5 bugs and a red herring

Weekends are traditionally harder for me to find time to work on my projects but the lack of updates in recent days has more to do with a lack of progress than a lack of time.

I've finally fixed pickup/drop but not before finding - by last count - no less than 5 bugs in my code. Some related to pickup/drop, and some not - and one that didn't affect game play at all. But there's no doubt this was the hardest issue to debug in the port thus far.

What was more interesting is that the process highlighted the fact that, even after rewriting in C and porting to 3 different platforms, and now a two-thirds complete port in 6809, some of the finer points of the code's operation still escaped me. Indeed, this was the very cause of a major red herring over the weekend, spending a few hours tracking down a 'bug' that wasn't actually a bug at all. The exact cause is - in my opinion at least - interesting enough to warrant its own post and even video - so I'll leave that for later in the working week.

But for now, I'm happy to report that I can finally continue on with the port. There's still a small amount of code to finish off the special objects, then as I reported, that just leaves the cauldron room, end of game, and the remaining sprite update handlers. Not sure at this point the best way to tackle them, though I'll probably look at end of game first since the cauldron room is largely implemented as a sprite update handler.

Hopefully it's all pretty smooth sailing from here-on in.