To SNES or not to SNES?

No opportunity for any development today but time to ponder random aspects of the project. I was also prompted by gp2000 to look a little further into specific aspects of the code, and discovered something that should have been obvious from the start, but escaped me until today - so thanks George for that inadvertent trigger!

I did tweak some of the coordinate transformation and video address calculations today, converting my 6502 code into 65816 and improving the resolution of some of the calculations. Always good to see a half-page of 8-bit code reduce to a few lines of 16-bit code!

And in the comments of a previous post I pondered the feasibility of porting this to the TRS-80 Model 4. Aside from the effort of porting to yet another CPU (Z80) there's also the fact that the hires board is all-but-crippled by not only port-mapping the hires video memory, but also restricting access to (vertical?) blanking periods. George suggested a hybrid mode mixing the text and hires graphics screens... very interesting but a lot of work none-the-less. I'll put this in the 'maybe' basket.

And on the subject of alternate ports, the SNES sprung to mind! I know little about the technical specifications except for the fact that it is powered by a 65816 (clone). A quick Google reveals it supports 256x224 resolution, allows 128 sprites (up to 32/line) and has the usual tilemap(s).

I'm thinking this would be a no-brainer; text would appear on the tilemap layer, with 27 asteroids, player ship, saucer and 6 shots making up a maximum of 35 sprites on-screen. Extremely unlikely that they'd all appear on the same scan line, but if I was really pedantic about it I could implement a software priority scheme. But with all the arcade 6502 code running, plus the bulk of the IIGS 65816 code available, it wouldn't be a lot of work at all. I'm going to put this in the 'almost certainly' basket, and I might be tempted to tackle it immediately after the IIGS port is done.

EDIT: Doh! It's already been ported to the SNES by Digital Eclipse!

[Makes me wonder if I should be porting that version to IIGS!?!]

That's about it for random musings. A parting fact: whilst the vector display coordinates range from 0-1023, the game's virtual playfield coordinates actually range from 0-8191. Somehow that escaped me... now consider it's all scaled down to 256x192... or in the case of the TRS-80 text mode graphics, 128x48 (128x72 if I get really tricky).