Wednesday, 4 October 2017

Mostly Playable.

Quick update on the Coco3 port of Asteroids tonight.

Have managed a few sessions over the last few days...
  • Fixed score display
  • Fixed end-of-wave detection
  • Added shots (player & saucer) and fixed shot direction
  • Added shrapnel (explosion) rendering
  • Added end-of-game detection
  • Added hyperspace

The game is all-but-playable now. Although it detects and displays Game Over, it still continues the game and subsequently dying results in a crash as it tries to display (presumably) 255 remaining lives.

Going purely on generated code size, it's roughly 67% complete now. I'm yet to do a formal audit, but I can't actually think of a lot that is yet to be ported, aside from the high score handling and player ship explosions, plus snippets of sound code. There's certainly some AVG display list management code that will not need to be ported for the Coco3 version, plus the non-English message tables that I'm not going to support, so it could well be closer to 80% or even 85% complete in reality.

Once the 'core' code has been ported, the next task is optimising the rendering for the Coco3. That means adding compiled sprites and page-flipping for starters. Nothing too complex in there, and I've already been through the exercise for the (unfinished) Apple IIGS port.

Here is where I hope the slightly higher clock speed and 1BPP graphics mode will give it the edge over the IIGS SHR mode graphics, which still crawled despite my best efforts.

Time will tell...

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