Well here we are 18 months on from my last "I'm going to get back into it" post with another optimistic post not worth the electrons it was transmitted with.
This time I make no claims but will report that tonight, for the first time since the abovementioned post, I have actually cracked open one of my unfinished projects.
Of course it took me about 2 hrs to locate the latest source and put together a working development environment that allowed me to simply build the project. At least I took steps to document the process; a lesson I learned in projects subsequent to me starting this one a few years back.
I also got time tonight to take a look at where I was at, refresh my memory on how things work, and start to progress on finishing it off. One bug squashed, but ultimately little effect on progress.
The project in question is the 6809 port of Space Invaders to the TRS-80 Color Computer 3 (aka CoCo3). I have transcoded the original 8080 code to 6809 and have it fully playable on the CoCo3, albeit rotated (sideways).
I had started rotating the graphics by hand, then abandoned that to attempt to do it programmatically on-the-fly, then ultimately backed all that out and continued with my first plan. But I got to the point where most of the graphics were at least rotated, if not displaying in exactly the right location, but the game was crashing after drawing all the aliens. And this is where I picked it up tonight.
As I mentioned, I did find one bug which was sending it off into la-la land but unfortunately fixing it didn't improve the situation to any discernable degree. Another hour or two of debugging and I can see what is going wrong, but not why at this point.
I'll update if/when I make any significant progress.
As an aside, in the last 18 months my transcode (port) of Knight Lore to the CoCo3 has seen a physical release on both floppy disk and cartridge by Neil Blanchard of the CoCo Crew Podcast fame. They look pretty snazzy and I'd post a photo of them here but I can't locate one atm.
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