Unmasked

I've worked my way through all the rooms now, adding the sprite adjustment routines for each of the foreground and background objects and implementing within each the logic that is strictly concerned with the sprite adjustment. As a result, the initial state of all rooms are now rendered 'correctly'; at least as far as pixel placement is concerned. What remains are a handful of adjustment routines for the player and the special objects that need to be collected and placed in the cauldron.

I suspect the 'sprite adjustment' routines are actually responsible for handling all the object interactions, so when I confirm that I'll update my nomenclature accordingly.

In the mean time, once I have finished the remaining sprite adjustments I'll implement the sprite masking, which I've thus far ignored. That will produce more pleasing results but the sprite priority (Z order) is still yet to be done.

No sprite masking as yet

You can see in the rendering above that the gargoyles sitting on the blocks are 'lost' in the blocks and the bricks on the walls, as is the arch on the western (front, right) wall. They're actually rendered last in the scene, but without the masking, which produces a black outline, they blend into the objects behind them.

From there I face another choice on how to proceed, but I'll discuss that next post.

I've also been thinking about potential target platforms for a port. The C code will allow me to port to the Amiga at least (I should also take the opportunity to do an Atari ST port while I'm at it), and the Neo Geo (hopefully) with some effort. The Sega Genesis will be more difficult than I first thought, and perhaps not even viable, as it will require use of the rather bandwidth-limited pseudo-bitmap graphics mode. I'll produce a PC port of course but I doubt anyone will be interested enough to look at it. Maybe a mobile platform will be a possibility?

As for assembler ports, the Coco3 was always the original target. But I've also been considering the TRS-80 (Grafyx Solution) - the results won't be stellar without double-buffering but perhaps still impressive enough to warrant a play through? Any other Z80-based bitmapped systems I've neglected?