Tonight I decided to end the procrastination and crack open my Retro Ports again. The goal tonight was to fix the monochrome rendering of the GAME OVER animation in the Coco 3 port of Lode Runner. This is in preparation for delivery of a handful of Coco cartridge cases I'm expecting in the next few weeks. Not that I've designed the PCB yet...
It's amazing how much you forget when you haven't touched a project for a long time. I thought I had the bulk of it documented/scripted but there's a lot of detail you don't realise that you have in your head after working intensely on a project for months at a time.
In the end I managed to produce - and test - a monochrome rendering but I still need to reorganise the graphics mapping to accommodate both monochrome and colour variations. That's for another night...
Next I'd like to return to the C version - in particular the Neo Geo port - and fix the AI. I can't quite recall what else was lacking in the C version, but from memory it was very, very close (aside from sound). Once the AI is fixed I should be in a position to release a demo NGCD image.
All this has been driven by my urge to progress on the Neo Geo flash cartridge. I've been hanging out in the #neogeodev IRC channel again, and there's some talk of development and porting and it got me enthusiastic again. I got so far with Lode Runner it would be a shame not to finish it off properly. And once the generic C core is complete, porting to other platforms - like the Amiga and Sega Genesis - should be relatively straightforward.
Then of course there's Donkey Kong (Neo Geo) which to-date is, IMHO, still my most impressive effort. I'm determined to finish that off as well - I've put a lot of hours into that but it's languishing at 50% complete so there's still a bit of work to do.
So much to do, so little time...
