Flippin' Hell

Another couple of short sessions - reverse-engineering the sprite rendering code.

Something I haven't seen before; read on! Sprites can be flipped horizontally and/or vertically on the screen. There's a single copy of the sprite data in memory due to memory size restrictions. Rather than flip during rendering, the sprite data is actually flipped - if required - in-place and then rendered, with each sprite data block keeping track of the current flip state. Clever, if sprites aren't flipped alternatively on the same screen (at least not very often).

Sprites must also be rendered at any bit offset and this is done at display time however - via self-modifying code. Not exactly uncommon for this type of operation though.

Generally with the low-level routines such as rendering there's no sense at all attempting to replicate the existing code since the underlying hardware can be quite different and often I'll convert the graphics data to a more suitable format. It also makes sense to optimise these routines for the CPU and hardware of the target platform. You'll find, for example, the Coco code for rendering graphics in Lode Runner bares absolutely no resemblance to the original Apple II code, and nor should it. The same will be true for the Coco code for sprite rendering in this port.

So with this in mind, I'm already thinking about optimisations that can be done on a machine with considerably more RAM. Like pre-flipping all the sprites and just choosing the appropriate memory bank to render to the screen. Perhaps even pre-rendering the bit offset sprites as well, especially if/when using 4-colour mode which will require only 2 offsets rather than 8!

As I delve into the code more, I'm feeling a little better about the port. Since so much of the game is concerned with rendering graphics, there may be less code that warrants line-by-line translation.

I'll probably spend the next few sessions doing more reverse-engineering until I fully understand all the rendering of sprites, complex objects and screens.