The Universe conspires!

I've ported the remaining high score routines, which leaves just two 'core' routines remaining - those concerned with the explosion of the player ship. The high score routines are almost functional; they just need a bit of debugging but don't adversely affect anything else.

So back to the mysterious end of game issue. After the addition of the high score entry routines, the nature of the issue has changed. In retrospect, the original problem was likely the very lack of the high score routines - particularly the routine that checks for a new high score - since it does change some of the state information.

The issue then manifested itself as the high score entry screen appearing briefly, then a new game starting immediately. After an hour or so of static code review and then moving on to debugging in MAME, I'd stumbled upon something that in itself didn't appear to cause the issue, but still wasn't right - a seemingly arbitrary value in the current number of credits.

However, setting a watchpoint in MAME and running not only refused to reproduce the problem, but the game started behaving correctly on the high score entry screen! Running again without the watchpoint, and it would fail. Run it again with - all OK. Inexplicable.

And then, I finally caught it. Not part of the 'core' code, but in the Coco-specific portion, I poll the keyboard every frame and increment, amongst other things, coin counters when appropriate. FTR the arcade code does this in an NMI, but for now I'm doing it once per frame. Anyway, turns out I wasn't detecting depress properly and holding down the <5> key adds multiple credits. And whilst running the debugger and watchpoint, it's slow enough to detect just one coin if you press <5> quickly.

But the universe wasn't done with me yet. In the same portion of code, I also handle the start button. In this case I was polling the keyboard correctly, but never clearing the state of the button, so once pressed, it remained in that state permanently.

And finally, to muddy the waters even further, it turns out that pressing the start button with credits in the machine will actually abort the high score entry screen altogether and start a new game!

Here I was thinking that somewhere in the core code it was exiting the high score entry state erroneously, when in fact a combination of multiple credits and a 'stuck' start button - all in my code - were to blame! At least I finally found it...

Next, debugging high score entry (which shouldn't take long) and then the exploding player ship.