Man or beast?

A week since my last post and I'm happy to say that I've made very good progress in that time. So much so, that you can control Sabreman turning, walking and jumping; he looks around randomly and at midnight he transforms into Sabre Wulf.

I was hoping to be able to post a short video of  Sabreman walking around, and perhaps other objects moving as well, but trying to find any sort of free video screen/window recording software without the risk of installing all manner of malware on your machine is simply too great. So until I get a recommendation from a trusted source, a few still frames will have to suffice.

Sabreman looking around

At night time you transform into Sabre Wulf

In fact, the game isn't that far off being playable - the sun and moon move across the frame and the days tick over - and there's not a huge amount of code left to reverse-engineer or port to C. I've gone about as far as I can now without tackling at least one of the two most technical aspects of the program - object interaction - which is little more than 3D collision-detection.

So late last night with only about 30 mins free I decided on a small fun diversion and instead worked on getting a raw dump of the loader screen displayed properly on my port. I'm yet to actually see how the screen is rendered during loading from tape, but I'm thinking of ultimately emulating that on my port, which will be a challenge on the Neo Geo.

Displayed from a raw dump of Spectrum video and attribute memory

The object interaction is required to move from screen to screen, where the object handler routine for the arches plays a key role. Once the generic interaction routine is done, the other objects shouldn't pass through one-another and aside from aesthetics, the game should be all-but-done. I'm even feeling less daunted by the Z-order rendering algorithm now.

Definitely getting to the business end of the whole process now!

ADDENDUM: I should add that the bug I thought I'd found was not, in fact, a bug.