A shadow of a doubt!?!

I've added the last of the compiled sprites - the only outstanding graphics now are the ship's thrust and the exploding ship. The former I will probably tackle next.

Aside from fixing the saucer rendering, I've been cleaning up - and in the process optimising - the rendering and erase dispatch routines. Originally they were switching back and forth between 8- and 16-bit mode; all the rendering and erase routines themselves are now pure 16-bit code and the dispatchers are almost there. I also shaved some cycles off the asteroid render/erase dispatchers by streamlining my tokenised 'asteroid' instruction.

The DVG CUR handler does some Apple IIGS video calculations and stores values for use by subsequent render/erase routines. It needs a good overhaul - converting to pure 16-bit, doing away with a few values that aren't needed, and adding another that will enable further optimisation of the render/erase routines. However there's not a huge amount of cycles to be saved per frame.

Incidentally, I was studying some IIGS code online and found the switch to change the border colour, so it's now black and does improve the aesthetics somewhat.

Finally, I activated SHR shadowing and expected to see performance gain. Nada. I'll have to go back and study (again) what that actually does and how it is of benefit (if any) in my case.

As for remaining optimisations, there's not a lot else I can come up with atm. The so-called stack-blasting technique isn't really suited to this situation, nor is moving DP to the video memory. They're generally more suited to larger objects and opaque layers. I'd say it's not going to get significantly faster than what it is now, unless shadowing changes something.

One last task I forgot about; there appears to be a requirement for an adjustment factor for the objects rendered as bitmaps. This is due no doubt to the difference between the vector objects having arbitrary 'origins' (defined as the starting point of the beam) versus the origin of a bitmap always being one corner of the bounding rectangle. With luck I can deduce the required values from Norbert's code.

Edging closer to something suitable for an alpha release just to give people a taste of the game...