Friday 20 May 2016

Still in the red... but much improved

Thanks to jmk, the rotation code is much improved - almost twice as fast in fact! So with some renewed enthusiasm, I added the routine to draw the shields and the game display is complete - except for the scores which I need to relocate to the side of the screen.

The red colour indicates time spent in the VBLANK ISR

Still not a lot of headroom for the VBLANK ISR code which, as you can see above, now encroaches on half the frame, where the mid-screen ISR is scheduled to run. Ordinarily that would show as blue but in the above screen shot, it's happening in the black area above the shields.

There are still some graphical glitches to iron out - my dirty rectangle code needs some tweaking - but the game is certainly playable and it's a reasonably accurate representation of the actual Space Invaders display.

I was originally intending on widening the Coco display from 256 to 320 pixels, but that would actually complicate the calculations for the rotated screen address; right now it's a simple byte-swap and an 8-bit and+neg+add sequence. I'll have to evaluate the implications.

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