Score, Men, Level

With the tiles converted and message display routine implemented, the usual supporting routines for displaying various formats of integers was next. These were quite straightforward and offered little resistance to my reverse-engineering efforts. I worked my way through the 'Game Status' display quite quickly:

The 'Game Status' display on the TRS-80 Model 4 (Z80)

This exercise has, not surprisingly, revealed the memory locations for the score, number of men and level, which will come handy for later reverse-engineering exercises. Also, the display score routine actually adds a (4-digit) parameter value to the score before displaying, so that's one less routine that remains.

I now need to go back and optimise the character/tile data lookup; taking a leaf out of the Apple II version I'll need to create a couple of sets of look-up tables which will, unfortunately, add a few hundred more bytes to the tile data, but on average speed it up immensely.

The Z80 port currently supports both single-pixel and pixel-doubled display, with a simple .define. Because I'm pixel-doubling on-the-fly it is quite a bit slower than it could be. No doubt I'll ultimately need to optimise it to account for the limited graphics bandwidth on the uLabs Grafyx Solution board, but for now I prefer the flexibility that it offers. It provides a benchmark for performance, also serves as a template for the 6809 code, mitigates the need to support different tile data formats for now, and may even come in useful on another Z80 port one day!?! Regardless, all indications are that there are only a handful of routines that write to the display, so it's not a lot of code to optimise.

Once tile-lookup optimisation is done, I'll bring the 6809 version up-to-date and then go hunting for the level display routine(s). In the process I'll no doubt find the famous circular screen wipe, though I don't plan on implementing that until right at the end of the entire porting exercise.