The Space (Invaders) - Time Continuum

With Lode Runner and Knight Lore in a holding pattern for very different reasons, as promised I turned my attention back to Space Invaders tonight. It wasn't easy as the temptation is there to start on a new port altogether, but I'm resolved to finishing off the existing ports before starting any more.

[On that note: not-so-good news for Coco fans is that the C port of Lode Runner (Neo Geo plus other platforms) will be next on the list and then finally I intend to return to Donkey Kong on the Neo Geo now that my NeoSD AES should soon be shipped! However I still have at least another two, and possibly more, Coco3 projects in mind that I'm keen to start!]

Nothing terribly exciting to report but tonight I have reverted all my on-the-fly rotation code and gone back to 12th May 2016. Somewhat prophetically, I last backed out these changes on... Friday 13th May 2016! I do, however, need to review some fixes I did subsequently after moving the video RAM base address.

As it stands attract mode runs (with rotated text) and the alien rack is displayed (also rotated) before the game appears to crash with small areas of corruption on the screen. Encouragingly, this is exactly what the SVN log describes!

Attract Mode (crash)

For latecomers: I should note that (behind the display) the Coco3 port is actually completely finished; you can coin up and play a game on a rotated monitor. What I'm in the process of doing now is modifying the code (and sprite data) to display in the correct orientation on the Coco3. Essentially, I'm (simply) rewriting all the rendering routines. It's a bit more complicated than that, but (hopefully) not terribly so.

No doubt it'll take a bit of time to come up to speed with where I was at and in the process I'll probably remind myself of why I opted for the on-the-fly tack... but ultimately this is unquestionably going to run fast enough (with enough headroom to add sampled sound), and the alternate wasn't looking quite so good.