Bacura; the bane of my existance!

I've tweaked the sound to use APCM-A only and it's all there and working. The only downside is that the rumbling sound of the Andor Genesis neccessitates muting the Solvalou tune since there is only one background channel. Good enough for a beta release...

However jotd gave me a good idea - use CDDA tracks for some of the sounds. Makes perfect sense since the NGCD removed the single-channel ADPCM-B and added CDDA playback - doh! So I should be able to move the background tunes back to ADPCM-B on the cart and CDDA on the NGCD. The nice thing is that NGFX SoundBuilder will make a lot of it transparent - from memory I'll just need to handle mute/unmute and stop loop differently between the two systems. But that's for a later date.

Right now I'm looking for the gameplay bug involving those !@#$% Bacura - bloody trouble-makers! I do know the Solvalou is destroyed (erroneously) by a Bacura, but at this stage I don't know why, or even if the offending Bacura was supposed to be active. Early days yet...

And jotd has reported another possible gameplay bug involving the Zakato. I have had my suspicions that they weren't 100% correct, but they appear so briefly and there's so much happening on the screen it's difficult to tell. But this is the sort of bug I'm happy to leave for the beta testers to discover!

jotd is reporting some good progress with the Amiga port! He has identified and eliminated a major source of flicker in his sprites which should also boost performance a little, so I'm looking forward to seeing that version in action!

UPDATE: Some progress on the bug; in the routine that checks whether the Solvalou has been hit by a Bacura, the value of the Solvalou shadow sprite X register - used only in hit-box calculations - is wrong at the time the bug manifests itself, but seemingly not at other times!

UPDATE: FOUND IT!!! Turns out it had nothing to do with the Bacura, and in fact could have happened with any flying enemy at any time! And the bug wasn't in the core, but in the Neo Geo OSD layer where it was updating the shadow sprite registers (used only for hit-box calculations). Yet another byte/word issue; the shadow X register calculation involves adding #8 to the object X coordinate, and I was doing addq.b instead of addq.w....

Beta1 release imminent!!!! 😮