2P or not 2P, that is the question.

 Today was mostly working through all the game lifecycle mechanics and adding some support for scoring during the game.

In previous transcodes I've just used (long) binary values for scores etc. In Scramble however, at some point early on I chose to preserve the use of BCD, and although I can't recall the exact reason I do remember thinking it was the right choice at the time. I'm regretting it a bit now, because the code for adding to your score is a bit messy in C, and the high score table code was just tedious.

You can now play through a game and get back to attract mode and start another - if you have sufficient credits of course.

1P gameplay mechanics seems to be complete

With no firing/bombing implemented it's difficult to get too far through the game, even with infinite fuel. On the 1st stage it's fairly easy to dodge the rockets, but the UFOs on the 2nd stage are another matter. A simple algorithm but effective.

High score table update is coded but not tested. Interestingly, the way I read it is if your score equals that of any previous entry in the high score table, the game will not insert your new score. That's a bit weird and it's going to be tough to confirm on MAME because playing the game you get 10 pts every second or so just for staying alive.

Although it's boring I'll probably work through the 2P mechanics just to get it ticked off. Given the architecture of the code though, that'll be an effort not considerably less than the 1P mechanics.

I'm wishing now that I had preserved all the ASM code in the completed C functions. It's kind of cool seeing the original code and makes it easier to debug; just blows out the file size considerably.

Given the relative ease of this transcode, and the fact that Galaxian uses the same hardware, I'm pretty keen to start on that as soon as Scramble is finished and ported to at least one if not a few other platforms. I'm a little concerned that older C compilers may not like my anonymous structures and unions, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. With Galaxian though, I'll preserve the original ASM code in the C source and see how that works out for me.