The bulk of the rendering (sans exploding ship and thrust) and the erasing has been done. I've also managed to pilfer the joystick read routine from Lode Runner and as a result the game is actually playable, albeit slightly slower than the arcade original at this point.
I've still got some optimisations up my sleeve, from simple changes to the display list entry format through to stack-blasting hand-compiled sprites, so I'm still holding out hope that I can get it running fast enough to require being throttled by a IIGS interrupt. And I still haven't worked out the whole video shadowing mechanism; a bug in my code meant that I was never shadowing the SHR screen in the first place - and now when I turn it on, it can't read the keyboard... so there's that to play with as well.
I guess if all else fails I can revert to the legacy hires screen which is a lot less data to move.
From the video it's obvious I've got some graphics tweaks to do, including bit-shifting plus offsets from CUR for each object. There's flickering of course, and the odd glitch and then the minor matter of a complete crash at the end of the game.
As an aside, I got stuck on the joystick not working in the IIGS emulation under MAME. I could move left/up, but centering the joystick read back as $FF, so I couldn't move right/down. That forced my hand in trying to get the disk booting in GSPort, and I eventually realised the floppy disk image should be in slot 5, not slot 7. However GSPort had the same issue...
Then it finally twigged; the routine was written for a 1MHz machine and was running on a 2.8MHz machine. The counter was overflowing before even the centre position was detected! After slowing down the CPU it all started working!
So - finish off the graphics, tweak the display positions, optimise the erase/rendering, fix the Game Over bug. Then add sound, title screen, and release! I've got - realistically - only one more night to work on it before its debut.
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