I've forgotten more than I know...

The perils of leaving a project for months - or even years - is that it takes some time to come back up to speed, and even then for a while you're subsequently discovering plenty of details that you've completely forgotten - most of which, unfortunately, result in head-scratching bugs.

A case in point is the joystick support for Lode Runner, which would have been trivial had I implemented it back when I first released it. Now, however, it has taken two sessions and I still don't have it working correctly.

I've spent the last hour or more trying to make sense of the crash I introduced when adding the joystick read routines. For at least 20 minutes nothing at all was making sense; the disassembly in MESS wasn't matching the 6809 assembler listing. Finally I figured out that I was specifying the wrong file as a cartridge image. What made it more elusive was the fact that it actually displayed the (corrupt) splash screen...

That stupid mistake finally sorted, it wasn't getting much easier as the code still crashed, albeit in a different manner. Cutting out code line-by-line I finally got it running again, and then narrowed it down to a single call to the joystick read routine. I couldn't see anything wrong there... but then noticed the length of the ROM image in the makefile output was suspiciously pushed over a 256-byte boundary when crashing. Further analysis revealed that the code was now too long and as a result I was overwriting high memory. Easily fixed by removing the 10th level from the image.

Unfortunately after all this I don't have the time or the energy to muck about with getting analogue joystick emulation to work in MESS and finalise the joystick support. I am however, reasonably confident it'll only take one more session.

I'm now leaning towards releasing both Lode Runner and Knight Lore for free as disk images. The latter could also be programmed into an EPROM or FLASH cartridge as it doesn't require any special banking support or otherwise... I simply don't have the time to dedicate to getting the cartridge productions under way.