Posted November 02, 2020 by Bob's Stuff
Not much progress this week - quite the opposite in fact, as whilst trying to add the graphics for the new Ghost enemy (as seen in the PC demo recently made available) I ran out of memory! I haven't completely filled the whole 128K, but one of the 16K pages which is rather crucial to the main game running, so I've had to have a good think about how to solve this.
I could simplify the game content - make the graphics smaller, less rooms (etc) - or try to be more efficient with memory usage, which usually comes with a reduction in the game speed. I've opted for the latter, as I really want this game to remain as close as possible to the PC version, and so have an idea as to how to reduce the overheads of the screen drawing routines. I've no idea yet what impact this will have on the speed of the game, hopefully very little, but I won't know for a while as it's quite a rewrite of that code, and also of how the graphics are stored. It should result in over 6K being freed up though, which is more than enough for what is required.
Wish me luck,..