A last word on explosions.

I've finished the RE of the exploding ship routines, both in the original and Norbert's emulator.

Norbert patches the explosion routine to call his routine to render a piece - using intermediate results from the caller - and then jumps back to the original routine. There's a decent amount of code that doesn't have to be executed on the emulator, but the game at that point doesn't need to be fast.

By necessity, Norbert grabs the player ship location and derives the explosion offsets from it again (since the vector commands are all relative to the ship position). He also maintains his own table of piece locations rather than use the original table, presumably because he requires less resolution.

In short, there's a non-trivial amount of code involved, even in Norbert's emulator. Since all the pieces follow a fixed trajectory it would be possible to replace all the calculations with simple look-up tables for either piece positions, or even simply a bitmap for each frame. At this point I'm undecided on how I'll approach it, but likely simply port Norbert's code.

Thus far I've ported the arcade explosion code up until the point where Norbert hooks it to render a piece. And in theory, that's all the original code that is required; the remainder is concerned only with moving the beam back to the ship position ready to render the next piece.

To re-iterate, the only outstanding bits of code on the Coco are: rendering the thrust pixel, rendering the ship explosion pieces, and the sound. Aside from those, the graphics display needs tweaking (pixel offsets adjusted) and the flicker is to be eliminated.

I'm undecided in which order I'll tackle the above-mentioned tasks. The ship explosion is tedious, the thrust isn't too bad since I've done it on the Apple IIGS already, and the sound will definitely be the last thing I do - so fixing the display on the Coco3 is looking tempting.

UPDATE: thrust rendering is done

This also means that the RE of the original is more-or-less complete, and fully-documented. I'll probably hold off releasing that until the 6809 version is fully ported and debugged, just in case...