Locaton, location, location!

Tonight I completely re-arranged the memory map, compressing all the areas together at the bottom of memory, and also finally did away with the DVG ROM at the same time. The 6502 arcade ROM now resides at $2000 (as opposed to $6800) and together with the IIGS code extensions - including the compiled sprites - now extends to "just" $7055. Plenty of space to finish off the rendering routines now.

I forgot that the English (only) messages are actually stored in the DVG ROM, so when I eliminated the last stray write to sound hardware and got the game running, all was well except for the messages, which were rubbish. It finally tweaked and I copied the English message tables into my core asteroids code module (together with the sine table) and it's all working as before.

High Score entry

And all this is now irrefutable proof that my Asteroids "source" code is fully relocatable, including all the ROM, RAM and hardware I/O location references! And now simply changing one assembler directive, for example, I could move it above the Apple II hires screen memory pages if I ever attempt a IIC+ version.

On another note altogether, someone asked me the other day whether I've had to decrease the frame rate. Thus far, the answer is 'no', and I'm hoping that won't change. It did remind me, however, that Norbert's emulator only renders every third frame! That could probably be improved somewhat now with my core, which eliminates all unnecessary display list calculations and operations.

And so onwards with the rendering and optimisations...