of "guess" (a kind of boolean comparison with the bitmap written in rom?) of what character is written in a specific position (0x4000..0x57FF), it’s not exactly a peek or vpeek alone (i don’t know what zx-spectrum basic does for that exactly) - and attr is a peek from somewhere between 0x5800..0x5AFF
