Thursday 24 March 2016

A (messy) splash of colour

A quick post on lunchtime progress, which I may update later tonight.

Fixed the bug I mentioned in the last post, which turned out not to be related to the new sprite update handler, but actually a latent bug in an existing one.

This means that there are no KNOWN bugs. I won't even pretend that are aren't any bugs at all, since the cauldron screen and game complete special effects have not been tested at all. This will of course require more extensive game testing. It's a rough job but someone has to do it!

I also dabbled with getting the correct colours on the menu screen, using well known trickery (no prizes for guessing what's going on) in 2-colour mode.

Better, or worse than monochrome?

Not sure that I like it at all. It also takes a pretty heavy toll on the CPU, so can only be run when text screens are displayed. Having said that, I still need to work out how I'm going to flash the menu items that are selected, such as keyboard/joystick and directional controls.

It's time to get it running as a cartridge image.

UPDATE: Knight Lore is now running as a cartridge image. I've improved a little on the arrangement I had for Lode Runner; the cartridge image is now converted directly to a DECB .BIN that loads itself into the correct memory pages. A small boot binary displays a splash screen, sets up the MMU and jumps into the game. As a result, there's only a single version - the cartridge version - that is subsequently massaged to run from disk.

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