> 00 - Blank
> 01 - Dirt
> 10 - Boulder
> 11 - Diamond
There are about 10 different thingies. Butterflies, wall type 1,
surrounding wall, etc...
I've had a brief examination of your suggestion - the problem is that there
are very large screen areas in Boulderdash - I imagine we're probably
looking at a 64 x 64 playfield. Thomas and I have had some discussions on
this, and storing the PF as seperately packed 'planes' using some sort of
RLE compression *might* be feasible. That is, pack only the dirt (using,
perhaps, a compression generally better suited to lots of solid and little
gaps - and, thinking on the fly, here... wherever there's a wall, mark it as
dirt TOO - so that we get better RLE efficiency)... in one plane, and the
diamonds in aoother, etc. It would be a major pain to modify on the fly,
but possibly the only way to get large playfields into RAM.
I'm thinking, though, of designing the display system first and *then*
worrying about the compression. Basically I really want to start a
cartridge standard which provides bankswitching and extra RAM (say, 1 or
2K). That would *really* open up the doors to interesting programs.
I might work on a scrolling Interleaved ChronoColour playfield, just as a
bit of fun and yet another proof of concept.
Cheers
A
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