Shielding you from the ugly truth

I've rotated the shields and have them rendered on the screen...

Shield locations are only approximate at this point

... but, and it's a pretty big but at this point, not accurately. The locations are only approximate atm, off by progressively a few (more) pixels for each shield left-to-right. But it's a good start.

The shields have quite 'inconvenient' dimensions and spacing; 22 pixels across and spaced 23 pixels apart. Not an issue on a vertical monitor but after rotating, the rendering obviously needs to progressively shift each shield by 5 bits (22+23/8 = 5r5).

The shields are actually rendered into a RAM buffer at the start of each wave and then block-copied to/from the screen at the start/end of the player's turn. Thus each player's shields are saved and then subsequently restored during a 2-player game.

Because RAM is limited on the original hardware, shields are 'packed' together in the buffer without any intervening empty space. Each player's buffer is 22*2*4 = 176 bytes.

Already simply rotating the shields requires 3*16*4 = 192 bytes, which is too big for the existing player data structure. So I've had to move that just to get this far.

Given this, and the fact that I have plenty of RAM to play with, the easiest solution would be to buffer the entire 16 rows of the video memory for each player, ie. 16*32 = 512 bytes. And since the save/restore is only done between plays, the slight difference in execution speed will be of absolutely no consequence.

So this is my next task.