Week 98

Not a lot of progress this week unfortunately.  I've been lucky enough not to have been furloughed by all this COVID, so am still working full-time, and sadly the real-world has also thrown a few curve-balls my way over the last year which means that really I'm still trying to get back into a regime of retro-coding.  These weekly logs do spur me on a little though!

I did manage to track-down the graphical corruption in the cavern levels that I mentioned last week.  I'd set aside 4K for an aspect of the graphics, but it turns out it really required nearly 11K - it was just luck that there was nothing else in that 16K page at the time and so it could use 11K without any problems.  Once I'd expanded the object count from 5 to 20+ though that 'spare' memory was all used up, and so the corruption occurred.  So more moving of things around, and everything now safely fits again.  I'm also hopeful that there's scope for reducing that 11K requirement down a bit through some optimising, and this is certainly a game where every bit of memory is required - there's so much content in the original PC version, and I'm trying my best to provide as close a conversion of it as I can.

I also managed to put a few more beeper sound effects into the game, do a bit of refactoring so the 'hero' selection screen is a bit (actually A LOT!) more fluid, and try to pre-allocate some more memory for things I know will be needed in the future.