Half the screen in shadow!?!

Not a lot of progress, or time to work on it.

I did, however, take preliminary steps towards eliminating flicker. The plan is to utilise video shadowing, as described in this article here, by one of the authors of the IIGS port of Wolfenstein 3D.

Currently, I've got shadowing permanently enabled and simply write to bank $01, which is shadowed on-the-fly to the SHR memory in bank $E1. Slow and flickering, but no trickery to implement and of course easier to debug. But now it's time to up my game.

So in preparation, I simply changed my initialisation routine to disable shadowing, rather than enable it. As expected, I now get a blank screen as writes to bank $01 are not copied to the SHR screen at all. So far so good.

Next step is to disable shadowing at the start of every frame render. Since I've never actually enabled it anywhere, I should still get a blank screen - right? However, when I run it, I now see the top half of the screen! And it happens in both MAME and GSPort, so it's not likely to be an emulation bug.

My first thought was Alternate Display Mode, which can be activated from the Control Panel. I can only access it in GSPort, but it's already turned off. Toggling the value regardless doesn't make any difference. And for good measure, I also disabled interrupts.

It has me completely stumped. I've fielded some queries out there but for now, no responses.

With a little more spare time tonight, but no path forward on the IIGS port, I returned to the C port. I fixed the object update and now the asteroids move as expected in attract mode. Next I added some inputs, so you can coin-up and start a game. The next bit will be tricky, rendering the player ship, as that's quite involved.

I don't really have to go through the exercise of emulating the DVG anymore; with my tokenised display list I can simply back-port that to the C version and it'll be sufficient for all platforms that it'll be running on. However I figured there wasn't too much more work to do, and it may help in understanding some nuance at some point (eg. exploding ship), so I'll persist for now.

Hopefully soon I'll learn of my stupid mistake and I can get back to finishing off the IIGS port...