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| Level 1 on the Coco3 |
I must admit that this exercise is a real eye-opener for me; a die-hard Z80 fan for 35 years! I'm starting to really appreciate the 6809, in particular the indexed addressing modes and the instructions that support them. A few table-lookups that are down-right painful in Z80 require just a few lines of 6809... I'm afraid that I'm starting to prefer it over the Z80. Add the fact that the Coco3 graphics are bit-mapped and interleaved with CPU accesses, and I'm starting to enjoy the Coco3 port a lot more than the TRS-80 Model 4. And to think it was an after-thought!
Now to start on the code to move the player around the screen. I'm fairly certain that the same code is used to move the baddies as well, as I recall that they're essentially the same graphic, but striped to display as different colours to the player. So that should be a reasonable chunk of the game-play mechanics!
Incidentally, that would also bring it up to the point that I had my own version 'complete' on the TRS-80 Model 4 about 25-30 years ago!
The idea of adding a Neo Geo port is still nagging at me, especially since we just received some PCB's for my Neo Geo hardware project (see my other blog)! It's especially attractive because it would be almost a direct line-by-line translation of the 6502 (if I decided to go that way) plus all the rendering logic would be irrelevant! It would take me some time to set up all the tiles, but once that was done the code to bring it up-to-speed with the TRS-80 & Coco3 ports would be almost trivial!
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