A few more fixes and it's looking good... but not perfect.

Another brief update; I seem to only get to work on it in snippets atm...

I've fixed the ship explosion offset (same as ship offset). I also fixed a long-standing bug in the erase routine for the extra life indicators.

It's looking pretty spot-on now as far as object placement goes, although occasionally a shot appears to pass right through an object. I've played a bit of Norbert's Atari emulator, and it doesn't appear to have this issue. So either there's a subtle bug in the 6809 core code, or there are some more offsets that I haven't noticed yet. Tonight I went through the rendering routines in Norbert's code again, and I don't see any more offsets applied.

From here I'll likely render the 1st frame in attract mode and compare all the plot positions for each object on Atari/Coco3. If they match (they're all large asteroids of course) I'll let it run for a fixed number of frames until a few get split and try again. Fortunately the attract mode is completely deterministic from a cold start.

After closer scrutinisation of Norbert's emulator, a few warts become more apparent.

Norbert has the same bug as I had; the first game from a cold start has 3 lives, and subsequent games start with 4. That's because the original code right-shifts a hardware I/O location mapped to a dipswitch, and checks for carry. Under emulation, that's simply a RAM location so although it's seeded with the correct dipswitch value (bit0=1) at initialisation, it's shifted out after the first game starts. I fixed this in the code (also on the Apple version), since unlike Norbert, I have the luxury of assembling the core.

The Atari version is also only rendered every 3rd frame, because the CPU is simply too slow to render every frame and have the game run at full speed (which I must admit, I still don't have a value for). At least, Norbert's code isn't anywhere near as optimised as it could be (an observation, not a criticism). That's fine for a busy screen, but when you're down to only a few small asteroids, the game is obviously too fast. There's no periodic interrupt throttling the game speed.

With any luck, I'm not too far off being in a position to start the Coco3 optimisations...