A major milestone - on Xmas Eve no less!

I have finally reached a major milestone in the project; with the debugging of the high score entry screen, the transcoding from Z80 to 68K is essentially complete! 😀

High Score entry screen complete to round out the transcode!

I do know of a couple of minor bugs in the transcode, and lack of proper support for flipping of 2x2-tile sprites, but I've been focusing on getting the remainder of the code RE'd and converted to 68K.

Next task is to go back through the listing for both side-by-side, add or clarify any missing annotations, fix typos in labels etc, and identify and document any unused code. I also need to tidy up the memory variable area(s) and ensure they're initialised (to zero) in the right places. It's a bit of a dog's breakfast in the original code as there are so many different areas of shared RAM.

Then it'll be onto Neo Geo optimisation and getting it running at 100% on real hardware, with little or no disappearing (Neo Geo) sprites (due to scanline limit). Somewhat fortuitously, visible display masks and the foreground tile layer are the first to disappear, so at least the 'sprites' won't be affected. But of course ideally there will be no disappearing (Neo Geo) sprites at all!

I'm also working with another developer to get this running on the Amiga! Once the ball starts rolling I'm hoping there won't be a huge amount of effort required; it's basically 'just' replacing the Neo Geo-specific code with Amiga-specific code! Having said that, there's currently about 1,000 lines of Neo Geo-specific code... though in contrast about 7,000 lines of Xevious core code.

Due to circumstances beyond my control, I've had a little more time on holidays to work on Xevious, though - again - that may not be the case (hopefully) for the remainder of the holidays. Either way, I might take a bit of a break after finishing the transcode before I dive back into it.