Light at the end of the tunnel - and it's bright!

I've found some time - somewhat unexpectedly - to work on Xevious on holidays...

I finally finished the flying enemies getting destroyed, with a doozy of a bug that again, I had to sleep on. Turned out to be an inadvertant re-use of d7 in an inner loop subroutine call.

And that was the last piece of actual gameplay code that remained to be transcoded. Or at least so I thought... turns out during subsequent play testing that the Bacura don't destroy the Solvalou yet! Oops, I'll have to find that!

I've also started on what should be the last remaining piece of 'housekeeping' code - the high score entry screen. Somehow I've managed to introduce a glitch in the in-game high score update which I've never seen before?!? The high score entry isn't complete, and it's not quite right, but probably only a half-hour effort remains.

EDIT: Wait, I haven't explicitly coded or tested a 2P game yet...

Despite all of the above, the transcode is very, very close to being 'finished'. And by that I mean a first-pass, unoptimised transcode. The MAIN and SUB ROM code shouldn't require much in the way of optimisation; it's mainly the Neo Geo code. Other than that, it's a case of going back through the Z80 listing, reviewing the 68K code, and of course a lot of play-testing. There are some bugs, but it's basically completely playable as-is.

No eye-candy today. Aside from high score entry there's not really much new to show anyway. In my next post I should be announcing a major milestone as described above!

UPDATE: Transcode is complete! Buggy, but complete.

UPDATE #2: More work on the high score entry screen. Almost working...