5 lines of code to fix 3 issues!

With the wife wanting some company in the lounge room tonight while she did some crochet, I turned on the TV for some background noise (Jupiter Ascending - what an absolute FX overload) and fired up the laptop to get some of the easier of the remaining tasks out of the way.

To this end I defined the bitmaps for two extra characters, period and underscore, and updated the arcade code to print those rather than render them with discrete vector commands. The period is used in the high score list display, and the underscore during high score entry. Straightforward.

Next was the 'rubbish' that is left on the screen after coining-up and starting a game. I thought I'd found the culprit and fixed it. Although the subsequent game appeared to be remedied, in later games it reappeared. Back to the drawing board on that one.

Finally, despite the dipswitches being hard-coded for 3 ships/game, the 2nd and subsequent games all start with 4 ships. Found that one rather quickly; the code does an LSR on the (read-only) hardware location, branching on a Carry condition. Unfortunately not so benign when that hardware location is emulated in RAM... loading into A and then shifting was a simple fix.

Somewhat interestingly, the game appeared to run faster on my laptop. Not sure if that was my imagination, a different version of MAME, different OS, or something else. Makes me even more interested in seeing it run on a real IIGS...

Aside from the above-mentioned rubbish, that only leaves the exploding ship and proper (accurate) alignment of the sprites before I tackle proper game speed throttling, flicker and sound. I might tackle alignment next, because that has the most detrimental effect on game play atm.

Oh and another thing I've forgotten about; 2-player mode. Trivial, but another task on the list.