Changing tack

I've been overwhelmed with work the last few days - and still am - but whilst watching Quartus do its thing (it's about as exciting as watching paint dry) and pondering Space Invaders, I'm seriously considering changing tack altogether.

To some extent, the original game was optimised for the rotated display; the player, the invaders and the saucer all move left/right and thus don't require the shifted rendering routine. Even worse, the shields are each offset 45 pixels from the one to the left, which means they too will require shifting.

Way back in 2003 (gosh!) I worked on what I called the Space Invaders TRS-80 'Bootleg' Project, in which I patched the arcade ROMs to run on the TRS-80 Model 4 with the aftermarket uLabs Grafyx Solution high resolution graphics board. It was only partly successful for reasons you can read about on the link if you're interested.

The strategy I took in that project was to retain all of the original rendering, but rather than render to video memory, it was rendered to an off-sceen buffer. The patches then modified each rendering routine to update the Grafyx Solution video memory, rotating each 'dirty rectangle' on-the-fly. It was much, much simpler to implement and, with a 4MHz Z80, there was enough head room for the rotation calculations. It's a pity the Grafyx Solution video bandwidth was the show-stopper.

I think it's worth at least giving it a go on the Coco3. Once the playfield has been drawn at the start of each player's turn, there's really very little rendering per frame. I'm pretty sure the 1.79MHz 6809 is up to the task, especially given the results of the profiling I did recently.

Time to dig out that Z80 code from 2003...

UPDATE: During lunch today I've just backed out the rotation changes and in preparation for the new scheme, moved the Space Invaders video memory (buffer) from $0000 to $2000. I had to fix a couple of latent bugs that weren't apparent when the video memory was based at $0000.

I've also had an idea; now that I'm re-rendering from the original video RAM to the Coco3 display, it should be relatively simple to change to 2BPP and add colour at the same time - effectively killing two birds with one stone!